Skip to main content

Joy To The World: In The Darkest of Places

     Merry Christmas and Happy New Years! I want to again thank everyone for their love, prayer, support, and encouragement during this time. I am beyond blessed to have such an amazing support system behind me. I am thankful for each and every one of you and all that you have done for me, the things I'm aware of and the things I don't know about, thank you.
     I can't believe that my time here is already half way over. In some ways it feels like I've been in Thailand for years and in others it feels like I stepped off the plan just yesterday. My time here so far as been amazing and in some ways indescribable. It has been difficult, emotional, stretching, incredible, and rewarding all at the same time. Being able to come here and serve has been a true blessing. I love being here and I love the people I get the opportunity to serve and work with. I am blessed with beautiful friendships with fellow expats as well as the Thai women I work with in the office. I am constantly astounded by the life and community that God has provided me with here.
     I work in the office on a day to day basis doing data entry, some communication with incoming visitors and volunteers, I teach English in Friday afternoons to the wonderful Thai staff, and giving tours to visiting teams and people interested in what we do. I also get the incredible privilege of attending outreach to the bars. 
     Outreach is one of my favorite things that I get to do here and we recently had our Christmas outreach. I have on outreach to the thai bars but this time I was able to attend both outreach here and outreach to other ares of town. We went in to each place with small bags of goodies and handed them out to the girls and mama sans. Just something to say we love you and Merry Christmas.  After we distributed gifts throughout the bars we then headed across the main road. Armed with gift bags and a guitar we made our way into one of the brothels to hand out gifts and hopefully bring some joy to their night. Once inside the guitar was pulled out and we were able to begin singing Christmas carols. Girls came out of their rooms and watched us and some of them sang with us. As we sang I looked around, at their faces, and where I would expect to see emptiness and fear I saw joy and hope. As I stood in a place of such brokenness, pain, fear, and bondage I sang Joy To The World and I felt it. It was all I could do to hold back tears as I stood with these women and sang with them about joy and love and hope. That night in a small brothel in Bangkok the love and joy and Christ penetrated the darkness and gave everyone there, the women and our team, a glimpse of what true freedom and joy can look like. It was such an incredible reminder that while the fight is not over; there is still hope no matter how bleak and hopeless a situation may seem. May we never give up. No matter how dark it is, the light can always shine brighter. No more let sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground. He comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I Have Arrived & Thank You

     Hello all! I have officially arrived in Bangkok. It was a long ride here but I have finally made it. I wanted to take this time to thank all of you. Thank you for sending me money, for praying for me, encouraging me, and supporting me all around. I wouldn't be here without you. I won't lie being here is nerve wracking and I'm already homesick, but I'm also excited for the things in store and all that I know God is going to do in my time here. You have all made this possible and that's incredible.      Special thanks to everyone who has provided enough cards and letters of encouragement to last me my whole trip. I don't even know everyone that gave Brooke cards to give to me but I am so excited to open them. I know each of them will be divinely timed and I will receive so much from them. I get to open the first one Monday!       Church Family: I want to say thank you to everyone at LWC for being the most incredible and loving church fam...
5 comments
Read more

Seven Year Dream

     Just in case you missed it. I finished my month of training with ISM and I am now at my internship. I am so thankful for my amazing month with ISM. I was able to learn so much and grow with an amazing group of people. The likelihood of falling flat on my face without the help of ISM would be much greater than it is now that I was able to spend that time in training and transition. However, I am so happy to finally be at Nightlight working and serving. I serve in the office as an office assistant, but within that role I am blessed to be able to do a number of different things. I do some data entry, work sales, clean the showroom, give tours, attend outreach, I have the opportunity to teach English once a week for some of the women, and I help with whatever else needs to be done.      Some times working in an office or cleaning a room can seem mundane and pointless, but when I truly stop and think about the reality of where I am and what I'm doing I fin...
4 comments
Read more

May Our Hearts Always Break

     Today I was giving a tour to a team that was visiting. We met and I told them about NL; how it was started and what we do and how we reach out to women. We're located in one Bangkok's many red light districts and usually after a tour the visiting team and I will walk to the offices. Often I hear teams express their shock at how out in the open and tolerated exploitation is in these areas. I watch their faces as we pass by various places and people in the middle of the afternoon on a week day. Things that should shock me, but I walk past them every day. Things that maybe they're being exposed to for the first time, but between my short time here and volunteering back in the states things I have known about or I have seen first hand multiple times. Does my heart really break the way it should? Have I become so used to the darkness around me that it doesn't phase me the way it used to?      I remember reading a blog post  from Love146  where th...
Post a Comment
Read more