Merry Christmas! It's almost the night before Christmas and it's not even a little bit quiet. Jackie is sneezing, Bob is sneezing and the house is freezing but there are no sugar plum fairies around. There's something to be thankful for!
So, what do you get when you add 3-4 gallons of ice cream, a bunch of fruit, nuts and Uno cards to a batch of Buddhist kids? Christmas party! Chuck and Janet have the perfect house for hosting such events so a bunch of our students, on the right, came over. Chuck and I teach different subjects but we teach English majors so we teach the same guys usually. We had a really fun time with them.
Chuck with the Santa hat had a great time being the gift giver and organizer of the "I'll steal your gift if you get a good one" event. Thai folks don't like to make waves but when there's a good gift on the line we found out that they will get a bit aggressive. It was all fun all night and I even took a couple of minutes to tell them about John 3:16, which they graciously listened to. We find that it can be quite a challenge for our Thai friends and students to become Christians. The parental and peer pressure to remain Buddhist, though most of them don't even know what that means, is unbelievable. There are those times, however, when the unbelievable can happen.
For example, the Christian Club at our university had their Christmas party a couple of days before Chuck's party and it was awesome. The student leaders did an incredible job of pulling it all together. They even let Chuck and I get up on stage and tell about the true meaning of Christmas. Not a very good picture, but you can at least see the stage. Chuck played the typical American and I was explaining about God's gift in Christ and such. One of the teachers came up to us 2 days later and told us how much he appreciated what we had to say. He's a Buddhist! They did dances, skits, dramas, gave away a ton of gifts and the gospel was shared by a wild-man Thai evangelist who was really good. The students and the crowd loved him. Below this you see the crew who put all this together. They worked
for about 6 weeks arranging the logistics with the school for the meeting place and such. In typical fashion, 4 days or so before the party was to take place, the school told them they had to move the venue to outdoors. But they took it all in stride and the end result was a good time was had by all AND, most importantly, 9 people inquired about how to become a Christian. 9 in one night WAS the record for anything I'd seen around here. That all changed with the next Christmas party that took place at our church, Baanathii Taan. That means "House of Prayer." Pastor Michael and the church staff worked like crazy to put this one together. We teachers passed out 100s of invitations around campus to our students and the other nearby university was also covered.
Our church building is just plain huge for a Thai church. It was an old disco place and we took it over about a year ago. It was full from one end to the other and people were outside on the balconies looking in the windows. We served dinner to everyone and used 900 plates so the crowd was somewhere near that size. Last year there were about 200 people. We had singing, dramas, dancing (I'll show you Jackie's girls and BOY in a minute) and an excellent message by pastor Michael. I think there was somewhere near 15 million kids! There were kids everywhere. One of the strengths of Baanathii Taan is the children's ministry. On Sundays we have close to 100 kids--they come from the homes that care for orphans and kids at risk--and our Thai staff is just incredible in taking care of them. This night, like I said: There were about 15 million of 'em running around. It was noisy, energy bouncing off the walls and people just having a good time.
There are Jackie's dancers. She spent about 6 weeks, part of the time on crutches and part of the time sitting on a stool, giving instructions to put it together. It was really something to watch. God was glorified. After all was said and done, a call was given to ask who'd like to receive Christ. About a dozen people raised their hands! That was on Saturday night and on Sunday when we got to church, Bum came up to us and said that 56 people turned in cards saying they'd prayed for Christ to come into their lives. 56! That's just too amazing. I sent out an e-mail and asked that you pray for these "56." Today I called Michael about something and he told me they'd found more cards and the total is now up to 62. Oh my gosh. Many of those will be kids and parents will probably be a challenge--no, they will be a challenge. Please be praying for all these people. I think we're done with Christmas parties and outreaches so life should settle back down to normal, which, when you live in Thailand, is kind of hard to define. I'll close this thing for now and just tell all of you, our friends/prayer partners/financial supporters, we are truly grateful for you. We've been over here 4 years and honestly we don't know how we've done it. At times, we feel like we are a million miles from anything that we understand and 2 million miles from our kids and grandkids. How we miss them and you who we get to see when we live in America. Those of you in other countries, we may never see again until the Lord reunites us all in His heavenly Kingdom. But what a joy and privilege it is to serve our great King and what a support it is to have folks like you guys that stick with us and pray us through the times when we want to give up. Thank you so much and have a MERRY CHRISTMAS and fruitful 2007.
