It’s been another action packed week. God keeps taking care of our needs right in the nick of time. I’m just going to get into it.
Thank you!
If you’ve been following along, you know that the last couple weeks I’ve been asking for financial support for a Christmas show in a village. Thank you to all of you who helped with that process either by prayer or through giving. We got to the night before we were going to leave for the village, and I had converted the last of the funds from you all to cash earlier that day. I handed her the stack of cash, and it came out to only a couple USD worth more than she needed for the ministry that weekend! God used you to provide for this need on the day we needed it. How cool is that?!?
Christmas carols!
The majority of our ministry consisted of singing Christmas carols at the Christmas show on Saturday night and at the sort of church service they did on Sunday morning. We found background tracks on Spotify the night before and practiced together to figure out the timing. Little did we know that all of that preparation (not that it was a lot) would prove irrelevant. Once it was our turn, they informed us that Spotify tracks wouldn’t work. It had to be a YouTube video.
We hastily chose an instrumental version of Away in a Manger with no idea what it would sound like. Then we pulled it up on one of our phones to see if there would be an intro and how many verses there were. Well… it was the wrong version of Away in a Manger. There’s another version with a totally different melody that we didn’t know. Fortunately, we were able to correct it in time that we did not go up there and sing the wrong song. It ended up going okay, but that was only the first song.
By “Silent Night” we knew to check that we chose a good track, so we found a good one and showed them which one to pick. Something got lost in translation because we got back up on that stage and they started playing a different track altogether. It wasn’t exactly instrumental, so we had all these vocals going on in the background that were probably louder than we were, but we got through it. I guarantee we did not look confident, but we kept singing…mostly.
Our last song was on Sunday morning. We did much better with Joy to the World. No
STOP THAT BUS
For our final adventure day in Chiang Dao, we took a day trip to Chiang Mai, which is where debrief will be next week. We were initially going to go see the new Wicked movie, but the timing didn’t work out, so we just went to some cafes and shops. We have two gift exchanges to prep for: a secret Santa for our team and a white elephant with the whole squad. I got a couple of things for those, but the highlight of the day was definitely getting to meet up with people from both team Summit and the MOG’s. We weren’t really expecting to see either, so it was an awesome surprise! It was a sweet little reunion, and I can’t wait to spend Christmas together before we go out separate ways for Albania.
After we said goodbye to the MOG’s we went to quite a few shops. We wrapped up and ordered two grabs (their version of Uber) to get back to the bus station to get back to Chiang Dao. The first one came and picked up half of us. The second one canceled, so three of us were stranded waiting for another Grab to show up. Once we got picked up, we were praying the whole way back that we would make it to the bus on time. Traffic wasn’t great, so that didn’t help either. And to make matters worse, we had planned to catch the last bus of the day. There would be no “next bus” until tomorrow morning.
I kid you not, we pulled up to the bus station after the bus had started moving. We saw our friends waving goodbye out of the windows. Fortunately, the bus does a little loop in the station, so we jumped out of the Grab car (I almost forgot my Nalgene) and ran to where the bus was looping around and held our arms out for the bus to stop… AND IT DID!!! Thank you, Jesus. Actually, that was so close and it did not have to happen that way. There are so many “what if’s”, but the Lord provided.
Prayer requests
- Pray for effective ministry and for us to continue to press in for our final week in Chiang Dao.
- Pray for our hearts to be prepared to love the whole squad well over Christmas and debrief week.
- Start praying for our ministries in Albania and for the people we will be ministering to.
- Pray for me to be less burnt out and to find strength in God. I’m so tired and I feel like I never have a free moment between ministry and stuff with the team.
