Y’all have no idea how hard it is to put three months of ones life into a short blog…it is impossible haha!
Things I did:
-Sang Christmas songs in a gigantic grocery store for two hours. (I was really wishing I could read people thoughts during the performance. Haha!)
-Overnight train from Laos to Thailand.
-Had a baby elephant come up to our gate and fed it something that I can’t remember haha! It was sooooo cute!!!
-Spent a day in Bangkok
-Visited a national park that had gorgeous waterfalls that you could swim in.
-Experienced Thailand beaches while drinking cold coconut water from an actual coconut! (Ps- I now love love love coconut water! I drank at least one everyday for the last two weeks in Thailand haha!)
-Spent an evening at a karaoke bar with the chairman of our province. (Now that was a fun night! He even served us dessert before dinner! Haha!)
-After just two months in Thailand my team taught in over 25 schools!
-Met a beautiful woman named Nu who owned the cutest little coffee shop with REAL coffee beans! I repeat real coffee beans! No instant coffee! Though I have to admit I only got a strawberry smoothie with yogurt every time I visited her.
-Spent a week in Thailand with my parents!!!! (Be jealous, sisters! Ha!)
-Learned what it meant to rely whole heartily on Christ
November use to be one of my most favorite times of the year, because it was time for Operation Christmas Child! Every year my parents would drive us to the Dollar Store, Walmart, and Target so that we could go and shop for the boxes we had been saving up for all year. Money didn’t matter. I just wanted to fill up the boxes with as much as the box could fit. And trust me, I would make it all fit even if it took me an hour to pack it and have a rubber band around it keeping it shut. Right before closing the boxes I would place a letter and picture inside wonder what child would receive my box. What country would it arrive in? What situation is he/she in? Would he receive as much joy from the boxes as I did by making it? Does this boy know The Lord? During my time in Thailand I had the opportunity to pass out OCC boxes in some of our Thai schools! The experience was so fun and humorous! We got to watch as the kids opened the boxes. Wish I had some photos of the kids with the weird things they received. One child got weird hand stitched underwear made of grandma material. The poor little boy was so confused and embarrassed. His teachers later took the underwear and took selfies with it hahaha! Can’t wait to pack more boxes this next year and think back on when I had the opportunity to pass them out!
I almost didn’t go to school because I was exhausted and just wanted a day to heal (I was very weak physically all week), but The Lord nudge me to go so I went! As I sat on the floor feeling rather weak and next thing I know I had two little ones sitting on my lap another laying on top of them humming and sucking her thumb while falling asleep and another laying her head on my thigh while she slept and the cutest little thing with the biggest dark brown eyes like mine wiggled under my arm and just smiled at me the whole time. I was in heaven! My love tank was overflowing!
From a early age I fell in love with sign language. It captivated my attention. While my sisters would go and find story books at the library I would go and wonder around looking for books about sign language. Sitting on my bunk I would curl up in a ball and stare at the pages. I would sit there practicing the signs feeling content. Through out the years I had opportunities to sign worship songs for children’s church or watch our church’s ASL (American sign language) interpreters sign throughout church service and my curiosity continue to develops. In 8th grade I enrolled in an ASL classes where I continue to study and dive into a whole new world. I studied for four years and when I stopped taking courses I was a level two interpret. I ended up changing routes and dropped sign language and moved to Brazil for my internship with IMB missionaries. For the past three years the only thing I have used sign language for was to watch Switched At Birth on ABC without subtitles, “listening” into others conversations while waiting for my mom at the mall, and signing to my friends the few signs I taught them so that we could communicate in different situations and others wouldn’t know what we were saying haha! But during the parent vision trip my folks and I were in a bar ministering to some of the girls we meet the night before and a girl came up to us with a sign saying that she was deaf. Without even thinking about it I just started signing to her. She told me here name and then asked “Are you a christian?” it turned out that she not only knew American Sign Language, but she also knew Jesus. She goes throughout the bars selling stuff animals to make extra money so that her son can go to a deaf school and uses that time to ministry to the deaf girls who have to work in the bars. She shared how she hurts for the deaf community where she lives because so many deaf girls ended up on the streets. So she decided to ministry and befriend the girls in the bars. Every night after putting her son to sleep she goes to bars and talks with the deaf girls about God and just about life. We sat together for five hours just talking. She continued to say that she was so blessed to have met me, but folks, I am positive that I was the blessed one. She was the sweetest and cutest thing. Before I had to leave I got to translate my dad praying for her and her prayer for my family. Ah! It was so neat! I am still in shock I meet a Thai deaf girl who learned ASL a couple years before so that I could encourage her in her ministry to reach out to the deaf girls in the bars in the city of Chiang Mai, Thailand. Like what?! I love my life! Who would have known that all the countless hours I spent studying this beautiful language was preparing for times like this.
Each wrinkle has a story and this women has 99 years worth. I met her in a little village in the outskirts of Chiang Rai and I immediately became captivated by her confidence. It is so sad how many people try to hide their age thinking beauty is only in the young. But when I look at this women I see the beauty of a life full of memories. Really wished I could have sat down with her and heard all about her life.
I had the privilege of serving along side my parents working in one of the biggest places for sex trafficking. In the evenings our squad split up into teams with their parents and then we went and hit the bars near our hotel. I have never felt so broken and yet so joyful all at once. There I was dancing in the middle of a bar with gorgeous sweet Thai girls who have been exploited into the sex trafficking industry. Night after night they sell their bodies away to bring back food to their hungry brothers, sisters, mom, dad or grandparents. While I sat and watched them throw themselves at these men that needed healing just as much as these girls I realized something that changed my whole perspective. The very reason why all the bars that line the streets were open was because of true love! Out of true love for their families these girls entered into a life of hell to keep their family from starving or to even keep their younger siblings from having to work in the bars.Tears filled the eyes of one of the precious women I met while I talked to her. She pushed through brokenness and hurt to save her family. She abandoned herself to save others. Isn’t that exactly like the testimony of the Bible? The great romance. Surrendering oneself to save others. I fail to find the words to convey my thoughts, but being there seeing it all first hand has put a passion in me for these girls and I am not talking about just the girls I met, but every single girl and boy who has fallen into this hell hole. Y’all, there are women and men right at our doorstep suffering just as much as those I had the privilege of meeting. We say we want it to end and yet what do we do to stop it? We donate a couple bucks and leave it at that. We pray for those who have been caught in this cycle and it ends there for us. Forgive me if it sounds like I am accusing or angry it is just something that has hit me hard and honestly this blog is for myself. I have “liked” the Facebook page talking about ending sex slavery and donated a couple dollars at different conferences I have attended and that’s where it ended for me. I had no attachment to the words. Once you see it first hand everything clicks together. My heart aches for all of the girls i didn’t met. All the young boys who can easily be forgotten when talking about this industry. I am only one person. I can’t save the word. But I can make a difference for one life. And with that I will strive to live as though each person I meet is that one person that I leave a fingerprint on.
Now my all time favorite memory- International Wedding Crasher!!!
“Everyone will be wearing Thai traditional clothing so you must too!” There we were walking up to a wedding we were not invited to wearing Thai traditional dresses, skirts and hair styles. Praise be to God that I just wore my teammate’s maxi dress instead, because everyone attending the wedding was in fashionable modern clothes! Oh my! It was one of the most embarrassing and yet hilarious moments of the race. The bride and groom had no idea who we were and the grooms family, who was from Denmark, was even more confused. That night was filled with awkward eye contact-oh! And how could I forget! Jamie, Alycia, Mikaila and Moe had the lovely opportunity to go and stand on stage and sing a song. So basically my team pulled a Maroon 5. Crashed a wedding and sang a song for a random bride and groom during their reception all while wearing traditional Thai attire. Gosh dang it, it was so so sooo bad! Hahaha! While we were finally departing I made eye contact with one of the groom’s brother and we both just busted our laughing. Oh how I love the craziness of my time in Thailand!
Prayer Request:
Being so close to our return date is making it hard for me to focus on the now. Pray for the strength to focus and make these next couple months count and for a passion for our ministry.
Thank you for all those who have been praying for my back. It is almost back to 100%!! Wahhhooooo!
Update on Zambia coming soon…
Sadly there would be more photos and it would be edited a little bit more, but the site is messing up due to poor internet
