Trilingual

DD reading Proverbs 16:9 in Chinese, 

"The mind of man plans his way, But the LORD directs his steps."

"Do you understand it?"

"Yes, I can't write it, but I can read it."

"So this is the old language?"

"Yes. But I still like it.  I love to read the Bible, it has such good advice, and it is so beautiful."  DD has only been reading the Bible for a little over a month, and most of that time she has been reading in her second language, Thai. 

This week however, that changed.  For the first time, our Saturday student Bible study used Bibles in three languages.   Thai, English, and Chinese. 

Excited that we had finally found a Bible in the right Chinese dialect, I asked DD to read the passage we were studying out loud.  What I didn't realize was that finding the passage was going to be almost as big of a task as finding the Bible itself.

"James."

I might as well have said a random word in Russian or Afrikaans.  The name didn't get us very far, and me flipping through the pages that held absolutely no familiar letter or number clues wasn't helping either.  I thought I had our solution when I looked up the characters for "James" in Chinese on the internet, but for some reason, they didn't match.  Another dead end, but we weren't giving up.  

"Okay.  We need a new plan."

First, the table of contents.  I flipped more pages. DD flipped to the back cover.  I wanted to say something like, "We want the table of contents, not the concordance." But I didn't know those words in Thai (or Chinese).  Then I realized what DD already knew, Chinese is written from right to left, top to bottom in columns.   I counted in my English table of contents.  James is the eighth book from the end (in case you ever have to find it in a language you can't read.) 

"Yesh-ceb?" DD asked.  Knowing that "James" is pronounced, "Yhe-cob" in Thai gave me confidence that we had found the right book.  We turned to the first page.  Not being able to read Chinese numbers, I had to trust DD was following.  "There should be a big number 'one.' Okay, now 'two,' 'three,' and 'four.'  Yes!  We want four, that is the chapter.  Now verses 13-17.  Those are the little numbers.  Yeah!!!  We found it.  Can you read it to us?" 

While DD read, my heart leapt.  It was beautiful, as was her expression, which came alive as she read.

By the end of the night, DD was tuning pages, finding chapters and reading verses all on her own.  "You can take this Bible home to read if you want."  I encouraged her.

"But what if someone else wants to read it here."

"We will get another. It is so special that you have one in your own language to read."

A visit to Nisa's home

Nisa is a great cook and we enjoyed delicious meals with her family. 

 This is the home she grew up in, although she said they added the second story a while back.  

The view around  her home is beautiful, mostly rice fields and MOUNTAINS!  (Something I really do miss in Bangkok.)  It felt so refreshing to get out of the city. 

 The rice was just sprouting in some fields and about knee-high in other fields. Corn was also grown in one section of the field.

Nisa's sister explained to me that here, where the farmers rely on the rain to water the fields, rice is grown once per year.  However, in fields along major rivers and water ways, rice can be planted and harvested twice a year because they have an alternative water source.

This is another home along the walk from the main road to Nisa's house.  The bottom of the house is left open and used kind of like a garage, to store things and hang clothes to dry during rainy season.

The white building in the distance is the school Nisa went to as a kid.  Now her niece, who lives with Grandma and Grandpa, studies there.

On our walk we found an ox.  His owner said he was friendly, so we could pet him and take a picture.  

On our walk back home Mr. Ox was getting a bath.  It kind of reminded me of washing a car, but he seemed to be enjoying it. 

Thank you, beautiful Nisa, for taking me to visit your home!

A field truck.  Most of the people in this area work in the fields.  

Nisa, her mom, her older sister, and her niece. 

 The family and their adopted foreign daughter.

A lovely weekend with lovely friends.

Girls

It is a blessing to live and serve with all these beautiful faces.

 Girls.

We are the same in every country I've been to.  We may speak different languages, or have different customs, but we all worry about our hair. We worry about our size.  We worry about our friends and our future.   We all want to be noticed.  We all want to be treasured.  We all want to be loved.

AND

Girls of every age

We were all created uniquely by God, perfectly in his image.  We are his daughters, and he loves us more than we can understand.

Wanting some of the girls to hold this truth closer to their hearts, we talked about it during Girls' Night.

"God's love makes us beautiful on the inside and on the outside." I shared.

"Really?!" Aom almost shouted like she embraced the idea for the very first time.  "Me too?"  She asked, pointing at herself.

"Yes you!"  I confirmed.

When we truly understand the depths of God's love for us, we don't have to be insecure about our hair.  It actually sounds silly to mention those two in the same sentence.  We don't have to worry about our future because we know Dad has it taken care of. 

My desire is to see the Thai and Chinese girls I am pouring into embrace these ideas.  The deeper our roots abide in the Father, the more naturally beautiful our lives become because they are being watered by the perfect, complete, quenching Living Water.

Awesome God

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The rain had slowed to spitting just a few drops, the sun was pushing its way through the remaining clouds, and the rainbow, oh the rainbow! 

It stretched across the whole sky, a full semi circle.  We marveled at it all the way home.  While we walked, Ning shared, "Most Thais, the regular Buddhists, you know, think it is bad luck to point at a rainbow.  They say your finger will fall off." 

I quickly tucked my hand, the one that was just pointing at the amazing rainbow,  into my pocket and looked around.  No one seemed to notice.

"But now that I know where rainbows come from, that God created them as a promise for us, I like them a lot more." Ning continued.

This got me thinking about how awesome our God is.  He created our earth and the universe.  The sun and every water droplet that the sun reflects off of to make a rainbow.  All the animals, big and small.  The giant elephants that Thailand loves and the millions of ants that crawl in your yard and mine.  He knows all the grains of sand in the sea and on the shoreline. 

And God didn't stop there.  Think about a sky full of stars.  Did you know, there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on the earth?  God created each one.  He knows them all and gave each one a name. 

Wow!  That's a lot of names.  And my little brain has a hard time keeping track of the names of the twelve dark headed kids in my Sunday School class. :)

"He determines the number of the stars; he gives to all of them their names." Psalm 147:4

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