For the month of October, V Squad has been in Malaysia working with various ministries throughout the country, and my team is paired with Team Desiderio Domini in a small town near the border of Thailand.
Our ministry is teaching English at a nearby kindergarten and supporting our contact and his family through corporate worship and prayer for the town.
The teacher in my class is using this month to catch up on things in the office, so I have had my own classroom and have loved every minute of it! I have five six-year-olds, and I have one eight-year-old with special needs. I cannot even express to you the love I have for these six kids. In class each day, we do English lessons, talk, laugh, sing, and spend a lot of time dancing. My heart is so full for them.
I never expected to get so attached, and I guess I didn’t realize that I signed up for 11 months of goodbyes.
My kids leave the kindergarten to start primary school next year, and my team is leaving our contact next week. My heart aches to think that I could potentially never see my kindergartners again – on earth or in heaven. My earnest prayer is that the seeds we plant as people who love them unconditionally and whole-heartedly for one month of their lives will make some kind of an impact on them that will bring them to Jesus.
In Malaysia, it’s illegal to preach the Gospel to the Malay people, so our focus at the kindergarten is entirely on teaching English and loving the kids without talking about God in any way. More than once, people in the town have tried to shut the kindergarten down, just because it’s run by a Christian family, regardless of the fact that there is no religion being preached there.
I would ask you to join me in fervent prayer for my six students (that I love so much I could burst) – that they and their families would come to know Jesus, that the town would see the light of Christ, and that all the other kids at the school would also come to know the Lord.
Please pray that God would bring a long-term missionary and a Christian community to come and support our contact and his family.
Please pray that the fulltime teachers at the school will see something different in the lives of the World Race teams that come here in the future and that each seed God plants in their lives will fall on fertile ground.
There is so much potential here, and I have so much love for these wonderful, wonderful people who don’t know Jesus. Please pray for them, and please pray for our contact and his family.
And also pray for me as I have been crying every single day just thinking about leaving Malaysia. I really didn’t think saying goodbye each month would be such a difficult thing to do, and we have nine more of them on this race.
