musings and other random things...

so the day before last we left chiang rai to head for the tak province, in a town called maesot, which is on the border of burma.
we had a 4.30 am wakeup call, and gathered all our wordly possessions about us, and headed for the bus depot, where we hoped wewere boarding the right bus, as our translator had left us the day before, and at 5 am there were no people about that spoke even a whisper of english around, so with many hand gestures and pointing, we boarded what we prayed was the right bus. we boarded a less-than-comfortable-but-not-so-bad-im-going-to-complain-about-it bus, and i took the sweet pill named dramamine, and waited for it to kick in and knock me out. i fell asleep, and when the bus stopped i woke up, assuming we had to be at LEAsT halfway to our destination. well....we had actually only been driving for about 15 minutes, and were in town, waiting for 7 so we could really get rolling. the dramamine had kicked in enough by then that i didnt even care, and barely noticed the team of white people that had boarded right behind us. of course they were a ywam team, and after making cloudy conversation with them i layed my head down and passed out. we were told that thebus ride wqould be 4 hours. psych!it wasmore like 7 1/2. sheesh.but i slept through most of it, andlistened to music the rest, so it wasnt bad.
we landed in the tak province. it was pretty sweltering. reminiscint of the philippines. yikes. we called the pastor, and he and his family met us, and took us to a wonderful restaraunt where we had a deeelicious thai lunch! after that we said that the day was just for relaxing (his english is good enough for clear communication, but still a little broken when he speaks), and took us down to the river, where we could swim. not everyone was hot for the idea, but antti and i jumped right in. we had fun swimming upstream and letting the water carry us to an inlet, and just goofing around and cooling off. tiesha and hanna joined us at the end, and we all had fun watching the thai people point at us and our obviously white skin. ah, such is the life!
after that we were all in the back of the truck, where we thought we were headed to our new home...wrong again! he took us instead up to a hill village, and the girls were dying, thinking that that was where we were going to be staying. when he got out he said that he wanted us to meet his friends, and then he asked us to put on a one and a half hour show! and we did! well,the students did. those awesome, holy, wonderful students! we had had a suuuuper long day, and everyone was tired, and some of us were wet, and it was cold up there to boot, but they all had wonderful attitudes about it, and prayed, and put together a show! they did all their skits and dramas, gave testimonies and a short message, and at the end of it, a large group of people who had ever heard the gospel before made decisions to accept and follow Jesus! im pretty sure that was a defined moment in the students lives, they felt more encouraged than ever before. it was such a humbling experience for me, and i am so glad for gary, because if the pastor would have talked to me, i would have said no, we had a long day, everyone was wet, tired, and hungry, but God is so gracious! i feel like that time was just as much for us as for the people!
i am so humbled to be a part of this team, and God has really been working on me a lot lately, giving me a burden for certain students, and really revealing His heart for them to me, and its been sort of painful, ive been doing a lot of repenting, and changing my attitude, but God is so good, and His grace is sufficient for me! i am so pleased to be a part of this team, and even in the hard moments, it is so much MORE than worth it! i love you Lord, thank you for the opportunity, the privelege, to be living this life! thank you that you love me, and give me so many gifts that i am unworthy of!
so speaking of burma: i dont have time anymore to write everything ive learned about it, but click here for more info...and maybe something we can do about it?
and in conclusion...while were here, we will be doing a lot of open air evangelism, some prison minitry, english teaching, and im sure many other things we know not about yet!