Thailand was an amazing month. We got to work with university students, tell them about the Lord, and invite them to a Christian overnight weekend camp. We got to evangelize in red light districts. We got to visit drug rehab and bring smiles to the men and watch them come to Christ. We got to physically serve the Lord at an orphanage helping them clean up the land and move bricks to help them build a new space. All of these things moved me and touched me deeply, but even those amazing things really didn’t completely shift my perspective of the world and the problems it has. So towards the end of the month I asked the Lord to break my heart- put me in a place that would really make me weep for this world.
Then we got to Myanmar. Crossing the border is an instant change from modernized Asia filled with American like Seven Elevens, sit down restaurants and life styles we could imagine living.
When you come out on the other side of the border you instantly find your feet in trash. Buildings are dilapidated. Bus stations double as offices, social hang outs, cargo storage and even a home.
Driving through the country to our ministry host I looked out at the houses around me. Built on stilts, most consisted of wooden walls that provides little shelter and tin roofs. Some had used cardboard boxes as makeshift walls. It was like the Gypsy villages in Bulgaria but instead of being contained to small areas where the church was bringing hope, it was the entire country and the Buddhist temples were doing little to improve the lives of those around them.
Last month I read the book Just Mercy, about a lawyer working to get an innocent man off of death row. As I looked at the houses of the people here, it dawned on me that many of our prisoners probably have better living conditions than the people I am seeing.
When we arrived at the ministry host they told us about the orphanage we had just arrived at. That a lot of the kids here lost their parents in a tornado that hit many years ago.
Hearing these stories and seeing the reality of the poverty around me broke my heart, and as I sat in front of a few of my teammates and expressed what was on my heart, I couldn’t help but weep for the condition of this world. The Lord had answered my prayer.
