So tonight I got to check out what will be a big part of my ministry here in Chiang Mai. Actually I like the story telling approach so much that I’ll just share it that way with you.
Upon arriving here I found out that the 2 main ministry opportunities here would be bar ministry (to the girls caught in prostitution), and the other working with university students. I felt led to work with the latter. It took a few days to get things figured out… Some things we learned is that it’s a place where they play metal kind of music, that it would be closed next week because of the water festival, and that it’s open only a few nights a week right now anyway.
Well, fast forward to today.
I come home to ask about the details for when we would be leaving in like 15 minutes, only to be informed that nothing for tonight was confirmed because the phone ran out of minutes and our contact here at the house wasn’t home. So Anna Coffey and I go and buy more minutes to call about meeting at this “milk shop” which we thought was called “Wan Jen” No idea, I don’t speak Thai. So we try calling and no one answers so Anna and I decide, let’s go out to the university anyway, at the very least we can prayer walk around it. Only there are no tuk-tuks or s-taxi’s in sight. So Anna gives God 1 minute for a taxi to show up or else we won’t go. About 40 seconds later the phone rings and we get okay’d to go check the place out…only it was such a bad connection we aren’t able to get directions….
Immediately we find an s-taxi and all we could tell them to do is drop us at the entrance to the university. The guy was very concerned at just leaving us there. Although during the taxi ride I realized that when I left a message the guy had said he was of “One Generation” and so I tell Anna “Oh I think it’s ‘One Gen’ not ‘Wan Jen’ so maybe we can find it easier now.” After looking up and down the street and not seeing it, we decide to go ask the guard at the university if he knew where it was. And he didn’t but he did deduce that it wasn’t on the university campus. So as we are walking out of the entrance to the street corner I tell Anna that we need to pray that God would guide us there. Immediately after we see these 2 guys dressed a little edger and Anna says, “Hey those guys look hardcore and they came from over there, maybe that’s where it is.” So we cross the street and sure enough there is a sign that says, “Won Generation.” We told the guys what just happened and they said, “Yeah we saw 2 lost Americans and thought, that must be them.” Totally a God-thing.
We had a great time hanging out there and getting to know they guys who run the place as well eat fried chicken with them…yum! We hadn’t really planned on staying there that long, but then one thing led to another and we stayed later than we were ‘suppose’ to, but we got home before curfew with plenty of time to spare.
I’m excited to work with this ministry. It will really get busy after the water festival, which is going on for the next few days. I’ll be spending my afternoons talking with students and getting to know them a bit and then inviting them to Won Gen to hang out and play a game or practice English or something, just to build a relationship there and then be able to share about God with them. The hardest part of this ministry will be the music played there….can’t stand metal music, or what I call ‘screamo’ so please pray that it can be supernaturally tolerated and not give me a headache.
