A genetic need for attention led to young actor Corey Haim's drug addiction and death claimed Dr. Drew Pinsky, an addiction-medicine specialist in a Today show interview. He said Corey used drugs to cope with the decline in attention for him after his early success. This caught my ear because God was working on that attention issue in me.
Last weekend, as I worked on another story for my Thai language class, God began pointing out the daydreams I had that the class would laugh at it or that the teacher would be impressed. I put those thoughts down by thinking the writing was only to try out the Thai phrase structures we’d learned. After all, the saying “raining cats and dogs” had come up in class. It was fun to use a story about them falling through thick grass roofs to explain it.
Also, the attention issue came up in relation to our web site writing. We need to glorify God in our writing (1 Cor. 10:31), but would that be by writing to gain attention to help our cause or to show His working through us? I asked some friends to pray with me on the attention issue. This was His answer.
Monday morning, waiting for a song taew, a lady waiting with us asked us in Thai where we were going. When I didn’t understand right away, she asked in English. That raised the language barrier between us that I was unable to overcome as we sat across from each other for the next 10 minutes. Then, in class, the Thai teacher corrected my story with no reaction. Later, my reading of the story to the class brought only silence and blank looks. No one understood it, except that it rained. That was probably the only thing I pronounced right. In my disappointment God showed me my heart. If I really only wanted to learn about sentence structure, then I would have been happy with the few corrections by the teacher and the class reaction would have been funny. After class, I talked to Him until I accepted His lesson.
Later, before aerobics, I felt the language barrier keeping me from the small conversations going on around me. I spent the walk home in prayer. One of my prayer supporters wrote saying God hears when we pour out our hearts to Him. Someone on Facebook put up Psalm 62:8, “Trust in, lean on, rely on, and have confidence in Him at all times, you people; pour out your hearts before Him. God is a refuge for us (a fortress and a high tower). Selah [pause, and calmly think of that]!” (Amplified Bible)
The next day God gave me the rest of His lesson. That afternoon a lady in my afternoon class asked to read the story. She enjoyed it. "What a graceful blessing," I thought, "He didn't have to do that!"
Later, leaving my house to get dinner, two smiling little boys met me saying, "Farang, farang," as I took the short cut by their house. They raised their arms so I gently grabbed one boy's and shook it saying, "Khone Thai, khone Thai (Thai person)". Then the smaller boy wanted me to do it to him too. Returning with my dinner, I saw them leaving with their father on a motor scooter, and the boys waved good-bye.
The housekeeper for our apartments (who speaks no English) was out chopping the greenery away from the small ditch between the road and the apartment’s boundary wall. I commented,
in Thai, that she was doing hard work. She pointed along the length of the ditch, seeming to show she understood me. Then she pointed at my little bag and I told her it was food for dinner. She laughed. That’s the most she’s understood from me yet.
Thinking through all of this I realized I was struggling through an attention deficit and not bringing that to God. People gave us lots of attention as we departed for our exotic mission. Now I am feeling the separation as contacts with close friends from home dwindle and they are not yet replaced here. Then, also, the language barrier inhibits daily interactions with people around us. He is showing me that if I admit that need to Him, He is able to meet it in much better ways than I can come up with. He showed me the Truth in Psalm 66:12. “You caused men to ride over our heads [when we were prostrate]; we went through fire and through water, but You brought us out into a broad, moist place [to abundance and refreshment and the open air].” (Amplified Bible)
This was the lesson I believed He wanted me to share in this writing, so that was the answer to that question, for now. Little by little He is teaching me how to trust Him more, with more of myself.
:J
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