Today is our last day here on the goat farm in Kanchanaburi. It has been a good few weeks here with the guys, getting to know one another more and more. I’m going to miss the slow-paced atmosphere that we all felt here. Since the last few months it seemed like we were always doing something. Tomorrow we head back to Bangkok for a day before leaving for Cambodia on Sunday morning.
Over the last week we did a lot of work out in the tapioca fields helping our contact and some of their friends and neighbors. I am usually the type of person who would much rather go and serve someone, showing them who Christ is in my actions rather than my words. That is why in Africa it was so hard for me at first going door to door preaching the Gospel, but in a way I feel like I got used to that type of ministry too much. This made it hard for me here and not seeing instantly the fruits of our labor. In Africa it was almost a daily thing, having someone come to Christ.
It was not until last week when I was eating dinner with Arun and Pang, the couple who are our contacts, and asked them what it’s like to be some of the only Christians in a predominately Buddhist country. They explained to me how difficult it was to reach out to the people here because their minds do not think the same way ours do. They can’t grasp the fact that Christ loves them for who they are and they don’t have to do anything to receive that love from Him. Arun was explaining that is why he spends so much time helping the people in the villages around here the way he does. The people here have to be shown the love of Christ. It would not do any good to just tell them about it.
After having that conversation with them, it made me feel so much better about what we are doing here, knowing that we are just a small part of something really big that is happening here. I feel all the guys here started to realize the same thing, and it really showed when they asked us if we would go help some of their friends in one of the neighboring villages harvesting their tapioca during our day off. We were all more than willing to go. At the end of the day we knew that what we had done made a huge difference to the people we were working with who did not know Christ. Even though the language barrier did not allow us to talk much with them, just the fact that we were there alongside them made a vast difference. The 12 of us really were able to help them out, doing 3 or 4 days’ worth of work for them in one day.
