Hold On

This month has been a roller coaster. Some days I’m enjoying the ride and some days I just want off this damn thing.

We have been in Chiang Mai working with an organization called Lighthouse in Action. They are a small group of people doing beautiful things here in Thailand. Emmi is Thai and she started a coffee shop, hostel, training center and refuge for anyone who needs a new beginning. She is simply AMAZING. If you want to hear her whole story, and you should, go to http://lighthouseinaction.org/our-founder/
Liz is her right hand woman. She is American born but has Thai blood running through her. She is a World Race alumni who just fell in love with the people here and said yes to God’s call to dedicate her life to helping them accomplish their full potential. And she rocks at it.

So what are we doing here?
We are staying at Zion Cafe, which is currently under renovation to become even bigger and better. We are here to help train and equip the women of Zion for the opening of the cafe. They are women who formerly worked in the red light district or were at risk of being exploited in one form or another of the sex trade. They are women with hopes and dreams but they have been told over and over since they were little girls that their only worth is in the sale of their bodies. At Zion they are taught that they are worth more, so much more. They are loved for the person God created them to be and they are given the freedom to be that person.
We are here to teach them English and help with their work training but the majority of our time is spent laughing. These girls amaze me. Even after so much pain, they are filled with so much joy.

The time I spend at Zion fills me with hope and joy and all the good things that life should be made of. But that’s not all that we do at Lighthouse in Action. There is another side to our ministry here. At night we go to the bars in the red light district. We don’t go there to gawk at the ludeness or to pity the people there.
We walk those streets night after night with a purpose. We’re there to simply be light in the darkness. I say simply because we often think a problem like this is too big for us to do anything about. The first night we went out to the bars we were given little to no instruction on what to do and I had a watermelon sized pit in my stomach. Before I even experienced anything, I thought I wasn’t the right girl for the job. I thought I had to have a certain script of the right things to say or the proper approach to take to immediately rescue these girls. But after less than an hour on our first night I realized that they don’t need to be rescued, they just need to be loved. I thought it was ridiculous at first, but it didn’t take long to see that just being different makes a difference. When a girl is used to people only talking to her when they want to buy her body for the night, it makes quite an impression to just ask how she is doing.
So it really is just that simple.
Night after night we walk into these bars and re-visit friends that we’ve made and hug and kiss them and laugh and cry with them and play pool and jenga and connect four with them. Sometimes we talk about their hopes and dreams and what they would do if they could leave the bar and sometimes they come to Zion and meet Emmi and discuss the possibilities of changing their life for the better. But sometimes we don’t. We can’t force it. We can only love them where they are.

Like I said. This month has been a roller coaster. Some days are so so good and they make me feel like there is meaning in it all. That we’re here for a reason. But others are just awful. They make me want to cry and kick and scream all day at the cruelty of the world. They make me feel hopeless. Those days we need to remember to hold on.

Hold on to hope.
Hold on to love.
Hold on to faith.
Hold on to these moments.
Hold on to this life.