Hello friends and family!! I am writing to you from Zion Hostel in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Even though my time here has been short, many things have happened since I took off from San Francisco International Airport on January 1st.
After a few days of fighting jet lag and becoming accustomed to the city, Thai food, climate and culture, we set out for training ‘camp’. We were hosted by the amazing Eubank family who lives about an hour outside of Chiang Mai. The Eubank’s ministry is the Free Burma Rangers. This family goes illegally into the fighting zone in Burma and brings medicine, food, water, love and hope to the different nationalities at war in Burma. (For more information you can visit their website here: FreeBurmaRangers.org.) Our purpose here was strictly for training and preparing ourselves, our teams, and our squad for the upcoming year. We will not be sneaking into Burma… not yet at least. 🙂
Training has entailed many different things including, setting up our tent and gear in the dark, packing up our tent and gear into our packs in under 5 minutes (sooo hard!), hiking with our 50lb packs on, and having half of our packs be taken away because they were “lost on a plane” forcing us to learn how to share absolutely everything!
We had many awesome teachings during training as well. We first went deep into ourselves to heal any brokenness of our own heart. In order to change the world we need to create a change in ourselves first. We discussed other topics such as conflict resolution, servant leadership, safety, feedback, etc…
The best part of training was really getting to know my squad. We were able to do many team building activities in different groups and see how we worked together with different personalities. At the end of training we found out who will be on our first team. I am on a team with five other amazing women and am so excited to share the next few months with them!
We are now back at Zion Hostel in Chiang Mai and will enjoy the weekend off (first day off in two weeks)! On Monday we will start our ministry here. We have been enjoying getting to know the city and the Thai people. Majority of our ministry here will start with creating relationships with the Thai people and pouring out love!
For team bonding we went and had pedicures. We meet the man below, Bob, at the pedicure parlor. He is a retired American who has been living in Thailand for nine years. We got to share with him what we were doing this year and he shared the he has been feeling spiritually starved since he has been in Thailand. We were able to pray for him that he will find community to be spiritually fed here in Thailand. (Funny story, we actually saw Bob again randomly walking on the street a week after we meet him at pedicures. We got to sit down and talk with him some more and encourage him. God is so good!)
