Perspective

I made my daughter cry on Thanksgiving. The permanence of our planned stay in Thailand became clear to her during our evening phone call. It made me sad to upset Amanda so much.

This was still on my mind Friday after I got the turkey cooking in Jennifer’s oven for our Thanksgiving dinner. It was a beautiful day so my husband suggested I take my run for the day. (Yes, he does make good suggestions sometimes) I decided to take an opposite route from the way I usually go from Jennifer’s and headed up to the left in conversation with God. Running along one straight, flat street I was praying about Amanda’s tears at our leaving and asking if we are really doing what He wants. Then I turned a corner to see the blue expanse of the sound under a blue sky with puffy clouds.
(Notice how the road disappears right after the white van)

I had never seen this view before, though I have run on that road several times. The view is at the top of a kind of hill I, as a runner, haven't learned to be thankful for yet. I still think of it as

tough to get through, or over. I rarely look back when I run, so I would always have remembered the hardness of that road rather than the beautiful view if I hadn’t gone that other way.

God used this to speak to my heart about His perspective on this coming sadness. Yes, this Leaving Time is hard, but He can see beauty in it from His viewpoint. Zech’s comment about “God is good” in their blog came back to me (reallifeontheedge.blogspot.com). He reminded me that God is good, all the time and everything He does is good, whether it seems that way to us or not. There is still the question of whether we are doing what God wants, but I see God leading us to Thailand as much as I have understood His leading at any other time in my life. That beautiful view at the right moment gave me reassurance and hope that His Good will come through this time of tears.

Two Presentations

We did two presentations this week! One was at Three Rivers Christian school and the other at East Kelso Baptist Church. It meant most of time I was home this week I was working on Power Point or our script. We are thankful that they both were well received.

Thursday afternoon, the children at Three Rivers listened and watched well.

They gave a big “Awww” at the picture of the baby panda in the Chiangmai zoo. They counted well with me in Thai, and, when we asked for questions near the end, most of their hands went up. They asked good questions too. We told them they could help in our sowing the work efforts by communicating and sharing events between their school and the schools in Chiangmai. The students and teachers showed some enthusiasm for doing this. I hope we can keep some interest up for that during our four months of language training.

Sunday morning we visited the church our daughter, Amanda, has had so much involvement with, East Kelso Baptist Church. Ken and Karen and their family go there also. We really appreciate their focus on prayer. After our presentation, their prayer coordinator came to me to finish writing down all the prayer requests we gave in our talk. She also wanted to make sure we had her email address so we can send our prayer letters to her for resending to the congregation. We thank God for putting this connection together for us so we might have this prayer support behind us.

Building update

Another potential tenant contacted us about our empty space after the sprinkler decision came down. A small, new, local winery was interested in putting in a wine tasting room to sell their wine and related paraphernalia. The restaurant owner then planned on selling her current bar set up to them. She would sell drinks still, but serve them out of the kitchen.

They also worked out a sharing of the utility costs since the restaurant owner has now taken over paying those. Then Gary checked with the City. They required us to pay an architect $300 and then determined that we must build a firewall completely around the space before they will give us permission to rent it to the winery. Gary estimates the cost for this would be thousands of dollars, well above the return we could get from the rental of the space. So, it appears the area must remain office space. God has a different plan.

Our web site

Most of you know we now have a web site! It is 2sowers.com. Gary is very thankful that Ken, one of our house sitters, has set it up for us. Gary did not want to try to keep up a web site. It is still in the beginning stages, though. We are finding out it involves our time just to get things to Ken to put on it. There are several sections we are slowly getting filled in.

This blog will be on the web site too. Ken said we can use the topic section to put in our prayer requests. That way people looking for our prayer requests will be able to click on that section and see all the prayer requests that we have made over a period of time. We will also be able to put answers in under an answered prayer section. I will be trying to get our prayer requests, and answers, in there soon.

:J

Answer? to prayer

I sent this email to some of our prayer supporters Tuesday morning, 

“A city official has written a report requiring us to put sprinklers in our building before we can

open the wall and let the restaurant use our former office space.  Gary says that would cost about $10 thousand and take quite awhile to get done.  That would be a prohibitive expense and time frame.  The city official is going to meet with Gary tomorrow at 11 am to discuss this.  Gary asked for prayer about this meeting.”

(Gary reminded me later that he said “$100 thousand”.  That’s my lack of number retention for you!)

Gary met with the official, and he did not change his mind.  God answered our prayer with, “No.”  At our church’s day of prayer and fasting last week, Dave Ness said to pray specifically in order to energize your prayer life and see God working.  Another side to specific prayer is that you get clear “no”s sometimes.  I have had several of those lately.

That afternoon, after I laid out the “Sacrifice of Praise” chorus for the worship team folders, it began repeating in my head.  I decided God was telling me to praise Him for these “no” answers as much as the “yes” answers, so I began to do that.

Another speaker I heard recently said we pray not to change God’s mind, but to change ours. When we see clear responses to our prayers, we gain a deeper understanding of who He is. If He gave us all we ask for, we would never be better.  We would make our faulty plans with our puny brains, without His help, and then keep asking Him to fix things when the plans fall apart.  We need His “no”s to begin searching out what He wants of us and to rely on Him as we try to obey the direction we understand from Him.  Also, as one of our prayer supporters reminded me, there may be a bigger issue God is working on and a “yes” answer might not fit in with that plan.

Certainly a “no” answer should drive us to more prayer rather than to less.  God commanded many times in His Word for us to pray and, as said by John Piper this week,  “If prayer did not work such wonders in heaven, ‘Satan would never have such an aching tooth against it as he has.’ Th. Brooks.”  That opposition by Satan is a good indicator that God’s will is accomplished when we pray.  

As to the building situation, if we don’t rent to the restaurant then we will need to rent it to someone else or leave it empty.  Without a renter for that space we won’t recoup the expenses we put out to fix it up.  Gary hasn’t told the restaurant owner yet.  He also plans to get some bids on sprinkler installations next week.  Keep praying with us for God to show His glory in what happens in this situation.

:J

Gary started his investigations into Thai language schools after we returned from Chaingmai, Thailand last June. The OMF missionaries there told him about their language training facility in Lopburi. He applied there, but we ended up second on a waiting list. There is still the possibility that some of those who have signed up for the school won't be able to raise their support in time, so they won't go then. The school starts in early December, so we should know if it is actually full by the time we leave. We won't give up going there until we are in the airport in Bangkok on December 30th. Gary plans on calling them from the airport and if they don't have a space then we would catch a flight up to Chaingmai and start looking for a place to live. (This picture is from www.backpackers-around.com/foto-thailandia-lopburi.php)

The Lopburi school sounds good to us because it is in a small town where little English is around. This is a picture of one of their back streets in a "middle class" neighborhood. This is from a web site called unglamorouslove.com written by someone who is learning Thai there as a part of their preparation for mission work there.

Also, the room and board are part of the price, so we wouldn't have to find our own. We could concentrate on learning Thai with few distractions, except maybe monkeys.

Gary looked at many schools in Bangkok which teach with many different methods, but they are all more costly and living in Bangkok is expensive (and polluted). A couple of schools are also available in Chiangmai and the living expenses are less there than in Bangkok. Gary is concerned we might be too distracted to study well if we were in Chiangmai, though.

These different schools each say they approach the learning of Thai by focusing on a different learning style. Gary hoped he might figure out which school would be best for him if he figured out his learning style. I found a test to determine learning styles in my papers, so Gary took it. He found out all the styles are nearly the same for him, so the approach of whatever school we go to wouldn't matter too much.

House sitters

A family we know well has told us that they have decided to be our house sitters. We met Ken when he moved into the house across the street with some other guys. Then, later, he introduced us to Karen and we went to their wedding. The other guys moved out and Karen moved in. As a young couple, they helped me out by teaching some Sunday school sessions to the youth at our

church on good male – female relationships, even though they were members of a different church.

Our friendship continued as they had their three children. Their two older children sent some presents with us to share with children on our mission trip to Chile. Now, Ken has said he would like to help us set up a website. Overall we have been impressed with their faith and determination to follow God in their lives. We are glad to help support their decision for Karen to remain a stay at home mom and to continue home schooling their children. Living in our house would likely ease their cost of housing.

Also, Ken has worked on fixing up two houses, so he has some expertise in maintenance. They have all had experience raking leaves, although not in a yard quite as big as ours.

When they read our email newsletter about our need for a house sitter, they independently thought of the possibility of their doing it. They were a little surprised when they mentioned it to each other.

Ken then came to speak to Gary and the first of our three dinners together came soon after. We have all been praying about it. Last Friday they brought dinner to our house to tell us they had decided to go ahead with this.

Now I need to write up something for us to work through so we will be clear about what we all have agreed to.

Thank you for your prayers about this already. Please pray now for wisdom for us as we go through this process. Please pray that we would know what we need to write down and that He would protect and increase our friendship as we enter this relationship concerning the house.