One of the things that led me to the World Race and to Thailand was a story I read about “Ask the Lord” ministry, where the Racers would pray and simply ask Jesus where he wanted them to go. They would walk where they felt called and go there. We had some free time today after ministry orientation and decided to do that! We all spent 20 minutes praying and asking God what he wanted to show me. I got some random words and thoughts— heart, these brown fruits that grow like grapes that my team eats a bunch but don’t know what they’re called so we call them alien eggs because that’s how they look, some other fruit, colorful fabric over shops, wind. They were random and I wasn’t sure what they met, but I brought them down to my team. We shared our words and images with each other and were absolutely shocked. Two of my other teammates had also heard “wind,” and a bunch of people also saw fruit. Ashlyn told us about a person she’d had in her mind ever since training camp and as we talked she realized that it was an older woman we met that morning at a fruit stand in the market! A lot of us had felt the Lord showing us flowers too, and her stand is right by a flower shop! Abigail and Kaitlin both heard “bicycle” as well, and Maddie heard “wind chimes.”
We broke into smaller teams based on the similar things we’d felt, so I was with Ashlyn, Maddie, Abigail, and Kaitlin. Ashlyn was so shocked at the sudden realization that the woman at the fruit stand was the person she’d been seeing for days when she’d pray, and she grabbed our hands to pray with such an uncontrollable joy and energy that was just driving her to go.
We left our base and practically ran down the street to the turns we took every day to get to the market. At the normal crosswalk we take, though, I stopped. “Maybe we keep going this way?” I suggested.
My team agreed, so we kept walking past the university near our base, and that’s when we saw a pink bike propped up against a building. Kaitlin looked at it and then back at us in unreal amazement.
We kept walking, past a bus stop I hadn’t seen that was crowded with university students. We crossed and took a winding path to the market, listening to where we needed to be and turning that way. And each turn we took we saw a bicycle.
We ended up in a part of the market we’d never been. At the back we met a woman with a small, hidden shop. She sat looking at her phone. “Sawasdee kha,” we greeted her in Thai.
She returned the greeting and just stared at us, so we asked her name in Thai. She responded, told us she didn’t speak English when we asked that, and then looked back at her phone. We all stood there awkwardly for a moment, then left, heading through the market to the fruit stand.
Someone else on our team back at base had heard “goldfish.” We got to the walkway where we knew the shop was and right at that turn was a bucket of goldfish! We picked up the pace, looking around like we’d never seen the market before, but so set on where we’re going that it was an almost magnetic attraction pulling our steps that way. We got to the fruit stand and smiled at the shopkeeper, and Ashlyn just said, “that’s her!”
Kaitlin froze. “There’s a bicycle,” she said.
And Maddie pointed up. “Wind chimes too.”
There was a flower shop right by the stand, so we bought her a bunch of yellow flowers and handed them up to her at her shop, saying hello. She was wearing a mask, but we could see the surprise of her smile in her eyes. She didn’t speak English, so we used our limited Thai to ask her name. She told us it was Tonng, and a younger woman wearing a floral top appeared out of nowhere to tell us (in English!) that Tonng meant grandmother. We told her our names and she repeated them back to us intentionally, like she really wanted to know who we were. Ashlyn had the world’s biggest smile and said, just in English, “We just want you to know that you are beautiful and that Jesus loves you.” She pointed at her cross tattoo on her wrist and we made heart shapes with our hands to convey “love,” and I realized in this numb sort of amazed shock that heart was the first word I heard. Tonng smiled and made the heart symbol back to us. “Tonng love you,” she told us, and I just about cried at this woman’s open heart and kindness. Then some customers came to her stand so she thanked us, we thanked her, and we moved by the flower shop to pray.
We grabbed hands and just thanked God for guiding us to Tonng. We prayed for good business for her shop, for her family, and for her health. Then we just talked about how amazing it was that everything we’d heard was there along the way. We turned around and realized that there were now so many people at Tonng’s fruit shop buying fruit. Just a few minutes before it was empty, but now it was bustling, and we marveled at how God gave us that little uninterrupted piece of time to talk with her.
Ashlyn loves photography, so she went over to ask if she could get a photo of Tonng. We waited there, and as Ashlyn headed back over to us, we saw Tonng waving her hand to us, palm down to the ground and fingers waving. It’s a similar gesture to a shooing motion, so at first we thought she was asking us to go so she could focus on her customers, but then I remembered that that’s the Thai gesture for “come here.”
“She wants us to go over there,” I told my teammates, so we headed back over to the stand. She’d taken her mask off and smiled so enormously as she handed us a bag of fruit. We said an enormous “khapkoon kha.”
The woman in the floral shirt asked where we were from and we said America. Then an older man in an orange shirt turned to us. “America?” He asked. He told us that his English name was Tony and that he studied at the University of Oregon. We learned about his family and his work. Then he asked us why we were here, so we explained that we were following Jesus and that he led us to this country and to the fruit stand. We shared how amazing Jesus was to us and the love we have for him and told Tony that he was a son of a God who loved him so much and did wonderful and incredible things. He smiled at that, listening patiently. We shared how Jesus was God’s son and came to earth to die and save us from our sins. Tony said he knew that part; he went to a Catholic school for his education in Thailand before college. We asked then if we could pray for him, and he shook his head slightly and said, “No, I’m Buddhist.”
“Alright!” We said. “Thank you for listening anyways!” We parted ways and headed back towards our base. We were so amazed that Tony even took the time to listen to what we had to share— he could have stopped us right when we started talking about Jesus, but he listened anyways, even though he didn’t agree. And if we hadn’t stopped at the first woman’s shop, we wouldn’t have been at Tonng’s shop at the right time to meet Tony!
But what’s even crazier is that Kaitlin had an image that she hadn’t shared of a man in an orange shirt and khaki shorts— the exact outfit that Tony was wearing.
We don’t know the full extent of God’s plan for that afternoon. We don’t know the conversations that people in the market had after we left. We don’t know who overheard us or who saw us walking through and wondered at us. We don’t know how our visit really impacted Tonng or Tony. But we’re not called to know, just to go. God’s plan is this beautifully woven tapestry of all of our lives and stories, intersecting and tangling and holding each other together. We don’t know what we were there for then, but all we had to do was follow obediently as a team, as we didn’t know the words and images all on our own. It was a beautiful example of the value of community and how we are called to lift each other up and pour into each other, strengthening our little family so we can strengthen the whole human family. God has such a plan for all of us and to bring us all to him and to each other. We only have to listen and uplift each other, walking together in his love and sharing that with the world.
