Heading Home

And we are off! Thank you for your prayers and support!
If all goes well, we will arrive in Oregon at 5am EST Thursday. After spending a few days there, I will arrive in Boston Tuesday night.
Please pray for safe travels and a smooth transition back to the USA.

Prayer for the Partnership

As this is our final week here in Asia, we want to spend time praying for the partnership that we have spent the last seven months exploring and working to develop. As we have met with more and more network pastors and leaders, it has been exciting to dream about what this partnership may look like in the coming years! We do not yet know how it will develop, but we pray that leaders on both sides of the world will continue to follow God's leading in the growth of this joint network of churches.
Please join us as we pray for the network, the pastors and leaders, and for continued direction in how to best reach this country with the amazing news about Jesus.

Prayer Week Three

The theme for prayer this week centers around unity, both for the church and the country as a whole.
The country is divided into many different ethnic groups who each have a different state or region. There has traditionally been tension between these groups ranging from discrimination to all-out war. This is still the case today: there is fighting going on in at least two different parts of the country, and many minority groups are looked down upon or actively persecuted by the government and society.
The churches we have visited seem to be leading the way to accept members from all ethnic groups. However, there often appears to be a hesitation to work together with other believers. Our prayer for the church is that they would grow in humility and enthusiasm for spreading the gospel with their fellow Christians. There are many ways God's truth might advance in this country if only His people learn to come together as one body.

Another Week of Prayer

This week's prayer topic here in Asia is for the health and education of the people. There is limited access to both of these necessities.
The number of doctors compared to population is quite low here. (According to The World Bank website, the count in 2012 was one nurse per 1,000 people and about 0.6 doctors per 1,000 people.) Approximately half of the population will get diabetes during their lifetime. Health education appears to be on the rise, but has a long way to go.
This is the case with education in general. In the rural areas, many villages do not have their own schools past a certain grade. So if a child wants an education, he or she must travel to another town or live away from their family in a monastery or children's home. In the places where government schools are present, corruption is also present: teachers are not paid a livable wage and therefore charge extra tuition for the information necessary to pass each grade. Many public universities offer distance learning degrees where a student will study for two to three weeks, have a week of testing, and then earn a bachelor's degree. This satisfies the population's demand for accessible education while producing college "graduates" who are essentially uneducated.
Please join us this week as we pray for these broken systems, that God would heal and bless the people of this nation and that His followers would use every opportunity to do good.

Prayer Topic

I know it has been a very short time since my last post, but I wanted to take a minute and let you all in on something our team is doing for our final month. Since responsibilities are winding down, we decided to be more intentional about praying for this country while we're still on the ground. To facilitate this, we chose four prayer topics; one for each week we will still be here. I would like to invite you all to join us.
This week (until next Tuesday, the fourth,) we will be praying for the government. There are many changes that are taking place in the government here, and many more that should. There has historically been a lot of corruption through every level of society, which is something that will have to be dealt with if improvements are to be made. And of course we pray that God's plan would be evident in and through the leadership of this nation and that He would move in strong ways to make Himself known.
If you have any questions, please let me know and I will elaborate! Thank you for joining us in your prayers.

1 Timothy 2:1-2 "I urge you, first of all, to pray for all people. Ask God to help them; intercede on their behalf, and give thanks for them. Pray this way for kings and all who are in authority so that we can live peaceful and quiet lives marked by godliness and dignity."

Community

When I wrote last, I was in the relaxation stage of summer vacation. Our team has now fully transitioned into that era of vacation where you try to fit as much as possible into the time that you used to spend working. As Peter pointed out to me yesterday, recently we have had some of the busiest weeks since arriving in Myanmar six months ago.
Mostly, we have filled our time meeting with pastors, as evidenced by the approximately twenty pinpoints on our developing mapping project that I mentioned in my previous post. This has been quite a treat. At the start of our trip, we expressed worry to our pastor back home that it was very difficult to set up meetings with anyone here and we hoped to one day be able to meet with a Myanmar family inside their home to experience what their life looks like. How things have changed! To use this week as an example: on Sunday we attended a house church and stayed for lunch with the pastor and his family. We then visited a second pastor in his nearby home. Wednesday night, we visited the home of some of our local friends for a short Bible study. Yesterday, we biked to the homes of two different local pastors to visit with them and meet their families. We have gone from despairing of ever experiencing community in the home of a Myanmar family to meeting with four to five each week. It has been quite the journey to get here, and is such a strong reminder for us of how God works to bring His people together when it may seem impossible to us. We just need to trust in His perfect plan and timing.
As we look forward to heading back to NH in just over a month, this reminder of trusting in God is an important one. We have begun job searching and trying to figure out what the future may hold. I recently applied for a couple jobs and am considering a master’s program that would begin in the fall. It is difficult for me to think about the future in the United States while living in Asia, so I need reminders such as this to rest in God’s sovereignty and astounding grace. Summer vacation hasn’t been all church visits and mapping. I was able to attend a three-day conference last week focusing on providing support to victims of trauma or trafficking in Southeast Asia. We have begun a bucket list of places to visit or foods to eat before the end of our time here, so we have been checking off fun activities as well.
I also had three amazing visitors to show around town and catch up with at the start to vacation! My parents and good friend Liz were here for just about a week, which was such a refreshing time for me. It was such a blessing to be able to introduce them to people we are working with and show them the places where I have been living for so long. No email or skype talks can beat face-to-face conversations with people you love! I am looking forward to more of those conversations in the very near future. In the meantime, our focus is on finishing out strong to leave a lasting foundation for future partnership growth. Thank you so much for your continued prayers and support!

Summertime at Last

Happy summer vacation!

To many of you, when you look out your window at the gorgeous piles of glistening snow, it may not appear to be quite time for this greeting. But here in Asia, the temperatures are rising, the days are getting longer, the smog is settling heavier, and we celebrated school graduation on Tuesday!

Despite the knowledge that I will miss my co-workers and students at school,  it does feel nice to no longer have lessons to plan and tests to grade. Instead of spending our downtime with school planning, we have begun to fill it with church planning.

Since our task here is to help determine how our church in NH can more effectively partner with churches here in Asia, we have begun a mapping process. As we meet with more and more pastors, we are pinpointing their physical location on a map and documenting the information we find. We are focusing on the stories of the pastors and their families, along with information about how their church began and what their ministries look like. Our map will include the assets of the different churches as well. We hope that, by the time we leave at the end of April, we will have a pretty sweet visual of the church network here! This will be useful for us to work together in planning and dreaming about what the next steps are for this growing ministry partnership.

There are many exciting ideas on that front: starting a business to help the local churches become self-sustaining, bringing in teachers to help train up network leaders or children in English or other skills, planting an international church to reach out to locals and expats living in the city, or maybe developing a sponsorship program to support ministry leaders until they have built up local income. It is exciting to dream about what the future might look like here!

We recently completed our final “visa run” and received our last 70 day visas upon returning to the country. This time, we were able to visit my friends who live and work in Thailand! (You can read about my previous adventures with them if you check out earlier posts on this blog.) We stayed in Thailand for about five days, living at the Timothy House, a small children's home located about three hours east of Bangkok. This was a wonderful time to reconnect with friends, breathe fresh air, see elephants and monkeys, eat amazing food, relax, and have great discussions with wise and Godly people. It was such a blessing for us to be able to spend this time in Thailand! I was asked to preach in church the Sunday we were there, which was a good push to think through some neat passages about God's love and our response to it. I will refrain from preaching here on the blog, but if any of you are interested in discussing this topic (or another like it) please let me know!

Now that we are back in-country and finished with school, we are celebrating with activities such as eating strawberry cake, watching movies, and gearing up for an ultimate frisbee tournament this weekend! My parents and a friend are coming to visit next week, and life is good!

I will end with the song by Chris Tomlin that I woke up singing:

“How can I keep from singing Your praise

How can I ever say enough how amazing is Your love

How can I keep from shouting Your Name

I know I am loved by the King and it makes my heart want to sing!"

Transitions

“Time is a gift, precious and rare, take it and make of it all you can, use all you can, there's not a moment to spare...”

This is a quote from a fantastic children's movie titled “The Phantom Tollbooth,” and it expresses my feelings about the upcoming few months. We have now been here in Asia for slightly over four months, with just under three to go. Our schoolyear ends in less than a month, and then we will be left with only a short time to meet with as many pastors as possible and prepare for our return to the States. We are now in a time of pretty major transition, which I will explain momentarily. But first, a brief update on my travels!

The adventures began shortly after New Years, when our team joined a staff retreat with the teachers we work with on Monday and Wednesdays. We were able to take the weekend to travel north to a lake and some mountainous towns with lovely views and exciting markets. We enjoyed spending time with our teacher friends and getting to know more about them!

A few days after returning from this short trip, I had three visitors arrive from the United States! It was amazing to be able to travel throughout the country with them, seeing amazing sights, and taking time to simply be a tourist and explore new places. We e-biked to, and ballooned over, some neat old pagodas, went on a three-day trek through lovely forests and farmlands, visited a lake and some caves, and climbed a couple mountains. I appreciated the chance to catch up and spend time with friends I value and have missed since September. Kaytlin and Peter had guests at the same time, so they were also traveling throughout the country and taking a break from teaching.

And now we are transitioning back to our everyday life here in the city. Our visitors have gone, and we have classes to teach and planning to do. We want to finish out our schoolyear strong, while looking ahead to the tasks we wish to complete during summer vacation (March-April). Since we will no longer be teaching at a school two days a week, we will have extra time to focus more on the partnership between our church back home in the USA and the local church network right here. We hope to meet with many more pastors throughout the summer months, learning about them and also helping with their English if necessary. We plan to continue teaching at the orphanage, and exploring what other ways we can serve Roger's network before we leave Asia.

During this time of transition in focus, our team itself has changed. Gwen has moved back to the United States, and is currently updating our church on our experiences and perspectives from the last few months here in Asia. Although we miss her, it is good to know that she is able to share what we are learning with our church community back home.

A Brief Hello

Greetings faithful blog followers! As it has been about a month since my last post, I suppose it is time to wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!
Shortly after Christmas I sat down and wrote out a long post, and then my computer decided to chew it up and spit it back out in some form of incomprehensible gibberish that I have not been able to translate back into English. Shortly after this event, I left on some exciting travels with wonderful friends who came to visit! I have now returned and begun teaching again.
Later this week, I will begin to catch you up on the recent events of our team here in Asia! Stay tuned!