No Mistakes.

Everyone who goes on the World Race is explicitly told from the very beginning, “Drop your expectations.”  Drop any and all expectations — of what kind of ministry you will do, of who you will be partnered with, even of basic things like where you’re going to go — just drop it all.

That has been a humbling and trying experience throughout the last seven months.  Trusting God and having faith that He really does have a plan for your time abroad is hard when month after month, you feel sort of… bored.  It’s not that our ministries have been bad, ineffective, or poorly planned — they haven’t.  It’s just that life as a missionary isn’t always as exciting as it may seem.  I am not constantly seeing the dead raised to life, blind eyes seeing, dramatic conversions to Christianity, or food miraculously multiply.  Trust — I see those things.  But not every month and certainly not every day.

But what I’ve learned time and again is that God does not make mistakes.  So if I feel like I got the short end of the stick as far as contacts go, it’s not a mistake.  When our squad gets together at the end of the month and it seems like everyone had a cooler ministry than I did, my placement was not a mistake.  When other teams get to go to Zanzibar or Goa or Phuket on mini-vacations and I’m stuck in whatever hot, arid city that I’m stuck in, it’s still not a mistake.

And when our original ministry contact cancelled on my team at the very last minute when we got to Thailand and we were scrambling to find a place for the six of us women to go — it was definitely NOT a mistake.

This month, we are working with Lighthouse in Action ministries and I can confidently speak for my teammates in saying that we hit the jackpot.  We get to spend hours and hours every day interceding in prayer for the bars and the women stuck in the red light district — and then we get to go do something about it.  We have the opportunity to go to the bars four times a week and build relationships with these women.  It’s an absolutely incredible thing — I’ve become friends with one woman named Sahm.  Her English isn’t good and I could have sworn she told me that she was twenty-three, but when she told me she has a fifteen-year-old son and an eight-year-old daughter, I nearly choked on my Diet Coke.  She’s not twenty-three — she’s thirty-six.  My mistake. There is a youthfulness about her that completely draws me in, though; when I offered to buy her a drink, she poured herself apple juice.  She absolutely schools me in pool [it’s honestly embarrassing] and dies laughing while we play Jenga.  And that, in a nutshell, is the bar ministry.  I’m literally playing pool and Jenga for Jesus and it’s the best thing I’ve done on this Race yet.

One of my favorite parts of this month is the fact that my team is paired with three other teams from E-Squad.  I am on A-Squad and to be able to spend this much time with a sibling squad is really, really incredible.  These teams launched in January, so this is their fourth month, and they bring such a passion and an energy and authority in prayer to this place — it’s unbelievable.  Jesus is just so funny… last month, I asked Him for an American friend and this month He put me in a brand-new community with thirty different people who hunger and thirst for more of Him.  I love it.

Twenty-four of us live in the guesthouse, with more teams living a few minutes away at LIA’s coffee shop.  We are divided into groups and our schedule is split into sections: on a certain day, half of us will go out to the bars during the afternoon, while the rest of us stay behind to specifically intercede during that time.  Then the groups will switch — the people who prayed during the afternoon will go out that night, and the people who were in the bars during the afternoon will then pray.  Then on Saturdays, we all stay in together to pray and worship and intercede for the women and the bars.  It’s a pretty packed schedule, but there is such power in it.

The level of sovereignty in this placement is so incredible.  Of course, God is always sovereign, but when He just goes above and beyond blesses us like He has this month — the incredible, life-giving ministry, the powerful intercessory prayers, the rich community of believers — it’s enough to make me feel spoiled.  I feel like He allowed us to go through the confusion of a cancelled contact just so that we would be even more aware of His perfect plans and provisions.

Don’t misunderstand me — there is very harsh darkness in this place.  The bars are all quiet and closed up during the day, but crawling with perversion at night.  The majority of men I see walking around are middle-aged white men, many of whom wear wedding rings.  We’ve seen father/son combos walking around together, which is particularly sickening.  And the other night while Sahm and I played Jenga, some gray-haired man with tattoos and a thick midsection grabbed at one of the other girls shamelessly.  Another man approached Sahm while she sat next to me.  “Have we met before?” he asked, his voice oily.  To me, the greasy pick-up lines and false formality seem to make everything even more degrading, but watching the women’s reactions is the hardest.  At one point in our game, Sahm called out to the men on the street.  “Welcome!” she said, “You are welcome!”  I looked at her and she just shrugged her shoulders.  “Customers,” she explained, almost apologetic.  She rubbed her fingers together as if feeling for a crisp dollar bill.  She lacks the English, but no common language was really necessary in that moment — a job’s a job, she seemed to say.

That is why our times of intercession are so desperately important.  According to James, the prayers of a powerful man are righteous and effective, which is something that I have learned and relearned many times in the last eight months.  So we have written a prayer that we intend to pray over this place and these bars and these women who are quickly becoming our friends.  We will pray this prayer until something happens, because our God is a God of justice and freedom.  He came to set the captives free and trust me when I say that these women are in bondage. 

So I ask that you pray this with us — once, twice, three, ten times a day, if you’re willing.  Because it’s not an accident that I was sent to Chiang Mai and it’s not an accident that you have been supporting and following this Race.  Print it out, keep it visible, pray in faith.  Because once you know about an issue, you become responsible to do something about it.  You’re a part of this fight now too — so let’s battle together.