Merry Christmas from Laos!
I hope each of you are having a wonderful time celebrating this season with your family and friends. Our team is currently packing and preparing to head back to Pattaya, Thailand to reunite with our squad for our Month 4 Debrief. We celebrated Christmas together as a team and with our hostel family (a Vietnamese family who manages the guesthouse where we are staying) – on Christmas Eve, the family hosted a party for the entire guesthouse and our team cooked popcorn and banana pancakes for the party; then, on Christmas Day, our team exchanged Secret Santa gifts, had pizza delivered directly to our room and watched a couple of Christmas movie classics (It’s a Wonderful Life and White Christmas). While it can be difficult to be away from our friends and family and our annual traditions, I can honestly say that I still felt extremely blessed this Christmas by the presence of my teammates and the “home” we’ve built here in Laos over the last three and a half weeks.
I know I still owe all of you recaps and stories from my months in Nepal and Thailand – and you shall have them! – but we’ve been asked to blog about our time in Laos prior to leaving since it was a special kind of month for our team. This month, our team was one of three teams serving Unsung Heroes (UH). Usually when our team enters a new country we have a ministry contact assigned to us – someone who will help house and feed us as well as provide us with ministry opportunities for the month. We try to join them in what they’re already doing there. But during a UH month, you don’t have any of that. When we crossed the border into Laos, our team only knew that we had been assigned to the city of Luang Prabang – but the rest was up to us! Where we were going to live, who we were going to talk to, how we were going to structure our day – nothing was determined for us.
The goal and vision behind UH is two-fold: #1) to follow the Lord’s leading and love on His people in whatever way the opportunities present themselves and #2) to potentially provide AIM with additional ministries to partner with in that city/country. The hope is that our team would be able to find other believers and/or ministries within Luang Prabang and encourage them in their kingdom-building – whether by just listening to their hearts and maybe bringing your attention to them through a blog or us joining them in their ministries and working alongside them for a few days’ time. In a “closed” country – this can be tricky. And as I sit here typing this blog on my last full day in Luang Prabang, I can tell you that we have not yet uncovered a single outspoken believer – not a local Laotian, not a Caucasian tourist, not a missionary living here. But I have faith that they’re here and I in no way count this month as a failure. Because I know that regardless of the fact that we couldn’t say the name of “Jesus”, we still exuded Jesus all month long – in the way that we spoke and interacted with the family who manages our guesthouse; in the way that we taught English to and built relationships with the local college students; in the way that we always greeted the monks with an excited “Saibadee!” and the appropriate “nob” (how you hold your hands in front of your face to greet someone and show respect); in the way that we waved to the local restaurant owners whose establishments we frequented; in the way we smiled at small children and even stray dogs.
I also know that whether or not we see it now (or if we ever get to see it), we were blessed with the opportunity to make some small impact for the kingdom here. And that’s enough for me.
I look forward to sharing some of our stories from Laos with you! Until next time!
For His glory,
Nat
