This month my team is working in Phuket, Thailand, where our main ministry focus is concentrated on Bangla Road. Consisting of over 200 bars and 1200+ prostitutes, my team heads out during the weeknights to intentionally pursue relationships with these men and women. Having studied human trafficking in school plus seeing it face to face within foster care and in Moldova, this was the exact ministry that captivated my heart with the World Race. I just couldn’t wait to get here and talk to these men and women! However, since being here this ministry has taken a little bit of a twist for me.
My team and I pretty much hit the ground running, as we hit up Bangla Road our very first night here. A couple of teams from the U-Squad were finishing up their first ministry month here on the race, so we followed them around just to see how things worked. Before we even hit the first bar I could sense God telling me that I wasn’t going to be talking to the girls. This week I was to just simply observe and take it all in, but then starting next week I would spend the rest of the month walking around the bar district praying through the visions God was going to give me.
Wait… what?! Seriously, I’m not going to talk to the girls?! I honestly thought that I was completely hearing wrong, but I have been praying that God would strengthen the gift of intercession within me the past couple of weeks. And what better month than this to do it?! As we continued walking around I kept getting images and just couldn’t deny it. The next day my team was asked to talk a prayer walk up to the dam that was down the road. As we stood there over the water I was hit with yet another vision:
It was as if God wanted to completely flood Phuket with His love but yet there was these huge walls (with the bars and prostitutes representing each brick) standing in the way, making Him unable to do so.
When we got back to the house, I decided to look up some verses about walls. As I was getting out my Bible, some of my teammates started talking about going to get snow cones or slurpies at the 7-11. Instantly, I thought Veggie Tales’ Joshua and the Big Wall, where the French peas were throwing down slushies on the army that marched around. At that moment I knew I needed to read Joshua and the story of the Fall of Jericho! In the story, spies had recently gone out to check everything out and then now that they were there, God instructed Joshua and his army to walk around the walls of Jericho seven times, after which the walls came down.
Later that afternoon I was looking at our schedule for the rest of the month and realized that starting next week, when God told me to start walking around, we had exactly seven times that we were going out until we left for debrief at the end of the month. Any doubt in my mind that I had about this completely vanished. If this wasn’t total confirmation, then I don’t know what is! For the next seven nights that my team goes out I’ll walk throughout that bar district praying, and as a result:
Bangla Road… Your Walls WILL Come Down!
