I am currently sitting in my air conditioned room in a pretty sweet hotel in Bangkok, Thailand; we have been here for a few days to relax and debreif this past month before we fly out to Africa tomorrow! Wow, Thailand. It seems like time is FLYING here (wonder if I’ll still feel that way after Africa). Thailand was wonderful. Pukhet is an amazing place and I hope that one day I’ll be back. SHE (Self Help & Empowerment) is an increadible organization that offers hope to woman. The woman at SHE have some inspiring stories of courage and redemption. When I would hand out flyers and tell woman working the bars about SHE, most could not believe that a place like that existed. Funny how God answers prayers. One night I said, ‘God, I really havn’t had a chance to minister to any lady boys yet and I’d love to.’ Later that night, one of the girls on my team decides she’s going to get her hair done at the salon where all the lady boys get ready for the night – ministry opportunity! We walk into the salon and both get to have some increadible conversations. The easiest definition I’ve got is that lady boys are men who dress like woman and work the bars. A lot of the lady boys have had surgery to make themselves female. It was hard for me to be in the bars with the lady boys, seeing men buying a lady boy for the night, knowing that they are buying a person who was born male but had surgery to become more feminine. Money to support their family and loved ones at home. Father, break the stronghold of money. Let woman and men see the hope found in you. Let them trust that they can go to a place like SHE for employement and make more than enough to support their families like the woman who are currently working there. Let people live a life for you and not a life revolving around how much money they do and do not have. This month we had conversations with bar owners. One night some of the musicians on our team actually performed a worship set in one of the bars. We told people truth in a loving way. We smashed the idea of what a Christian does and doesn’t look like. We learned what intercessory prayer is and how to stand in the gap for each other and for Bangla Road. We loved on people who were running from problems, who were drinking to escape, who were searching everywhere for intamcy, who had interesting logic about Buddhism and Christianity, who deal drugs, who are lost. We saw how God used our ministry in the bars to minister to our own hearts and reaveal things to us we never saw coming. We saw the kingdom expand. Amen.
The stories of the men that I met at the bars still blow me away. My last night of ministry I met a guy from Kansas, an international school teacher there on vacation. We had some deep conversations about God and at one point he said, “I don’t know how any Christian guy could come down here and do ministry. This place is to much of a black hole.. it sucks you in.” I asked him, “has it sucked you in?” and he said, “oh yes, most definitely,” in a matter of fact way. I sat there, thinking to myself, ‘how can you be okay with being sucked into a place like this?!’ He didn’t seem happy or sad about it, he just talked about it like it was a fact and that was it.
Every woman and lady boy that I asked the question “do you like your job” answered the same: No. When I asked ‘so why do you stay?” again the answer was the same: money.
We looked men and woman in the eyes and told them “you were made for more than this.”
