Dad, Katie, and Mom
Sawadiikha!
It has now been over a month since I landed back in Thailand. As I was preparing to come back I was trying to get things done “early” the day before I thought I was flying out. So I checked my itinerary and realized my ticket had been changed and I was leaving that day! Thankfully, I had just received my Thai Visa the day before. After traveling for 23 hours I made it to Chiang Mai, Thailand. Though, I wasn’t able to get ahold of my contacts there and let them know I was arriving early, so I called the Campus Ministry in Chiang Rai that I had worked with, and found out that they were having 5 Baptisms that afternoon! I quickly gathered my stuff and after a 3 hour bus ride made it to Chiang Rai in time for the Baptisms. It was such sweet welcome home!
My last month in the USA was spent studying TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) with YWAM Montana. It was a crazy sweet course of about 6 weeks worth of training packed into 4 weeks. I honestly wanted to quit the course on day 4, but by the grace of God I made it through and was so completely blessed by my fellow teachers, students, and staff!
After jumping around from place to place as if I had been strapped to a pogo stick for the past 6 months, I finally made it to my new home in “The Isaan”! Life here in the Northeast part of Thailand is so different from life in the North! I’m trying to simply get used to the new volume of the people here. I keep thinking folks are yelling at each other, but they’re usually just having a friendly conversation! It’s pretty weird.
My hair is pretty short at the moment and this morning on the way to church I was mistaken for a boy. I just laughed it off, but as I heard this woman say how she wanted to get a foreign boyfriend, as if you could pick one up at the grocery store, and that she had dumped the last fella because he didn’t have enough money… I got a little mad. Not at her, but just the whole cycle of people using one another! Whether it be for money, lust or whatever. It makes me seriously angry! I couldn’t really say much after that because I was just fuming inside. It breaks my heart for the women here that think they might find prince charming with a big fat wallet that will save them from poverty. It breaks for the men that think they can buy love. My heart breaks for the parents and grandparents that even considers sending their children away not knowing what they’re really sending them to just because they can’t afford to take care of them and think they will be more profitable to them working in the city, and my heart breaks for the children that have to live with those consequences! Nothing in this world can satisfy like the love and hope that God gives! Absolutely nothing! Without Him all of this hopelessness would just be some endless cycle, but through Him I pray that there would be a change! That people would know the truth that sets them free.
That they are not forgotten! They are not hopeless! They are not a mistake! The creator of the universe knows their name! And that they are Loved! Deeply.
What the son sets free will be free indeed! (John 8:36) I long so deeply for Thailand, and the World to know the only truth that can set them free!
I long for Christians to be set free! It’s too frighteningly easy to just sit in a cage of lies we have believed, when all along the door is wide open! I let fear and lies hold me back for far too long thinking I was stupid or had nothing good to say. I hated grammar in school and since I was home-schooled I hid the book so I wouldn’t have to do it. I never wanted to do a TESOL course at the fear of looking stupid or foolish that I don’t even understand how my own language works. But I was so blessed to be able to renounce those lies that had held me captive. Seriously though, if I can do it, anyone can do it!
If it is true that God uses the foolishness of this world to shame the wise, and that in our weaknesses He shows His strength. Then I pray that I will be a truly weak and foolish Christian that is seeing God at work all around me! (I think I accidentally stole this quote Shawn Claiborne -” Irresistible Revolution” but I could be wrong.)
If you have made it to the end of this I am truly thankful! Thankful for your love and prayers, words or encouragement, and with the diverse and global family God has blessed me with. Thank you for being a great part of it!
Love,
Katie
