I have never been the biggest fan of surprises. I like to know what the next exciting thing around the corner is so that I can dream big dreams for days on end leading up to the said thing. Also, I have never loved waiting. I usually have an uncanny knack of making decisions on the fly and hopping on buses. (Funny thing, I am currently writing this on a 10 hour public bus ride to Bangkok because of the latter but that’s another story for another time)
So yah you get the point; I’m more of a “doer” than a “waiter”.
This month the Lord, and Thailand, are teaching me how much good can come from the waiting.
Usually before arriving to a new country my team and I will know at least two weeks in advance where we will be living and what kind of work we will be doing.
However, this month we just barely found out the day before we flew from Nepal to Thailand.
For the longest time we thought we were going to work for a nifty organization in Chiang Mai, a city we were very much looking forward to be living in, but at the last minute it fell through. So then we were going to be sent to a place in Northern Thailand, to no avail, then it was going to be Bangkok. It was a hot mess! We were just waiting around for days while all the other teams were making plans and getting pumped about their assignments.
Finally, we were told we would be going to a place called Thoen District. “Thoen District…. what even is that!!!.. We can’t even find it on a map… it is hardly the Phi Phi islands we had been dreaming of.” (just a few of the thoughts regarding this last minute update)
But so goes life this year, so we hopped on a bus trusting that the Lord had something in store for us amongst these tiny villages in the mountains that no one knew a thing about… (spoiler alert, HE DID)
As we sat on the roof of Nepal, unsure and praying about what our life in Thailand would look like, at the very same time, across the ocean sat a wonderful man named Pastor John, praying fervently that a mission team would finally be sent to help his village church.
This amazing Pastor and his wife had been waiting and praying for a team for 4 years.
4 years!!!! And I was struggling to wait 4 days.
So if you haven’t connected the dots yet, We are the team that was sent to help Pastor John. And while we may be his answered prayer, he is also ours! I cannot imagine a more loving host, and just over one week spent with his ministry has been enough to be completely overwhelmed by the Lord’s faithfulness.
The area we are living in has never had a group of foreign missionaries visit, and many people have never even laid eyes on a foreigner. The Thai word for foreigner is “farang”, and people left and right consistently stop everything they are doing to point, wave, stare, and yell farang.
A VERY small handful of people in this area know a little English and otherwise we are pretty much in the dark with what people are saying. When Pastor John heard he might be getting a team where no one spoke Thai he started to teach himself English via YouTube. Roughly 3 weeks ago. He believes the Holy Spirit stepped in and helped him with his English because the level he is able to communicate with us despite 3 weeks of YouTube school is highly impressive.
Life in this village is upside down from anything I’ve ever known. Beautiful and freeing. Many nights Pastor John (PJ) parades us around to the homes of village people who caught wind that foreigners are in the area, and who want nothing more than to say they cooked us a big bowl of pad Thai.
We have been offered cows as gifts for just visiting a home, my teammate, India, was offered a garden and a small house from a 100 year-old women. (Don’t worry we politely turned down the offers. I hardly think I can handle adding a cow to the collection of things I’m hauling around the world.) But, as you can see hospitality is out the roof.
We teach English camps where we have lessons, games, songs and sports. And by sports I mean cup-stacking. Ask me more about this one some time. For recess we trek through the jungle and climb waterfalls. Something that would surely result in serious lawsuits in America. The kids are swinging through the trees and scaling rocks like Mogli from the Jungle book while we hike through the rapids looking like fools in our long modest teaching skirts.
The director of the school told us with a proud smile how he alerted the whole province that an English team had come to his school and therefore over 1,000 people would be tuning in to watch live footage of our camp that he flitted around excitedly capturing.
On the last day of our first camp all the students ran home during lunch to bring us gifts of bananas, papaya, mango, guava, and dragon fruit from their gardens. We stood in a line at the front of the school while all 60 kids walked through the line and knelt down to give us a bow as they handed over their prized fruits.
That next weekend the director of the school planned a camping trip in our honor because what’s better than fishing for your dinner with bamboo, digging up snails for breakfast, and dancing around a campfire.
It’s a heavy thing be told over and over you are an answer to prayer.
Just little old me, bumbling around Asia, and these people look at my team with hope and expectancy.
But we are learning how God is always in the waiting.
And when we wait on him, He can do immeasurably more than we could begin to do on our own.
In just our first week in the villages we saw the Lord moving like crazy.
We were brought to a home of a women who four years prior had fallen down the steps of her home. Everyone in these villages live in tall tree house bungalows made of heavy cypress wood so falling from one is quite treacherous. After her fall she lost all mobility of her legs and her muscles have completely atrophied from lack of any physical therapy.
She asked us to pray in the name of Jesus for her to be healed. She said she had been praying for years that missionaries would come to her home and pray over her. I sat holding her calf muscle in my lap that felt something like jello, thinking who am I to pray over this women! I’m not a miracle worker.
But we prayed and waited on God to do what we could never do on our own.
By the end of our visit to her home she was walking laps around the house. Holding firmly onto my teammate Alex’s hands at first, then slowly loosening her grip. By her last laps she was hardly touching Alex’s hands and dancing. Dancing!
We laughed, we cried, and praised the Lord for meeting this women in her pain.
Since we left we waited for updates and for an opportunity to see her again. She called PJ the next day ecstatic. She slept through the night with zero pain in her back and legs. She had not felt this good since before her fall. We have seen her over the past week and each time she has left her crutch at home, and a contagious smile has replaced it.
We did nothing for this women that God couldn’t do on his own. Her great faith healed her. Her great faith gave her the courage to leave the crutch behind and step out of the boat, onto the water, and into the unknown. God merely invited us to be a part of this experience because that’s who He is. He wants us on his team.
We saw a women with abnormal bleeding laugh with tears of joy as her pain was no more.
We saw another lady with stomach pain not be physically healed. But her soul and spirit were healed. With her friends surrounding her, sitting cross legged on the floor of a bungalow, and PJ working as a translator, the women heard the gospel for the first time and forgot all about her stomach pain. She knew what she needed more was the Gospel, and so she accepted Christ right then and there.
So here’s to waiting on God to show up in huge ways when we have no idea what we are supposed to be doing.
He doesn’t need us, but if we choose to wait for him to show up right by our side, we just might find ourselves on the best adventure of our lives.
Psalm 27:14: Wait for the LORD; Be strong and let your heart take courage; Yes, wait for the LORD.
