We've been in Thailand for one week and I cannot believe how hot it is here, and that people live in this heat for most of the year. People always freak out when I tell them how cold it gets back home and they usually comment and say that they would not be able to survive there. But when I'm living in +45 weather, -20 sounds quite alright and I kind of wish I could roll around in the snow with just a t-shirt on. For all you americans +45C is like 113F and -20C is -4F and that's still pretty mild weather for our winters.
So this month started out with team changes and team leader changes, my team is till the same but the leadership changed and I am currently blessed to be leading this amazing group of women. So pretty much I have some more responsibilities and I lead team times and make decisions on things. I was really excited about this opportunity and at first satan tried to feed me lies about how inadequate I was to be in this position. I kept bouncing back and forth for the first few days with being excited and not feeling like I was good enough. But I have to say that's how I really knew that God wanted me to do this, because why else would satan have been fighting so hard against it?. So after some good one on one time with God He assured me that this is where I'm supposed to be and He's got this, the biggest part of leading a team is loving them and God's given me a lot of love for them. Just pray for me that I would be able to help my team grow and that we would be especially bold this month as we are involved in a lot of ministry.
Part of our ministry this month is working with ABBA House Foundation where we teach 8 boys from 10-23yrs of age. Our classes are from 1-4pm and we teach the english, different types of worship and songs, and we do a Bible lesson everyday. These boys have been rescued from sex slavery, homeless poverty, and abuse; some of there parents have tried or actually sold them for sex and ABBA house rescues them off the streets. They are all amazing boys, they have great sense of humors, they love to learn and they love to worship God. My favorite thing is to worship God with them, they have such life and love for God when they sing it brings so much joy to my heart.
This week we also had the opportunity to go to ChiangMai's Men Prison to preach, and I loved it. It was really neat to be able to do Prison Minisrty in another country, there are 4300 prisoners and we only saw a little bit of the prison and maybe a total of 300 prisoners in the time we were there. We preached in front of about 100-150 prisoners, we did a skit and sang some worship and then Erin, MK and Carrie shared their stories. We also bought each of those prisoners 2 bags of instant noodles, tooth paste and a bar of soap so we were able to hand that out to each of them before we left. Majority of the prisoners are in there for selling drugs and some of them are in for some worse crimes like rape, murder, and for stealing money and such. It was really interesting how well behaved they all were and very respectful when we were handing out our stuff. Some of them have been in prison for a long time and they have nothing to do during the days, so when Pastor Ed started going to preach he taught them to evangalize in the prison. Some of them have been christians now for 6 years now and many more are coming all the time to learn or about God, praise be to God for the work being done there.
We are also doing Unsung heroes this month, my teammate MK has a blog about this so I would encourage you to read it to know more about what this is. If you know of any ministries or missionaries here please e-mail me that information @ [email protected]. It would be much appreciated 🙂
