This week we are leaving Myanmar!
Actually we’re leaving in about 12 hours at 3am on Thursday morning. Instead of driving the +20 hours in a bus back to Thailand we are flying, so we’ll head to the airport tomorrow, fly about an hour to Bangkok, have an hour layover, fly back to Chiang Mai, and then take a 3-4 hour bus ride back to our ministry site where we were at last month in Mae Ai.
My team and I aren’t super excited to go back to our same ministry. We didn’t see a lot of growth or really get to share the Gospel at all in the Buddhist school we taught at. Our students also didn’t learn a lot of English simply because they couldn’t understand it. We would show up to class and the teacher would hand us a stack of worksheets and ask us to teach uncountable nouns, but our students had a really hard time even understanding the question, “what is your name?” At the time we were okay with the lack of fruit we saw because we know that sometimes ministry isn’t harvesting, it’s just throwing seed.
Last month we were also living on our own as a team for the first time, and we spent a lot of time investing in each other and growing together. At the end of the month we knew our real ministry had been in each other. It was a good growth period that needed to happen, but now as we are preparing to come back, it feels repetitive, like we’re taking a step backwards.
Overall, it’s been a difficult week finishing our month here, saying goodbye to our Myanmar kids, and also processing that we’ll be going back to a hard ministry while the rest of our squad is going to new sites. We know that it will still be a good month and that the Lord will move, we were just hoping and praying for a different type of ministry where we’re not teaching English. We still have three months in Africa, though!
This morning while I was spending time with the Lord he told me that I have been too legalistic in my relationship with him, focusing too much on the “dos” and “don’ts” of being a Christian and not enough on the romantic side of him. I often forget to look for this side of him despite how much of it surrounds me every day. Coincidentally, Steffany Gretzinger’s song Out of Hiding was playing on my worship playlist, and I Googled the lyrics so I could actually focus on her words.
Her song is sung from the Father’s perspective and is written as his heart for us, and as I listened to it, it was a few simple moments this morning where I felt I could truly comprehend how much he loved me. So my blog this week is only this, a brief update of our next ministry and a request for you to go listen to Out of Hiding/Father’s Song by Steffany Gretzinger and let me know what you think of it and how it makes you feel to be so deeply loved.
Don’t forget to look for the moments when he’s trying to romance you.
Love,
e
“I loved you before you knew it was love
And I saw it all, still I chose the cross
And you were the one that I was thinking of
When I rose from the grave
Now rid of the shackles, my victory’s yours
I tore the veil for you to come close
There’s no reason to stand at a distance anymore
You’re not far from home”
