This month, as you may have seen if you watched the video in a previous post, we have been working with a ministry called Lighthouse in Action. If you haven’t watched that video, click here and do that right now. Seriously. I’ll wait.
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Done? Good. Now you’ve seen what this awesome and multi-faceted ministry does here in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
As we arrived and progressed through orientation, excitement built throughout the squad. What would we do? Would we go to the village and work alongside the people, changing the hearts and minds of people and attacking human trafficking at its source? Would we spend our time doing bar ministry, befriending prostitutes and ladyboys and helping them see that there’s another way? Would we work in the café or with the college students, helping them learn English and sharing our stories with them? There were so many options, each as beautiful as the last.
So when our team received our assignment, worship, we were all a little bit confused. What exactly did that mean? How would we fill our time? What was expected of us? A lot of the first ten days of ministry felt like constantly trying to live up to an expectation that was never defined.
Finally, after a lot of analyzing, prayer, and wrestling with a fear that I would be misunderstood, I tearfully went to my teammates. While I was probably mostly incomprehensible, I somehow communicated that I didn’t feel like what we were doing was working, not just for me but for any of us. We were trying SO HARD and so constantly concerned with each other that we were at once ineffective in our ministry and ineffective at satisfying each other. And wouldn’t you know, but my teammates not only understood but agreed.
In the last week, ministry has looked a lot different than it did at first. It does not look like a check-list of things to do, nor do I feel any pressure to make it so. In stark contrast to the first 10 days, it is my joy to “do ministry” each day. For each of us, ministry probably looks a little different. For me, it looks like spending time in prayer, generally and specifically for each of the teams that are doing the ministries I first thought I wanted. It also looks like taking time to sit with people from other teams and just ask them about how they are doing. It looks like being a person they can be honest with about what they are struggling with about their ministry or events that are taking place; someone who is not intimately connected with the situation and can be a neutral sounding board and source of prayer.
It has been the greatest honor, and I do not want to leave.
I wish the first week and a half had gone differently than it did. I wish several things about this month had gone differently, actually. I take comfort in the fact that this is our first month and we are still getting to know one another. I imagine that any group of 7 near-strangers trying to corporately realize such an open-ended assignment would have had as much difficulty. In a few days, we’ll be in Cambodia with another open-ended ministry for the month. Please pray for us, that we will take what we have learned this month and apply it effectively in the next.
As we near the end of our first month, we are ecstatic to report that we are only about $4,000 from being fully funded! Thank you to all of you who have supported us financially and to those who continue to do so. Thank you, also, for your prayer support and for reading, commenting on, and sharing blog posts. You make a huge difference.
