Vegetables, but Something More Important

It was a special day.  

The yellow banners in the market reminded our eyes.  And our noses quickly led us to the delicious aromas coming from stall after stall.  The annual Vegetarian Festival is primarily celebrated by Thai-Chinese who are wanting to cleanse their bodies from all meat and dairy to please their god.  However, everyone seems to enjoy the delicious dishes. 

This opened another conversation with one of my Thai friends with Chinese heritage...

"Why didn't your sisters come to church today?" I asked Lin.
"They had to go with my mom to the Chinese temple." She responded.
"Do they go every Sunday?"
"No, today is the first day of Tesagan Jae."
"The Vegetarian Festival, right?" 

"And what do they do at the temple?" 

"Pray to our god.  Today we celebrate because he comes to earth for the festival time." 

"What does he do on earth?" 

"Ummm...I don't know.  I guess to spend time among the people."

I asked if I could ask more, and with permission, our conversation continued on to her family's beliefs about sin, getting rid of it; heaven, getting there; god, and the unreachable standard of good he demands.  

After listening attentively, I was still confused.  And the more Lin tried to explain, the fewer answers she seemed to have. 

Lin has heard the gospel before (and again today as we talked), but still stands unsure, somewhere caught in between the pulls of family, a religion she doesn't really understand but grew up with, and the offer of a relationship with the world's Creator. 

Yummy vegetarian food!

A Fun First

    

Turbo speaking (and me translating) Sunday morning.

One thing about translating is that you must (at least I must) become a lot more familiar with the material than you would if your only responsibility was to listen.  Some points that stood out to me...

*There are about 360,000 Christians in Thailand, that's 0.58% of the population.

*Of those believers, about 150,000 of them are in tribal villages, which means only about 0.35% of Thai-speaking Thais are Christians. 

To put this in perspective, if you walk around Bangkok and meet 300 people, statistics show that only one of those will be a true Christ-follower.   

Doesn't that put some urgency into sharing the gospel.  

And when we share it, do we share like it is a chore or like news that we had just won the lottery?  (Cause isn't eternal life even greater than that?!)

We both had a lot of fun and are already asking when the next time will be. 

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

Image from forum.santabanta.com

Kids' stories aren't just for kids!

The silly girls I live with...wouldn't trade them for anything.  :)

"Julia!  Can I come visit you?"  Wi asked, opening my door before sound could leave my mouth. 

"Ooh, your room is hot too."  Wi said, as she came in.  "What are you doing?"

"Translating a Bible story to teach the children at church on Sunday."

"Can I read too?"

"Sure."  I responded, handing her the teacher's book of stories. 

We sat on my bed, fans blowing the hot air around the room and flapping the pages of our books.  Wi read story after story out loud but to herself, insisting I get my work done and only occasionally stopping to ask how to pronounce a word or its meaning.  I occasionally did the same, asking the difference between two verbs that seemed interchangeable or the correct phrasing for a sentence.

After a while, Wi turned to another story.  "This one is from Genesis 26."  She stated.  "What's a 'well' and why were Isaac's ne-i-ber-s...a-r-gu-ing?" She asked, but quickly followed with, "I'll read and find out." 

Soft murmuring came from the other side of my bed.  Her petite finger ran across the lines of the story, brow intermittently wrinkling under her short, black bangs as she stopped to examine a word. 

"Hmmm."

I looked up, noticing Wi was finished with the story.  "So, why were Isaac's neighbors arguing?" I inquired.

"They wanted Isaac's well. But Isaac didn't want to ar-gue, so he built another one and then another one. He wanted to be their friend."

We sat quietly for a moment.

"I'm going to go now."  Wi stated, rather abruptly.  She paused, seeming to think about the stories she had been reading.  "God encouraged me to not argue with my friends."

"Good." I said, marveling at the way God just used a kid's bible story and my prep time to remind us of a lesson we often forget, even as adults. 

The door closed, and I was left alone to translate the rest of the story for Sunday school.

"Ar-gue?"  Wi called back, checking to make sure she was remembering her new word.

"Argue." I confirmed, smile widening across my face. 

Multiplication, God Style

A fun part of small group is hanging out to play games afterward!

"I really enjoyed coming to small group with you last week."  NaamFon shared with me on Sunday. 

NaamFon has been a believer for some years and is involved in another church, so I almost didn't invite her to our Bible study.  She surprised me by being very interested and insisting on going, even though we meet all the way downtown. 

"I think I will start meeting with a small group of students to study the Bible too."  NaamFon continued.

Wait.  What?  Wow! 

Is multiplication that simple?

Well, of course it is, if God is doing it.

We model what the Bible teaches, gathering together with Christ as the focus and the Bible as our life guide, and God brings the people and does the work. 

So in the next few weeks, there will be a group of students meeting at Ram 2 university even though our team is focusing on Bangkok university.  God has shared the vision and passion with a couple other people from NaamFon's church, so they will be partnering in leading this group. 

Just imagine... What if God multiplies that group in the same way, to reach out and start another group at another university.  And what if other people from our group are lead to start a group at the other Bangkok university campus. How long would it take until there was a small group meeting at all of Bangkok's 30+ universities? 

And that's just the work God is doing through our church.  Wow God!  What a blessing it is to get a glimpse into God's bigger vision for reaching Bangkok and Thailand. And what a privilege it is to be involved!

Perspective

Perspective changes everything.

This past week, we played a game called "Can You Make It?"
 

Each team was given a pile of random objects and players took turns trying to make the word they drew out of the bag.  Whatever team guessed the word correctly first was the winner.  Think of Pictionary, just making the object instead of drawing it.

My team guessed this immage within about 10 seconds of me beginning to make it.  I was very impressed.  With the right perspective you'll see...a sailboat.


"Do you ever feel weak?"  Gif asked me later.

"Of course.  Everyone one does at times."  I responded.

However, how we look at this feeling of weakness goes back to perspective.   "We can think about it as God's reminder that he is the one doing the work and we should be relying on him, or we can just be frustrated because we feel like we don't have enough strength."

At one point in the game, my word was "chair."  I made an "L" shape with string then lined up four toothpicks sticking off the bottom.  To me, it looked like a chair.  To the judge (who pointed and said, "That's it exactly!") it was a chair.  To my teammates, it was string and toothpicks in a mixed-up pile.  

How many times do you think we see God's plan like that?  When really, if we seek him (and are patient for his timing) the picture would look much different. 

 Any guesses? 

This one my team figured out...a cat.

 Teams 1 & 2

Teams 3 & 4

 The "making" process.

 Too easy!  

An ice cream cone.

 I was impressed that we figured this one out...

An elephant!  (The trunk is closest to us and the blue dot is its eye.)

Teams 5 & 6

Mango and Sticky Rice

Looking for a cool, summer dessert that uses delicious summer fruit?

Try Mango and Sticky Rice!

My Thai friends were the first to teach me how to make this easy and delicious sweet treat.  At the market we picked up (aka, your shopping list should include)...

 Ingredients:
-1 cup sticky rice (glutinous rice)
-1 cup coconut milk
-1/2 cup water
-pinch of salt
-1/4-1/2 cup sugar (more or less sweet according to your preference)
-1-2 mangoes (or other fresh fruit)

Directions:

Soak the sticky rice for 6-8 hours in a bowl with a lot water (the rice will expand, so make sure your bowl is big enough.)  After soaking, pour out the extra water and rinse off the rice.   While water is boiling in your steamer, place a cheese cloth or muslin cloth on the top part and pour the rice into the cloth.  Cook the rice for about 20 minutes, or until it is translucent and not crunchy.  (If you would rather microwave the rice, see the Microwave Method below.)

Next, heat the coconut milk and water in a sauce pan.  Stir constantly and add the salt and sugar when simmering.  Mix until sugar is dissolved. 

Pour about half the coconut milk mixture into a smaller bowl.  When the rice is cooked, mix the rice into the remaining, hot coconut milk. 

Lastly, peel the mango (or other fruit) and cut it in long, thin slices. 

To assemble, place a scoop of rice on the plate, top with a few slices of fruit and then spoon some of the remaining coconut milk sauce on the top. 







The Microwave Method: Soak the sticky rice for 10 minutes in warm water in a bowl. Soaking the rice is very important. I have tried this method without soaking the rice first and it was disastrous. The rice was undercooked and inedible. The water level should be just above the rice, which comes out to be 1 cup of rice and a little over 1 cup of water (about 10% more). I recommend using a non-plastic container because you may melt the plastic in the microwave. Cover the bowl with a dish and cook in microwave for at full power 3 minutes. Stir the rice around to move the rice from the top to the bottom. You will notice that some of the rice is translucent or cooked and some still has white center or the uncooked portion.

Heat it up again for another 3 minutes. Check and see if it is done. When cooked, all the rice should be translucent. If it needs more cooking, I recommend heating up and checking every 3 minutes or so. How long it takes to cook really depends on your microwave. (Microwave Method from www.thaitable.com)

Enjoy!  (We all sure did!)

Beach and Baptism

Friends from English class joined us at Bang Saen beach. 

Although not the same as the famous southern Thailand beaches, at an hour and a half away from Bangkok, this one is a perfect one-day get away. 

Under our tent-city, we could order food, buy beach toys, or just sit and relax.  

We couldn't enjoy the beach without enjoying some good sea-food...squid, muscles, and papaya salad!  (Can you guess my favorite...?)

Friends of all ages joined us, from an "Aunty" who has been retired for many years (third from the right) to Josiah, who at one and a half years old, we still had to keep from eating sand. 

The highlight of the day was definitely the N, who put her faith in Christ last week, was baptized!  It was perfect timing to make her proclamation to the world in God's beautiful creation.

Kyle, N, and me...so happy for the privelage to celebrate this special day together.

The Tennessee interns were very excited to celebrate with us too.

"I feel good." N told me afterward.  "I have peace in my heart."

Luckily Josiah didn't know that this man was selling cotton candy, otherwise he might not have let him keep going.  :)