April Break trip part 1 - Kong Welai
Dear friends and family,
After a lovely few days at the beach I feel refreshed, at least for the next 24 hours, and am putting finger to key to try to help me recall our last week. As a teacher I am often being asked about this student or that and then, after some serious contemplation, it is pronounced that little Bobby has a specific memory disorder that only allows him to remember three things every hour and so try not to give him more than this. We are then expected to do what I can only call educational alchemy with the aforementioned child without compromising standards in any way. I have done enough of these types of analysis questionnaires to come to the conclusion that I myself have a rather eclectic mix of some of these disorders, particularly in the areas of playing nicely with others and in my short term memory. I cannot remember what day it is, what I did yesterday and how old I am (although the latter is becoming more long-term memory than I would like). That said, I have just looked at some photos we just took and it has triggered some remembrances so here they are.
Having not seen the beach since we were back in Rustington last summer we booked into a cheap resort on the Island of Koh Chang, on the south East bit of Thailand on the way down to Cambodia. It is about 1000km by road so we took the opportunity of stopping for two nights with some WEC friends who live in the back of beyond on a small village called Kong Welai (which means ‘beautiful bend’ as it is in the only interruption on an otherwise very straight road) about half way to Bangkok. I have mentioned them before as Malcolm, the very tall red-headed man and his wife Kerstin and daughter, Amy. They are church planting in the village there and have a small church with a dozen believers of so.
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| From Koh Chang Trip April 2009 |
They want to reach out to the surrounding villages also, and so on the Saturday we went to a village with them in a truck loaded with equipment and asked the ‘Poo Yai’ (which means ‘man big’) if we could show a film there in the village that evening. Getting the required blessing we set up a large screen between two electricity poles and set up the projector and sound equipment.
When darkness fell, folk started sitting in the seats we had laid out. You need to understand that this was a break from the usual routine of watching chickens run around, picking toenails, watching some dreadful TV drama (they are all the same) or retiring to bed early after binging on cheap whisky. I do not know what they expected but they got 4 testimonies from Thais who found that Jesus was the answer to their fears of demons, suicidal depression, alcoholism and devastating paralysis after a car crash. All of these are very real and very common issues in this culture. Malcolm and his small team, including one Thai Christian, were able to chat with folk afterwards and it lays the ground for return door to door visits this coming week. One lady in the village had seen the TV advert for the ‘Power for Living’ book which these testimonies were from, and had phoned for a copy but never received it. She was delighted to find that there was a pile of them on the table. It is truly wonderful that, in a place wher there is no concept of a sovereign God, and no idea who Jesus is, God is working by his Spirit to prepare hearts to receive him. It was inspiring to be a small part of this while we passed through.
Please pray for this small team as they repeat this in other surrounding villages and return to chat with the folk who live there and build not only relationships but also work with God to build his Church.
We left this wonderful family the following morning having deposited supplied of cheese and butter with them, as they are unavailable where they live. These things are valuable currency. I return we were allowed to try some their marmite on our toast which was heavenly as we have run out until someone brings some to us….anybody?