First, I want to start by saying that I am fully funded! It has been an amazing and very long experience fundraising, but I am finally done thanks to the help of my supporters. I just wrote a blog about this, but I am extremely thankful for the overwhelming amount of support and help I have received over this past year.
Secondly, as some of you may or may not know, I recently had to have surgery on my arm. Long story short, while we were cutting down palm tree leaves for ministry work one of the long thorns that are on the leaves fell down and embedded itself into my arm, and because of how deep it was I had to get it removed at the hospital. This experience led to me staying home from ministry for the next week.
Staying home from ministry has been really tough; not being able to do ministry work has been really trying and annoying, because it’s the entire reason that I’m here in the first place. I didn’t do all this fundraising in order to stay at a hostel all day. Even though the first few days were really rough, God has used this time in order to teach me how to make the most of my situation and continue my ministry work outside of the scheduled ministry time each day.
I have had nearly daily visits to the hospital this past week and I have been using this time to get to know the people there and form deeper connections with them. I talked to this one man at the hospital who was a father of 2 and he happily worked at an architecture firm with his wife. I also met this Swedish man named Nicholas; he was visiting Thailand in order to go deep sea diving and he was at the hospital in order to get a physical exam in order to get his diver’s license. We talked about politics, our daily lives, and about our faith. It’s cool to get to know people that you wouldn’t get to usually meet and get to form bonds with them.
I have also spent a lot of my time in the Word, baking and talking to people at the hostel. While I haven’t been perfect in spending my free time wisely, I have been diligent in making sure that I don’t waste my day and am able to continue ministry, in whatever form that might take. My only regret is that I don’t have a cooler hospital story.
