During our seven hour wait at the train station in Bangkok, Thailand.
Welcome to our beautiful country! Here you will be sure to sweat through your shirt, (every time you step outside) you will desire to take five showers a day just to cool down. The tile floor will be your best friend when it is not an approved air conditioning hour.
If you look to your right, you will see a large monitor lizard, sunning itself on the side of the street.
Now I want you to take a nice deep breath in through your nose and smell the butcher shops to our left! You can even watch the butchers prepare your purchase fresh!
I hope you brought you rain coats, umbrellas and rain boots! You will need them everyday, but it’s not monsoon season.
This is what we should have been told when we stepped off the train in Malaysia! It’s HOT, sometimes I plan my days around places I can get air conditioning! We are blessed to have air conditioning this month, but we don’t NEED it, so we mainly use it at night to sleep and for two hours during the day.
I really did get scared yesterday by a GIANT lizard about four feet away from me as I was walking home. My first thought was it’s a Komodo dragon! Then I took two giant steps to the other side of the street and watched the lizard slither between two rocks into the gutter on the side of the street. With my heart rate calming down, I scurried home because I didn’t want to meet one of THOSE AGAIN!
Trying to hold my breath past the butcher shops under the tents, but failing because thats a LONG way! We are blessed to know exactly where the local meet is from… which is good and bad. You make the decision. Just saying becoming a vegetarian has crossed my mind throughout the race.
Looks like the Space Needle in Seattle, but we’re outside the Mall!
So Malaysia has us in a small town, barely over the Thai boarder, with about 10,000 residents. We are partnering with a local pastor and his family to support the growth of their community by developing relationships and loving people like God loves. We are working at a school two times a week teaching English. Don’t worry…we are the FUN English teachers! We use our strengths as a team to incorporate activity and creativity into our daily plans.
We also help with a Bible study the paster has every week for new Christians. This past week we studied The Lords Prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread.” This week we will be studying the next verse, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” It was amazing to learn that as we sat down to plan what we were going to teach on, our group of 4 discovered we all were at a loss of what to do next. We all felt inadequate to teach on this verse, we didn’t feel like we had enough Bible knowledge to teach others. This is a crazy thought because we’ve been doing this for nine months… and God would never hang us out to dry in the rain. Yet God showed each one of us that we had something to share, something to teach the new believes and encourage them in their growth with the Lord.
As a team we are doing prayer walks for the city. We hope to cover the city with protection, peace, health, financial stability and hope. We want our prayers to reach even the darkest areas of the community. Malaysia is a country home to mainly Muslims, we have many Mosques and Temples nearby that we are praying for. It has been incredible to hear of the testimonies the paster has encountered. The chains of the past falling off, and lives being restored through forgiveness and grace.
Personally my ministry also includes piano lessons. That’s right folks, those eight years of lessons have finally paid off in a way I never expected. If I had been asked to do anything else, literally ANYTHING else I would have confidently said yes and worked my butt of to do my best. Yet with piano, all I could do was panic. I still know how to read music, and can play. However, for the last ten years playing piano has looked like, plunking on the keys maybe once or twice over the summer, until I became frustrated because I wasn’t as good as I once was. Now I found myself calling home to get copies of old music so I could practice but also the pastors two daughters could use to practice. I spent hours practicing and planning what and how to teach new players. I was nervous and didn’t know where to start. I had learned the basics so long ago that I no longer knew what step one looked like.
I am lucky to have two very patient and kind students to encourage me through this process. Who don’t complain when I say, “whoops, I should have had you do this first.” We just all laugh and try it again. For as scared as I was to begin, I really enjoyed lesson one. It is giving me a chance to give back to our pastors family and spend time with his daughters.
Flags from the upcoming political election.
With my teammate Oriolyne, who LOVES selfies!
