Just Rambles and Prayer Requests

As I sit here in the office I hear the sounds of workers around me. One is speaking in Thai on the telephone transacting some business or other. To my left, one of our Thai co-workers, Bunga, is pasting text into one of the languages of the “Good and Evil” book. To my right is the Project Head of “Good and Evil,” Pookie. She is the one talking on the phone. To her right is one of the American ladies who has worked with us for almost 11 years, who is now in charge of the home office in Texas. Her name is Myra. To her right is another American lady from Tennessee who has been with us for about 7 months and who plans to stay indefinitely. Her name is Carolyn. To her left is Anne, from Pennsylvania who has been here for 7 months and who will stay as long as she possibly can. Her visa expires in 5 months, but she is hoping to extend. She is here with very little financial support, so she will stay until her money runs out basically. Behind me, the man translating the Bible College curriculum into Thai is called Burm. To his right is Noah, the man from Burma who is working on the Judson Bible.

Only 2 of these folks are members of the same church. Berm and Pookie belong to the same local church here in Bangkok. So that means that there are 8 churches represented here. Each morning at prayer time before our work day begins we go before the Lord and commit our day and our work to Him. It is a blessing to pray for the various things that take place from day to day here, but also for things that each one of us receive each day via e-mail and phone calls from other places around the world.

Tom and I leave for Lithuania on April 7th. We will be gone from the office for a month. Myra leaves to go back to America in 5 days. She is the closest thing we have to a computer geek at present, so we pray that all the computers stay up and running and virus free since there will be no one here to do any maintenance on any of them while Tom is gone.

We look forward to seeing our daughter and son-in-law and our grandchildren. We haven’t seen any of them for over a year, and we haven’t seen our oldest grandson in almost 4 years. He did not come over to Thailand last year with his mother, brother and sister, because he was in school. That is the hardest part of being on the mission field, not seeing your family for long stretches at a time. However, we do get to see them from time to time unlike the early missionaries who left for the field knowing they would probably never see their families again. Travel, technology and the advent of things like telephones and e-mail have made life so much easier for most missionaries today. I can call my grandchildren and see them and they can see us with the help of a tiny camera mounted on the computer. We have no real concept of what the early missionaries sacrificed to serve the Lord in foreign and many times, hostile lands.

Almost immediately upon returning from Lithuania, there will be people coming for various periods of time to work with us. A man from our church who has been coming over for the last 3 years during his vacation time from work. He has been a great help and blessing. There are several folks from a Bible college who want to intern for a specified period of time and then there are the unexpected folks who stop by and lend a hand for a few days at a time. Right now, we need to rent some additional facilities to house these folks. We have need for guest quarters because what we have now are full. Three ladies are sharing the second side of our small duplex townhouses, the men’s townhouse has 1 permanent resident and maybe another soon. We have some tragic facilities in our resource center, that can only be used for men. No sane woman would dare stay there. What we need is some type of facility that can be used for both men and women and possibly couples. Where the trouble comes in is that sometimes we have single men and women and they can’t share the same house. Please pray with us that something can be rented that will meet all the housing needs.