Sometimes my teammates and I play a lame game called “guess where the white man is from before he speaks.” Sometimes I play this game with myself (which makes it even more lame) when I am in the bars and I don’t understand what is being said around me. The reason the game is so lame is it’s really an easy game, and we get the answer right 95% of the time.
One day a couple weeks ago, one of my teammates and I weresitting in McDonald’s when we noticed the man sitting next to us eating ice cream.His clothes, and shoes looked American, but hisface didn’t. We contemplated and contemplated and couldn’t figure him out.
Later outside, we saw him standing by himself by the street.
“Let’s go ask him where is is from,” my teammate says.
“No.”
“Yes.’
“Okay, but you do the talking.”
So we walk up to him, “Hi! We were just wondering where you were from.”
“Moscow,” he says. Then we talk about him, and what he is doing in Thailand, and how he had been living in California (which explains the American clothes.) Then he asked what we were doing in Pattaya. We used this opportunity to clarify that”No, we are not lesbians in town for the women, but instead we are teaching English to the bar girls at the Tamar center.”
He laughs very loudly like we said something very very funny, “You know you are just helping them make more money.” Yes, we know that part of the reason that they come to class is to learn to speak to their customers. But once they are in class, we can get to know them and we can love them, pray for them, and share truth with them. They come to class to learn English, they leave knowing how to say “sea worm,” “fish sauce,” “I have an elephant as a pet,” and they leave with a new world view.
English class is my favorite world race ministry to date. The interesting thing about this ministry is that it doesn’t feel like ministry at all, it feels like a normal job that I could do at home. The reason that it is ministry is because we are intentionally caring for the girls deeper needs.
When I was at home, I wasn’t intentional about seeing work as ministry. Work was work, and small group was ministry. I’m starting to think that I missed a lot of wonderful opportunities.
One thing that race and English class specifically have been teaching me is that ministry works best when it just happens in normal, everyday, ordinary life.
Ministry can look like talking to a man from Moscow on the street, it can look like English class, and I’m sure that it can look like thousands of other ordinary activities.
In case your wondering, themost obvious difference between European and American men is their shoes.
