January 13, 2015
“Be still and know that I am God.” Psalm 46:10
There are already so many stories that it’s hard to pick and choose which to put on here. It feels as though we have been here for at least a month, but in reality it’s only been a little more than a week. There have been so many teachings and prayers, activities and sights that it’s hard to remember the days!
We are staying at a place called Zion in Chiang Mai, which is both a hostel and a café run by a woman called Emmie. But this is no ordinary café. Emmie has her hands in some amazing ministries, but I will save that for later, after she has explained it fully to us.
My team has named ourselves the “Love Rangers,” and I will explain why. We all feel that God’s love should be our focus and our mission to others. It’s the most powerful things we have and that we can give and “if we do not have love, we are nothing.” As for the ranger part…. for a few days we were blessed to have been able to stay at the David Eubank’s house. Ex special forces and an adventurer if I have ever met one, he is the creator and leader of the “Free Burma Rangers,” which are specially trained groups who go into Burma and aid the refugees. They give medical help, education, food, the gospel, and help the refugees flee when soldiers come and attack. They are the last ones out—Always.
It is a truly inspiring ministry, and David and his family got to talk with us before they left on their next mission. His house and land is a place where the Free Burma Ranger volunteers stay and train before heading out. I say it’s the Eubank’s house, but he and his family are only there one month out of the year! So when you see facebook posts or references to “Love rangers”, you will understand the name. 
How exciting it is that we will meet brothers and sisters in Christ form other countries doing their special ministries and callings, and that know we get to pray for one another!
My team is made up of Victoria Baker, Maggie Macdonald, Heather Brown, Sara Shin, and myself. I am so thankful for each an every one of these girls! I’m sorry if I have already misspelled names, but I don’t have access to a list of names or the internet to double check. My internet is horrible here. It seems that my little asus laptop cannot compare to all the phones and other laptops around it when fighting for internet. I am hoping to wake up really early and shoot this out. I ask for prayer in regards to my technology, which already seems to be on the fritz, and that I may contact my family well.
For this blog am only going to share one story (or lese it would be a novel!), which I hope will enlighten you all as to what is going on here at training camp/launch. As I said earlier there is a LOT of teaching, prayer, and activities and I believe it is stirring up spiritual warfare. But more on how that is affecting me in the next blog.
Our leaders, including Seth Barnes, challenged us to do ATL prayers—ask the lord—which has us ask “God who is on your heart today?” and then ask more specifically for colors, a specific kind of person, letters, things, etc. So the very first thing that our “Love Rangers” team ever did was to pray this prayer, and know that it is ok to make mistakes, like how babies make mistakes when they first start walking. We just have to keep practicing!
After our prayer, we got the following things:
The letters “CH”, a smiling face, a tan middle aged man, an Indian man, white powder, things hanging from clothes lines, tent, darkness, and the ailment had something to do with the leg.
So we all headed out to get food and that is when we saw the “CH” in a big sign saying “CHANG” and so we thought we were in the right place. After eating dinner, we walked a little further into the market. All of us were still praying and searching when Victoria B. turned around to me and asked what kind of powder I saw, and I said that I couldn’t tell her. She moved a step to her left and that’s when I saw it; a middle aged Indian man, sitting while painting a person with a smiling face, using black and white powder, sitting directly outside of a tent where lanterns were hanging from clothes lines.
Well, ok then!
I just began grinning like an idiot, and we all walked into then tent. We prayed with our eyes open so as not to scare anyone else in the small tent with us. Heather Brown pointed out to me some of the eyes of the paintings. All of the paintings were from magazines like National Geographic’s, and all were good replicas—except for the eyes. The painter had manipulated the eyes, and what we saw disturbed us. There was darkness in them.
We tried to talk to the Indian painter, but we needed another man to help translate. We gathered that both men were Buddhist, that the painter was completely fine and healthy (said by the translator a bit defensively), and both were so confused about why we wanted to pray for him. The translator could not understand that we were in fact missionaries, especially with a mix of American and Korean girls with tattoos, and that we didn’t want anything in return for our prayers. We just kept telling him that God had given us clues/signs to find this man, so that we could tell him that Jesus loves him and to pray for him, especially if he needed healing with his leg.
In the end, we were not given the green light to pray, but I was not deterred at all! All of the translator’s questions and the confusion on their faces made me excited to think what God was doing. How was he challenging their preconceptions of followers of Christ and Christ Himself? We did what we were told to do, and God was going to do the rest. We have no idea where in the harvest we were working and in what part of the story of his life with God we were entering.
We also found out that he had been painting this face for a day and a half, sitting on his stool. That would cause some discomfort in my legs! But we have no idea why the “leg” came up. Maybe he wasn’t being honest and his leg was hurting. Maybe his leg will hurt later and it will cause him to think about the conversation. Maybe it is something else entirely. We prayed for him off to the side at any rate.
So that was our first treasure hunt—and the treasure, God’s treasure, was a talented painter, a son of God, who needed to be told that His father loved him.
