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!"