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

Facing Fear

     Fear...fear is something we all face at some time or another. It can be small or it can be crippling. Some may face it every once in a great while and others face it every day of their lives. Fear can be brought on by accidents, people, wars, disease, governments, media consumption, and by simply being alive. I would venture to say that fear is interwoven into the fall of man, therefore it is interwoven into being human. However, to say that it's interwoven into the human experience doesn't mean that it should be; I truly believe that when God created humanity he never intended for us to be fearful creatures, in fact time and time again the Bible tells us not to fear. This is something that we did to ourselves. The second Adam and Eve messed up and everything came crashing down around them fear entered the picture and it came to stay.       Fear doesn't affect and interact with everyone the same way. Some people merely brush up against it...
Post a Comment
Read more

Embracing Obscurity

             As a Christian female in my 20s I know my Meyers-Briggs personality type (INFP), my enneagram (4w3), my love languages, and I've probably taken a spiritual gifts test. I probably take all of these tests every few months just in case my results have changed. Why? Why are we so obsessed with personality types and love languages? They so important to us that we will literally plan and center out entire lives around these results (which is rather unhealthy, but that's a post for another time). Why do we put such an emphasis on these things and purpose to weave them into our lives as tightly as possible? I would suggest that it's because we want to be known. We have a deep desire to be truly by known; to be known by our friends, our family, our co-workers, and even by ourselves. These tests give us the ability to have snippets of ourselves and our personality written out in front of us. It's something tangible that we can present to other ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Face To Face With Heroes Of The Faith

     Hi Everyone! Can you believe I've been in Thailand almost three weeks? It's been an amazing time or learning and adjusting so far. I am enjoying the immersion in a totally new culture. Being able to experience a new language, food, and practices is stretching and challenging at time and other times it's exciting and fun; often it's a mixture of all four. Even though they don't have a whole lot with this post I'm throwing in random pictures just so you can see what I've been up to with your own eyes.     There are six of us going through a month of training at Impact School of Missions in preparation for various internships across South East Asia. We have classes and training up until the end of the month; in October we all officially move on to our internships! Our month at ISM consists of classes involving classes on the culture, language, effective ways to minister and serve, culture shock/stress, learning about ourselves, and many more. We explore ...
Post a Comment
Read more