Recap of my Time in Thailand

From ministry to team dynamics to earthquakes, a lot has happened over my time in Thailand and in closing out my time in Thailand. In this newsletter, I plan to share how things ended with my time in Thailand as I currently am in Malaysia now.

For ministry, my team and I were able to closeout of ministry strong. Throughout the time in Thailand, our main ministry was to teach and prepare further teachings for a business administration course. This was meant to help women at risk of exploitation/ who have currently been through exploitation to have skills for future jobs. For my part of the training, I was able to teach on Organizational Skills, Decision Making, Forgiveness vs Reconciliation, and Google Sheets. It was cool seeing God use all of the random things I was doing throughout my life and in school to be used in mission work. I believe the women I taught learned things and were able to grow from it.

Additionally, the transition home I was apart of helping fix up is now being utilized as a place women can come and heal and recover. I was told that the women were impressed and touched by the work we did. They were even able to do a worship night in the house! The soccer ministry with the kids also ended well with a warm goodbye from the students and teachers.

In addition to closing out of our main ministry stuff, our team got other opportunities such as helping lead a church service with doing 2 songs and the sermon. We also had the opportunity to do additional evangelism to people in the area as well as prayer walks. There were many tourists in the area so often a good conversation starter would be asking where they were from and what they were doing in Thailand. It was a blessing having opportunities to share the gospel with people.

With team dynamics, I am blessed with the team I was given but living in community also brings challenges. Some of these challenges we had to walk through individually while others we walked through together as a group. The church is most effective when each part of the body is functioning in its place and is helping one another where needed.

After we finished ministry in our first country Thailand, we continued walking through things as a team for the last 2 weeks of our time in Thailand where senior leaders of World Race flew into Thailand for support and for teaching. Our squad had one teaching week focused on reaffirming certain teachings and on praying for freedom and healing for each other. This was followed by a week of debriefing. During debrief week, our team went over situations with our leaders and worked through things while getting to know the senior leaders better which was a blessing. At the final day of our debrief, a 7.7 magnitude earthquake occurred in Myanmar with effects felt where I was at in Thailand. Fortunately, my squad and I were safe, but it did affect travel stuff for the next day. After about 55 hours of travel over buses and trains, our squad was able to make it into Malaysia safely.

In summary, my time in Thailand was good with challenges along the way. I’m excited and believe Malaysia will be even better hopefully with me being being stronger for Malaysia. While each country is different, the transition to full time missions has been more challenging than I originally anticipated, but God has always helped me each step of the way and will continue doing so.

Prayers requests I would appreciate you guys praying for would be for team healing, for our ministry time in Malaysia to be fruitful, and for continued daily strength and healing for me as I’m recovering from vertigo and am still struggling with sleeping. Thanks guys.