The Lame Will Walk

And he answered them, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them. (Luke 7:22 ESV)

We first met Wari in November last year. For over a year she had suffered from a condition that left her unable to walk except with a walker, and when she did walk it was with great difficulty and great pain. The doctors said there was nothing they could do for her.

We went to visit Wari at her home. We explained the good news of Jesus to her and she made the decision to follow Him.

Each week we would visit Wari's house to sing songs, study the Bible and pray for her. Slowly her condition improved.

By January, Wari felt strong enough to get baptized. At that point, she was still using a walker and we had to help her into the pool. But God continued to heal her, eventually she no longer needed a walker or cane. By springtime, she was able to ride a bicycle and in June she started riding her motorcycle to worship services. Several weeks ago, our truck got stuck in the mud when we were visiting another church member. She was quickly out the door of the truck to help push.

If you see Wari today, you would not recognize her as the person we first met. Her face is full of joy and she stands tall with confidence in Jesus.

God has given her a great voice which she uses to help lead praises to God during worship services. We praise God for the work he has done in her life. We praise God for the work He has done in her life. She is becoming one of the key leaders in our church. We are grateful to God for the miracles He has done in her life, but the miracles don't end there.

Wari’s father worked in central Thailand, but he developed a health condition that left him unable to work, so he came home. The first week he was back, Somdy, our team leader, went to visit him. At that time he didn’t want to hear the gospel. But the second week when Somdy met him he said, “If God will heal me, I will believe.” So Somdy prayed for him, he was healed and he put his faith in Christ and was baptized. Soon after that he returned to work in Central Thailand because God had healed him well enough to do so.

We thank God for these occasions when His love is poured out in the form of healing from medical conditions.

No less important is the miraculous work God does in our souls.

We lift our praises to the God who loves us inside and out.

In Season

June is the saddest month of the year here in Central Thailand.  That’s because June marks the end of mango season.

I don’t have many favorites in my life.
I have no favorite color
no favorite song
no favorite food
no favorite movie
no favorite sport
etc.

But I DO have a favorite person (my wife)
AND a favorite fruit (mango).  My wife’s favorite fruit is mango as well.

We sometimes joke that we moved to Thailand because of the mangos.




But the good news is that June is the beginning of longan (Dimocarpus longan Lour. ลำไย) season

Longans are usually sold in bunches like this

Insides and seed of longan

What's left after eating

We never had eaten longan before we came to Thailand, but it is probably now the second favorite fruit for both of us.  But soon even it’s season will be over.

In the US we would sometimes be almost unaware of the cyclical nature of fruit harvest because in the grocery store you can get just about anything at any time of year due to the ability to transport fruit over great distances and store the harvested fruit while maintaining a reasonable quality.

But here in Thailand where we tend to buy our fruit in open markets, we tend to be more aware of the seasons of harvest.  And we adapt our fruit eating habits to whatever is in season.  (Though certain fruits are available all year long: banana, pineapple, papaya and watermelon.)

There is a seasonal nature to our work here in Thailand as well-even tough we are not involved in Agricultural production.  Paul alludes to the cyclical nature of our kind of work in 1 Corinthians 3:6 (ESV):

   I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.

We spend a lot of time planting and watering, so to speak, and aren’t always sure what the harvest will look like or if we will even be around for it.  Sometimes we get to harvest what others have planted.

Sometimes we think there is a crop coming along fine but then a storm comes up and beats the crop down.  I think of one person in our community who indicated a desire to follow Christ back in December.  But then some temptations came up and he succumbed to the temptation.  Now he seems too ashamed to be around us any more.

But while it is our responsibility to be faithful laborers. it is God who brings about the growth.  We don’t control that aspect of it.

So on one day my “sowing” might be holding a child whose parents are in prison and is pretty much neglected by his relatives.  It might be years before he can understand more fully the message of God’s love—what it means for God to send His Son and for His Son to take upon himself the sins of the whole world.

On another day I might be watering-teaching a young believer about the Bible and what certain scriptures mean to his life.

On perhaps another day we might enjoy a bit of harvest—praying with someone who is responding to the message of God’s love.

We plant.  We water.  We pray for God to make the crop grow.  And we bring in the harvest.
Like eating the seasonal fruit, we learn to enjoy each “fruit” in its season:

We enjoy planting in planting season
We enjoy watering in watering season
and we enjoy reaping in harvest season
And there’s always room for more laborers in the field.

 Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field." Matthew 9:38 (NIV)

Being Grateful

It’s not a good sign when you have aquatic plants as your front lawn.  But such is the case for many poor people living on this back road in Ang Sila.

The rainy season is supposed to end by Loy Krathong (a festival which fell on November 28 this year), an old fellow told me.  And it couldn’t be soon enough for some of these people.

I took the picture above several days before Loy Krathong.  Several days before some of the heaviest rains we’ve had.

This was the neighborhood where we held VBS a couple of weeks ago.  The VBS program was held at the home pictured below.  The gray-haired lady was our host.  An MB Mission team had helped fix up her flood prone home.  They raised it a little bit and gave it a concrete floor—although I don’t think they raised it enough to be above the current water level.  The woman and several others have since come to Christ, though they don’t get to church much because they have no transportation to get them there.



Ingrid and I had come back to the neighbor hood to inquire about a girl we met during VBS. This girl had a chronic leg infection and Ingrid had treated it some and we wanted to see how it was doing.  We did not know exactly where she lived and so we were traveling with Upa—another woman from the church who lives close by.  But when we came to the flooded area Upa said we shouldn’t go into the neighborhood.  She told us we’ll get a rash on our leg—and she should know—she lives on the back side of the same swamp in a house that is also prone to flooding.



It is hard to know what to do with situations like this.  One wants to help, but how?  This neighborhood is built on a depression—a low spot where all the rainwater collects.  Upa said it would be a least a week until it dried up—and that was before several more days of rain.  The original houses in the area were built on the few high spots in the area.  If it were in America, no one would be allowed to put up a community in a swamp without doing something to get rid of the water (However frail it might be as we learned in the case of New Orleans).  But here in Thailand, the poor have to live somewhere and the options are few.  So they settle where they can, even if it is a swamp.

On the night of Loy Krathong, we watched the fireworks and flying lanterns that mark the holiday from the dry safety of our 6th floor apartment.  (The orange star-like things in the photo are actually balloon-like lanterns the are set afloat in the sky.)  We are grateful for such housing.



But we and the Thai believers from Ang Sila church still think about the plight of those living in the swampland neighborhood.  Not only are they physically poor, they are also spiritually poor as well.  During VBS, many children indicated a desire to follow Jesus.  The Ang Sila church now grapples with how to follow up on this VBS.  How do we bring the gospel of Jesus to this neighborhood?  How do we not just tell them about the love of God but also show them the love of God?

The bigger question is, how do we not grow calloused after seeing this kind of situation again and again throughout Thailand?  It is too easy to just throw our hands in the hair and say, “well, this is too big for me to deal with,” and so do absolutely nothing.  We pray that we might find ways to show our gratefulness to God by doing things that others can be grateful to Him for.

As James writes:
¹⁴ What good is it, dear brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but don’t show it by your actions? Can that kind of faith save anyone?
¹⁵ Suppose you see a brother or sister who has no food or clothing,
¹⁶ and you say, “Good-bye and have a good day; stay warm and eat well”—but then you don’t give that person any food or clothing. What good does that do?
James 2:14-16 (NLT)

Tear Down This Wall

I was reading somewhere that today is the 25th anniversary of Ronald Regan’s famous speech at the Berlin wall where he challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”

President Regan giving his speech at the Berlin Wall 6/12/1987
from the National Archives: http://arcweb.archives.gov (ARC Identifier 198585)

Walls.

People like putting up walls.  There are the walls you can see and the ones you can’t see.

Many walls are physical walls designed to keep our enemies from attacking us.  The thing is that these kind of walls don’t often protect us.  Sure they may prevent enemies from getting in.  But they also keep us from forming relationships that might keep us from having enemies in the first place.

The there are the walls we put up in our lives so that people won’t know what we’re really like because we’re afraid if people knew what we were really like they would not like us.  The problem with these walls is that if people knew what we were really like, they might realize how much we’re alike and they might like us even more.

But worse than the walls to keep people out are the walls that keep people in.  The folks in East Berlin might have said that the walls we’re to keep people out but they were really to keep people in.  The leaders knew that if people could leave easily, many of them would and then there would not be much left to govern.

But the communists aren’t the only ones who do this. The church has often done a very good job of this.  People can get so accustomed to all the programs going on inside the church they forget how to relate to people outside the church.  After a while the people outside the church think of church members as a bit strange, and the church does not do a good job of communicating the good news of Jesus to those who need Him the most.

After the crucifixion of Jesus, the disciples were huddled behind locked doors.  They did not look like likely candidates for communicating the good news about Jesus. Jesus somehow had to go through the walls of that locked room.  He had to get inside to give them a message to go outside

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age. Matthew 28:19-20 (ESV)

The church is not about staying—it is about going.

We in the church need to tear down the walls that keep us in just Gorbachev needed to tear down the walls that kept people in.

A few years ago I wrote a song about this:

Tear Down That Wall
© Edd RussellFresno, California 11/2006

You are a God without borders,
You stepped out from heaven for us,
You reached in the dark, lonely places;
Illuminated us with Your love

You tore down all of the fences
That kept us from coming to You.
You opened the doorway to heaven
When Jesus stepped into our lives.

But we’ve erected some fences
To keep all Your love to ourselves.
We hide Your light under a basket
So everyone stays in the dark.

We want to tear down that wall.
We want to tear down that wall.
We want to tear down that wall.
We want to tear down that wall.
Jesus help us tear down that wall.
Cuz we’ve got to tear down that wall.
Yes, we need to tear down that wall.
We want to tear down that wall.