12 days to go

I can't believe that it's been since May 25th since the last time I added something to my blog. 3 weeks. That's crazy. Time goes by so quickly.

So, when I started all of this, I had forty plus days before I was leaving for Thailand and now I'm at the less-than-two-week mark. Again, time goes by ridiculously fast. I am (finally) looking forward to my trip. I'm still apprehensive and definitely feeling inadequate for the job, but I'm finally excited about it. Yay! :-) It's been really great to see how God is pulling this whole trip together. It seems like we've had changes happening left and right, but they've all brought our team to a place where I feel like we can really use our gifts to make a difference.

To kind of give you an idea about what I mean, I'll explain it a little further. One of the Team Leaders, on a previous trip to Thailand, had promised to revisit the southern part of the country to paint a few murals at a church. She feels very convicted that this is what she is supposed to be doing; however, to travel to the southern part of the country would mean that we would have to spend almost two full days traveling by bus... one day to get there and another day to get back. When I had heard about that, I wasn't all that thrilled. I feel very strongly that I want to form relationships with some of the agencies and girls in Thailand and I was really excited about working at the Mercy House and the Tamar Center. I really didn't want to be traveling all over the place- I wanted to have some focus on this trip. And, especially when I found out that the Tamar Center was wanting us to teach the girls skills on baking- I mean, talk about God's timing for this trip! These baking classes are a brand new addition to their curriculum and they 'just happen' to be rolling them out during the two weeks that we will be there. So, to hear that we'd be gone for four days to southern Thailand (on an already short trip to begin with), I was upset and disappointed. But, I prayed about it and just had to trust that God would put me where He wanted me to be.

A couple of weeks ago I was having dinner at Downtown Disney with some old Disney co-workers and a received a call on my cell phone from the Trip Leader and she was sharing with me that she would really prefer not to make the four day trip to southern Thailand and she asked for me to pray that God would create a way for us to stay in the Pattaya area. The only glitch in our plan to do so was that the Team Leader still really felt called to go to the church in Southern Thailand and we didn't want to prevent her from doing that; but, in order for her to do that, there had to be at least one other person for her to go with and, at this point, most of the team would prefer not to make the trip. So, fast forward a week... I get an email from the Team Leader telling me that, last minute, her husband has decided to join our trip. He said that he felt God was calling him to go and that if he wanted to get any sleep anytime soon, he had to agree to go.

Amazing.

Problem solved.

Now Suzanne can go to Southern Thailand with her husband and we can stay in Pattaya. And, now I'm finding out that the baking program they are rolling out is an even bigger deal than we originally thought and I may be spending a good portion of my time working on that project/training. We'll have to wait and see. Only God knows what He has planned for us. I keep talking about Pattaya and Southern Thailand, so here's a map of the country:



Pattaya is pretty much in the center of the map, just south of Bangkok. The southern part of Thailand I was referring to is a town called Nakhon Si Thammarat... find Vietnam on the map and look to the left of it. As you can see, that would have been quite a drive... I'm told 8-10 hours each way.

God's been working on our behalf in a lot of ways these past few weeks. The leaders found out that money we thought we had, we actually didn't and I just found out last weekend that I was still owing more money for the trip when I thought that I had well paid for the entire thing. And, wouldn't you know it... these past couple of days I've had a couple of people come up to me and say, "I'm sorry that this is late- I hope that it's not too late to contribute to your trip" and they've each handed me checks to help support me. I am now at the financial goal I had to reach and my trip is all paid for. I can't help but think to myself that they both thought they were late in getting the money to me, but it was quite the contrary because they money arrived just in time and just at the right time because it was God's timing- He may take longer than we'd like, but He's never one second late.