A Wild Ride So Far!

So, we hopped on our plane in LA, took off for Tokyo, spent a night in Bangkok, and finally landed in good ol' Chiang Mai, Thailand the next day.  We've met our missionary, Robert Reagan, and his apprentice, Mark Foster, as well as his two summer interns from Abilene Christian, Julianna and Fish :-)  It's an unbelievable team!  Are we exhausted?  oh you betcha.  Are we loving the thai people, culture, and food? bahaha yes!  have we made slight fools of ourselves already and wonder how we ever managed to graduate college? oh...oh yes... many times.

It wasn't 12 hours after we got off our international flight that we held our info meeting for the local thai people who had come to the Christian Zone after we everyone had been passing out flyers around the area. We told them who we were and that we were offering free english lessons with the Bible and about 20 people signed up with us that night.

We spent the weekend at a lake house on a retreat with the missionaries and interns and it was a much needed day of recouping before heading into the business of reading began.  The lake and rain were beautiful!  We had dinner at Robert's house that night and it started to storm so hard that the roads began flooding.  As we drove our truck back through the high street-waters, we picked up a thai man along with his wife and young daughter who were soaked out in the storm.  They climbed in the back of the truck with us as the water was starting to come in near our feet, and he said in broken english, "i am a pastor..." and we all looked at him with wide eyes and I thought to myself, "incredible...what are the odds that we'd drive by his struggling family in this terrible storm?"  The odds I suppose are God's odds.  He takes care of His children, indeed.

At church on sunday, three or four churches from all over Chiang Mai that Robert and Sean had planted over the years came together for a larger worship and potluck day.  Incredible!  We started reading with our readers today and it was awesome to begin sharing our lives and our faiths with them, some knowing much greater english than others.

My favorite part of today was when my reader named, "Seven" was reading from the first chapter of John and was reading the part where they called Jesus, "Rabbi" but he said in his broken english, "Rabbit" and i had to do everything i could to not bust up laughing. So i bent over my workbook and quietly shook and bit my tongue haha  LOVE SEVEN!!  AND RABBIT!!  So it's been incredible so far.  Humid.  Hilarious.  and downright insane.  God is good and we can't thank Him and you enough.  Enjoy the pictures :-)