Thailand Missions (2018) "Wat Happened on Friday"
Hey everyone! It’s been four full days since we arrived in Thailand and we are pretty much settled in Chiang Mai. Since we’ve been having full-packed busy schedules for the past few days, most of us have been a little drained but feeling more enthusiastic each day! After breakfast and our daily team devos, Denise took us to the Old City Moat to look around and to check out some of the many Wats (Buddhist temples). For those of you who don’t know, Chiang Mai is actually known as the temple capital of Thailand! We were able to check out Wat Chedi Luang and Wat Phra Singh, which are two really well-known Buddhist temples within the Old City. Just like the temple we visited on the first full day, the Wats were decorated with shining gold and jewels. Seeing this alone, made me think of the large amount of money that was donated by Buddhists to create these buildings and how they have the concept of earning merit. This reminds me of just how thankful I am to God that He didn’t make it difficult for us to be saved, but rather He made it easier for us by sending Jesus down to die for us.
Ephesians 2:8-9 says:
“For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.”
Aside from the temple buildings, there were also many monks walking around. Every Buddhist male becomes a monk sometime in their life. Some become temporary monks and some become monks for life. One of the biggest reasons why they enter monkhood is to make merit for their mother. Some young boys may not even want to become monks but they would have to because it would be seen as a sign of disrespect to their parents if they didn’t. Seeing a few young monks walking around made me wonder just how many of them became monks for their own sake. Two of our team members were able to talk with a monk around our age and was able to find out that he couldn’t wait to quit monkhood next year and get back to living his normal life. 
After we grabbed lunch, we spent the rest of our day at The Centre. Jonny and I were able to attend one of the classes and played a charades game with the students. Afterwards, we were able to convince them to stay at The Centre a bit longer to play even more board games! Although it wasn’t easy to have side-conversations with these students, as the size of the group was kinda big, I was glad that I got to interact and bond with a bunch of people at once. I actually surprised myself when I invited them to go bowling with our team tomorrow. Although it didn’t seem to work out too well (since we couldn’t give them a set time yet), I was still proud of myself for trying.
Later tonight, we held a worship night and ordered pizza and Korean fried chicken for all the students at The Centre. Melody and Jonny did an amazing job leading and teaching everyone our FCBC signature “Jesus is a Friend” hand motions! I felt so moved that we were actually singing praises to God with the students!! It was also very encouraging to see Jonny allow himself to become vulnerable towards the Thai students and describe how faithful God has been in his life by sharing his testimony (below is a little snippet with translation by Eric).
Towards the end of the night, we split into groups of 4-5 to talk about our week and prayer requests. Our team split up and strategically placed ourselves in different groups so that we could help pray for the students who were not too familiar with praying. I wasn’t too sure if the students were going to talk about their current hardships as I’ve heard that many Thai people do not enjoy talking about stressful things. However, two of them revealed their struggles and hoped that the power of prayer would be able to help them go through their trials. As well, one girl named Patty, asked for us to pray for the coach and teen soccer team that has been trapped in a cave for 6 days (The soccer coach is actually associated with SIM so we heard about this incident from them during orientation). She also added that she wasn’t sure if there would be unknown spirits in the cave and said that if our God is more powerful than the spirits, we should pray for them. I was really taken aback by her statement and was touched by her open-mindedness about the power of God. Overall, it was a blessing to be able to pray for the girls in my group.
To be honest, it has actually been quite hard for me to make the first approach to students for the past couple days. I’ve been praying about it lately and God answered my prayers by giving me a slight boost of courage and confidence today. Truly, our God is the almighty God that always listens to our prayers.
Speaking of prayers, we hope that you can still continue supporting us through prayer~.
1. Aside from tomorrow’s bowling event, we are currently starting to plan for the 4th of July celebration event that we will be hosting next week! Please pray for guidance and that we will be able to gather/organize all the supplies and food we need!
2. Pray for the Thai people and that they would be able to be more open-minded, even though it would be difficult as Buddhism is deeply rooted into their culture and identity.
3. Pray for good health and strength for our team. Specifically pray for Alisa and Kevin, as they are both currently not feeling very well. As well, pray for Melody Young’s sore ankles.
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