THAILAND!!

Hello everyone! I feel like it’s been forever since I’ve written a blog, so much has happened in the last nine days! Let’s get to it:

MINISTRY IN THAILAND

The Lord sees me and knows me and He has placed me in the most amazing ministry. We arrived to a house up in the mountains of Chiang Dao to 12 of the sweetest, funniest and orneriest kids you’ve ever met, and the two best ministry hosts ever! Our ministry hosts have 2 children of their own and have taken in 10 other children with ages ranging from 9-17. We get to hang out with them in the evenings and even though most of them don’t speak much English, I’ve even gotten to do Bible studies with some of them. During the week, each evening we get together and worship. The kids lead every other night and we lead on the nights they don’t. This has been so cool! Some nights it’s just been me with my guitar as we all sit in a circle and worship, and some nights we’ve jumped and danced and shouted our praises at the top of our lungs together!

The School

Our first week here our ministry was teaching English at the school the kids attend. Showing up the first day was so crazy and a little scary! We drove up to about 400 kids in perfect straight lines all staring at us. We were quickly ushered up on stage to introduce ourselves, then a marching band started playing the Thai national anthem and right after that we jumped into teaching! The first 3 days I was a secondary school teacher, which was so awesome, I love that age group! The last 3 days I taught primary school, which was challenging but pushed me to grow in a lot of ways. There were moments in both schools were I felt there was no way I could get up to teach another lesson (we taught up to 6 classes a day!), but I pushed past what I thought I could do and depended on the Lord to get me through. Our last day, even though most of the students are not christians, we got to pray a blessing out loud over each classroom. I got to have a couple conversations with the help of google translate with students about the Gospel and why my team is here. I pray these students will not forget the love of Christ we showed them and will long for me. By teaching them English, these kids will be about to get real, respectable jobs to support their families, so we were so blessed to have the opportunity to teach them!

We also had THE most amazing opportunity to go and teach English for a day at a buddhist monk school! It is so incredibly rare that visitors are allowed (our ministry hosts had never even been allowed to visit!!), so we were so surprised they said yes to us! They told us we would have an hour to teach, but when we got there, they let us stay for three hours and even invited us to join them for lunch and told us we were welcome back anytime! We had two teachers in each of the three classrooms, so since my team has seven people, I had the opportunity to just sit in the back of the classroom and intercede in prayer for about an hour. Prayer was essential to our trip there, we all prayed together before hand and prayed over the campus before we went inside and I believe this is what made our time so successful. Continuing to pray that those students would see that there is ONE TRUE LIVING GOD!

Village ministry

This weekend we got to do ministry in the village! This was my favorite thing we’ve done the entire summer! I love good old fashioned evangelism, and yesterday I got to preach the full Gospel to a group of 30 women! After I was done sharing, I told them some personal testimonies of the Lord healing me, and I felt prompted to ask if anyone needed prayer for healing. In that moment I was nervous that no one would come up, but after an awkward moment of waiting, 10 women came up! My team and I got to pray over these women, and I’m believing that even if some weren’t healed right that moment, that they would be experiencing full healing right now! There was one lady who began weeping at the front, just hugging our ministry host (she was translating for me, she’s the best!) and she toldus that she felt her mind was clear and her burdens were lifted, she felt so light, PRAISE GOD!!!!! Our God is working in Thailand! We also went to a village way up in the mountains that had zero Christians. While at this village, we got to do a house visit with the village leader and pray over him, and then we just walked through the village praying over the huts. There is so much power in prayer!

Team Valor!

Being separate from the other teams has been sad because we miss them dearly, (shoutout to my new bestie Ian since I got a shoutout in his last email!) but God has used this time to build such strong bonds and friendships between the women on our team! It has been so beautiful and I could not be more grateful to do ministry alongside these women of valor. My squad leader Clarah is the most phenomenal leader of all time, and God knew she was the perfect woman to lead our squad! We are truly living in such beautiful unity, and I can’t help but thank God for this picture of what He intended biblical community to look like. I’m learning so much from this team, that I’m excited to bring back home and implement! It’s so special to experience God’s beautiful creation with these women (and let me tell you Thailand is GORGEOUS; or gorgina as dani would say). 

Prayer requests
Now as this blog comes to a close, I cannot thank you enough for praying for me! I will be with you in just two short weeks (how is that possible??!?!). I got to watch the Springcreek livestream last night before I went to sleep and wow oh wow it reminded me how much I miss you all, and how excited I am to be back with my friends and family. I keep checking my phone for a planning center request from pastor Spencer 🤣
I do have some more prayer requests so here they are!
1. pray against sickness! My girl Danielle is fighting some gnarly illness and infection and we are planning on a second doctors visit for her. We have also had some other health concerns on both my team and the other two! (also for those who were praying over my eye, thank you so much, it is better now!)

2. pray against the attacks of the enemy over our whole squad! Any spirit of darkness, offense, disunity, anxiety must flee! It has no place here. The enemy does not like what we are doing!

3. pray for our last week of ministry! Wednesday we start farming ministry! (oh also forgot to mention, we watched the pig at the house give birth to FIFTEEN piglets!!) We will do this W-F, break for the weekend, and then M-W before we head to our next location to debrief for several days and then start our crazy travel days back to America.

4. pray for the people we’ve ministered to and my team! Pray for a realization that God is the one true living God, and that He would continue to reveal Himself in supernatural ways. Pray for our ministry hosts (Wanida + Arron) and their ministry. I don’t think I’ve shared the names of the girls on my team yet so I will do that so you can lift them up in prayer by name if you’d like!
Danielle from Florida, Maren from Scotland, Mak from Michigan, Kierra from Indiana, Rylee from Washington, Clarah from Indiana and Me!

I LOVE YOU ALL!!!