Little Drummer Boys

This morning we went to a local church located in a refugee village! This church was started by an evangelist a few years ago and got so big, they needed to build a second location which is the one we visited today! Jadon and I led devotions this morning for our team, focusing in on putting on the armor of God as we step into missional service each day, and then headed to church.

The day started off bumpy (literally) with a thirty minute detour down a dirt farm road but immediately brightened when we arrived — Jadon found a kid and a drum! A perfect combination ;)

The three hour long service started with some worship in Burmese and the kids did a dance for us to a song about Moses parting the Red Sea! There were also testimonies and then they brought the Americans up on stage for introductions and then asked us to sing a song. Suddenly, and without warning, someone gave me a mic and I had to sing Amazing Grace!! By God’s provision, I think my voice held out, even if it didn’t feel like my legs were going to!

One of our teammates gave a lovely message on Gideon and how our identities need to be not in what we do, but in who we are in Christ. They served us a delicious home-cooked lunch before we started our road trip.

Oh yeah! The road trip! We are going to be spending the next two nights in a remote part of Thailand serving in a UNHCR-run refugee camp of about 14,000 people. We got special permission from the Thai government to serve these people, but one of the stipulations is that we have to provide at least two days of clinics.

The road here took us through narrow, winding mountainous roads which make Colorado mountain roads look easy! Even though the highest peak in this particular mountain range is only 7,000 feet, these mountains are steep and completely covered in vegetation. Most of the time you couldn’t see the ground at all!! The hairpin turns stacked on top of each other so as soon as you finished making a sharp right, you had to make just as sharp of a left! And the road was so narrow on the turns that it was really only wide enough for one car which meant lots of stops to let trucks traveling the other direction pass! A bunch of people were carsick, and one of our trucks’ breaks broke! They went careening down the mountain, bumping against the guardrails doing everything they could to slow down, but nothing was working. The thing that finally brought them to a halt was a house! Everyone inside the vehicle and the home was uninjured praise the Lord, but everyone was quite shaken up! We all eventually made it and checked into our “campsite” (more of a motel, really, but they call it a campsite?) without too much more hassle. We will spend the night here, and work at the camp Monday and Tuesday, and head back to Mae Sot Tuesday night.

After dinner we went for a quick walk down to the 7/11 in search of some after-dinner treats and walked on what initially appeared to be a cute little foot bridge and ended up being an extremely creaky and squishy foot bridge which despite its many protests managed to hold us ;)