Ministry this month definitely looks different.
My team and I are in Thailand, at one of the Adventures in Missions bases. AIM has a few bases in different countries such as Cambodia and Thailand, creating an environment where long-term missionaries can reach more locals over an extended period of time, while helping short term missionaries with a place to stay.
Our ministry this month is ATL- Ask The Lord. This week has incorporated a lot of prayer, whether prayer walks or intercession. Our host offered different means of ministry— one in particular that my team joined in was a Monk Chat.
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We start walking from our hostel to the temple. I was wearing jeans and a shirt that covered my shoulders, the appropriate attire to wear in Thailand. My black jeans offer no forgiveness to the heat and humidity of Thailand. After walking what seems like an eternity, we pass our location. Turning around, we realize the temple is right behind us.
It’s not a long walk inside before someone begins speaking to us about the temple. A nice gentleman from Bangkok, offers a fun fact about an earthquake 500 years ago that caused a piece of the temple roof to break off. He seems quite knowledgeable about the religion, but we only ask him where we could find the “monk chats.” Again, he knows exactly where we should go, and provides the information happily.
We walk around the temple and come near a tree and an area to sit in the shade. I see him, sitting in orange. I see the monk.
The encounter was not what I expected.
The monk put his cell phone down and my team and I sit around him, but not too close. Girls are not allowed to touch a monk, not even accidentally. He gives us a nice smile and asks us where we are from….we exchange all the pleasantries.
Conversation begins and we start asking questions.
Where are you from? How long have you been a monk? What is a normal day for a monk? What do you have to do to become a monk? Where do you go after you die? What is buddhism? What does buddha do for you? What happens if you make a mistake?
Alllll the questions except the one I really want to ask, the one question I’m not allowed to ask.
What do you know about Jesus?
I don’t know what I was expecting, but this was not it. Maybe I thought he would be stoic and monotone. But he wasn’t. He seemed happy and very conversational, with big smiles as he spoke about teaching. Maybe I thought he’d have no desires or worldly things, but he did. He had a cell phone with internet!
Maybe I thought we’d convert him, but we didn’t.
I’m not really sure what I was expecting exactly. All I do know is that I left feeling as though he had such devotion to his religion. And I felt such sorrow for him. He was so lost and a slave to all 277 rules a monk must follow. I saw a man, not a monk. And I don’t really know what to do about it. An hour conversation, a group picture, and a goodbye. Anticlimactic.
What I can do is pray for this man. What YOU can do to help is PRAY for him. Pray for the monk in Chiang Mai.
