“Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches.  Who is weak, and I do not feel weak?  Who is led into sin, and I do not inwardly burn?” (2 Cor 11:28-29)

People sometimes ask me what I feel is the hardest part of my life here.  I think they usually expect to hear something about mosquitos or the heat or slum dogs.  But most of the time it doesn’t have to do with physical circumstances at all.  It’s seeing people I love and whom God loves turn away from him and toward lesser gods.

It’s watching a young believer allowing money to be her master, gambling all day instead of taking care of her sick two-year-old.

It’s witnessing a leader deceive many by her charism, a smile and eloquent words erasing the memory of wrongs not yet made right.

Felt the heaviest these days, it’s seeing church leaders lie to themselves, their church members and the Lord about where the offering money is going.  It’s discovering money given to God by slum dwellers has ending up in the pockets of a volunteer church leader.

It’s realizing how many of us (myself included) have in small and large ways enabled and even invited this kind of sin.

This has been a season of both celebrating the new life God is bringing in our midst and mourning over the brokenness that has been revealed.  But I take hope that all of it is the Lord’s work.  I would rather the mourning and repentance over sin brought into the light, than a half-hearted smile to cover up a lie.  It is the Lord’s kindness that leads us to repentance, it is his mercy that refuses to allow us to deceive ourselves.  While it can feel like we are falling apart, really this is just the first step of letting God heal us.  None of this sin is new; this has been going on for years and God has known about every day of it.  But now in his timing he is doing the work of a good physician.  Unapologetic for the pain, he is removing our feeble attempts at a bandage and is applying his truly healing balm.

Pray that each of us, our leaders and church members would yield to his firm but loving touch.

But up until a few days ago, I hadn’t heard any stories from people I knew about run-ins with the police.

Pai, the woman who was like a mother-figure for me when I lived in Permsup, told me her story on Friday evening.  The day before, like every other day, a group of about 10 or so were hanging out on the plywood platform they’d constructed below a prominant, shady tree in front of the slum.  Some of the kids had been playing Bingo, for a little bit of money– the quivalent of about a quarter each.

Pai had gone into the community briefly and as she came back out a black police truck was speeding up to their tree.  It screeched to a halt, and police came out, yelling for everyone to get into the back of the truck.  They even threatened a couple of kids, one of the little girls shaking from fright.  They had spotted the money the kids had left out from playing Bingo, and concluded the group had been gambling, which is illegal in Thailand.

Despite protests, eight adults and teenagers were herded into the truck, usually used for dangerous criminals.  Those arrested included Yay Kaew, an elderly member of the house church there with health problems, Pai and her daughter Pat.  Pai told me she kept asking the police “why do you let the drug dealers in this community go free, and arrest us for Bingo?  It’s just Bingo!”  She also scolded them for scaring the children.

They were taken to the local jail.  Pat said the ride was so frightening that the police at the jail asked if she was sick, her face was so ashen.

They were each forced to pay a 5,000 baht bail, plus 1,000 as a booking fee.  None of them had that kind of cash on hand.  Finally they were able to contact two women in the community who run a store and food stall, and had a bit more money available.  Pai had some sort of insurance that could reimburse her for the 5,000, but the 1,000 baht was gone for good.  To put that in perspective, Pai works 3/4 time cleaning our office, for 3,400 baht per month.  After paying the exploitative electricity bill that same day (slum dwellers often pay more than those in formal housing), and then the 2,000 baht fee for herself and her daughter, she now has no money for the rest of the month.  Her husband is working upcountry and it will be awhile before they see any of his earnings.

They didn’t get to go home until 10 p.m.

Hearing this story just made my blood boil.  Having committed no crime, my friends just lost a huge portion of their hard-earned income.  They have no recourse for this kind of injustice.  And the police have all kinds of incentive to repeat this kind of thing all over the city– no doubt a big chunk of that 1,000 baht fee goes straight into their pockets.  At the same time, the real criminals who are selling drugs to the youth and shedding blood, are protected with a bribe.

That evening, Pai and I rode with others in the back of one of my neighbor’s pick up trucks, returning to our communities from a special combined worship service.  I told her that our church has a mercy fund created by a portion of the offerings, and that the leaders would certainly consider helping her with her expenses this  month.  I was humbled as she said,  “I just praise God because he is always providing for me”, describing how she felt so fortunate that she still had just over 2,000 baht left of her salary at the time of the arrest.  But as she again recounted the details of the story, she was visibly pained at the helplessness she’d felt, at the injustice.

I told her that Jesus says those who are least in this world will be greatest in the kingdom of heaven, and that those who are great in this world will be the least.  I have frequently felt these words echo in my heart as I see the faith of my neighbors and friends here.  I told her that God, too, is angry when these things happen, and that he is especially close to people who suffer injustice.  She wept, and seemed to take some comfort in these words.

I pray she’d come to know the Lord more and more as a “refuge for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble”, one who “does not ignore the cry of the afflicted” (Psalm 9).  Praise God that one day he will set right everything that has gone wrong in his creation.

It’s so hot that the slum dogs are too tired to get up to scratch their mange.

It’s so hot that I routinely have sweat running down my legs and pooling at my ankles.

It’s so hot that I actually appreciated the cowboy hat my music teacher made me wear home.

It’s so hot that people in my slum are eating ice cream at 10 a.m.

It’s so hot that my refrigerator is hot to the touch from the strain of keeping the inside cool.

It’s so hot that two showers a day is a minimum.

It’s so hot that a cold drink can soak your clothes with its condensation.

It’s so hot that the pages of all my books at home are curling.

It’s so hot that when I’m in the sun I expect to hear my skin sizzling.

It’s on the bad days that I most need hope in God’s ability to do the impossible.

Lately I’ve had some bad days. From a human point of view, the situation in my slum, as far as our ministry is concerned, could seem hopeless. Our Thai partnership has weakened considerably, to the point where I wonder if I even have any. The group of kids coming on Sundays has grown to the point of chaos, and it seems like they are not getting anything from our program and we are lucky if we just keep them from beating each other up by the end of the evening. My efforts at spending time with the women in the community is often hindered due to the gambling addiction that keeps them bent over their dice games for hours on end. One woman who I had a great relationship with recently had a fight with her husband and left.

Into this environment we have been hoping to welcome two new teammates. I have not stopped wondering how in the world this was going to work, or even whether it was worth it to try. The other community with openings is a far better set-up in terms of Thai partnership, size (it is much larger), hospitality (more Isan culture rather than central Thai), and living environment (it is better-off financially, so housing is of higher quality). If I were a new teammate, that’s where I’d want to be.

Then throw into the mix the practical: everyone I asked in my slum recently said there was no housing available.

Tuesday night I was feeling particularly frustrated. Everything in me wanted to recommend this other slum, Samaki, to our new teammates. But that would leave me alone in my slum, something I think I can live with for only so much longer.

So I prayed what felt like a weak and maybe foolish prayer. I asked God to give me some kind of sign. This is maybe only a month after a prayer time where I had clearly heard that it was good and right for me to continue being in Phothong for now. But here I was, completely doubting everything, using my human reason to decide that the situation looked hopeless. So, okay, God– if you want this to work, you need to convince me. And the sign I’d really like is for housing to open up.

The first thing that happened is I went home Tuesday, walked by the house of the woman who had left her husband, and she had moved back in. This is someone who has been particularly welcoming of potential teammates when they have come to visit, so this meant a lot to me that she is part of the community again.

Then on Wednesday I hung out with a family I spend a lot of time with. As I was sitting there a woman came up to me. “Are you still looking for a house for your friends?” And she led me to a completely open house, being rented by its owner, plenty big enough for two new teammates, and close to friendly neighbors who I’m sure would give them a warm welcome.

We don’t know if it will be available in a month, when they come. I haven’t seen the inside yet to see what condition it’s in. But it served its purpose. Thank you, God, for this truly undeserved grace. And for teaching me to expect the unexpected. The foolishness of God truly is wiser than man’s wisdom. Who knows what God will do in this most unlikely of places? He is certainly capable of more than I can imagine.

When I stop to think about it (and when I’m not in the throes of one), migraines are pretty fascinating. If I didn’t have a label for what was happening to me and hadn’t learned anything about it, I’d think I was dying or going crazy.

It starts for me with what’s called a “prodrome”. This is like warning signs that let migraneurs know that an attack is coming. It seems to be different for everyone, but for me I will often get hot flashes, either depression or super high energy for about a day, sometimes sudden extreme fatigue. I usually just feel “off” and can’t explain why until I wonder “maybe I’m going to get a migraine…”

Then comes the aura phase. I’ve only had a handful of migraines preceded by visual aura, but they were quite disturbing each time. I will generally get a flashing line over one side of my line of sight, as if I had looked into a bright light and then looked away. Except it hangs on for about 15 minutes, growing, until eventually my vision goes completely dark on that one side. By this time I have probably swallowed a bunch of drugs because I know that some serious head pain is on its way.

Other times I will have a sense of mild vertigo, either hunger or nausea before the headache hits.

Then comes the pounding pain on one side (the ones on the right tend to be more painful, whereas the ones on the left make me feel more sick to my stomach). This often spreads to the whole head. If I’ve taken meds during the aura stage it usually is not too horrible or last terribly long (a few hours rather than a day or two). If I wake up with pain, though, I know I’m in for a rough day.

My absolute worst migraine of all time had me shivering, shaking, one hand gone weak and tingly, and in horrible pain. I really thought I was having a stroke. But I was able to form coherent sentences, so I figured I was okay. My blood pressure was so low when standing that I had to keep prostrate for most of the day. It was no fun.

After the headache is over (from a couple hours to 2-3 days later), then I go into “postdrome”, the recovery or “hangover” phase. This week that meant two days of fatigue, needing 10 hours of sleep each night, lack of energy or motivation to do anything. Again asking myself “what’s wrong with me?”, confused, until realizing “maybe I’m just recovering from the trauma my body just went through.”

The good news for me is that these attacks happen only about once a month rather than once a week, which was my experience at my worst, during my first term on the field. And I’ve gotten better at identifying the warning signs, the triggers (though some of these I can’t control, like weather changes), and how to best treat them. Unfortunately, I still get them far more often and more severe here in Bangkok than in the States. But I’ve done all I know to do to try to help myself and I think this is just something I have to deal with as part of my life here. It has definitely served to keep me humble, as Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” did, depending on God’s strength in the midst of my weakness.

For example. I love the kids in my slum, they have each found a special place in my heart, but when over a dozen of them make the main room in my house the public playroom, make as much noise as possible, and see anything in the refrigerator as obviously put there for their consumption… I start to go a little crazy.

So a major accomplishment I made before going on furlough was learning how to set boundaries with the kids. When the door is open, they can come in. When it’s closed, that means I want to be alone. If I’m disciplined to not give into their puppy-dog pouts when I really need my space, this system works well.

But children are only one imposition on my personal space. Three mornings in a row I awoke to discover rats had come into my bedroom and made off with random objects, of seemingly no use to a rodent. Mosquito coils, for instance. They swiped my stash right out of its box. Or a plastic bag from a grocery store. A visitor’s toothbrush. Come on! Sometimes I think they’re purely out to torment me.

In the States, it is a valid assumption that the things in your bedroom will be there in the morning. Not so here. You also don’t need to protect yourself from insects, or at least convince yourself that they won’t find their way into your bed tonight.

I sleep underneath a mosquito net, tucked tightly around my floor mat to keep out not just mosquitoes but bigger things too, like roaches or spiders or even rats. Well, that illusion of security was taken away as well, when I woke up the other day with a cockroach running across my hand. I proceeded to have to fight it out from under my net with a broom, and then convince my nerves to calm back down enough to go back to sleep.

I hear the details of my neighbors’ personal lives because our plywood walls do nothing to block out sound. A couple nights last week one of my neighbors was drunk and throwing up out his window into the swamp that separates his house from mine. My first week back one of the slum dogs had 7 puppies which yipped all night long, keeping me awake.

I often end up sharing more with my slum than I would like to.

In the midst of this, it struck me how truly amazing it is that Phothong has welcomed me in the way it has. Moving into a slum is more like joining a large family, moving into someone else’s living room, sharing in the joys and difficulties that family faces. I came not only as a stranger, but a complete foreigner, barely able to communicate, different not only in appearance but in mannerisms, values, lifestyle… I’ve tried to adapt as much of the culture and lifestyle as I can (and still honor God), but I will always be a foreigner.

I see and experience up close both the beauty and the shame in the slum, and yet my neighbors have welcomed me, a stranger, into that. As one of my Thai friends there said recently, I’m “part of the family now”. That is very humbling to me.

So I’m praying that I would continue to reflect Jesus in the midst of the stress this lifestyle places on me. In the ways Jesus was able to remain patient and loving while crowds pressed in on him, and at other times retreat to be alone with his Father, I long to also have that balance. Pray that I would be so tapped into God’s love and peace that the things most likely to bring out my worst would instead cause grace and compassion to flow.

I have gone to four different hospitals and seen about five different doctors. I’ve been on anti-biotics and anti-fungals. I’ve had a corneal “scrape” culture done and, most recently, a corneal biopsy. A more serious post about this whole experience will come soon; for now here are some observations about the Thai medical system.

First of all, there are few free-standing medical clinics here; rather, doctors have their clinics inside hospitals. In the private hospitals I went to there was a good amount of English on the signs, paperwork, etc. and not too difficult to navigate. But lately I have been going to a government, university hospital which is absolute chaos. You have to make a hospital card, find your clinic on one of 12 floors, sit in the waiting area until you are called to sit (or stand) in the next waiting area. You may have an appointment card, but really that doesn’t mean anything– it is first-come, first-served. I’ve heard that people line up at the doors at 5 a.m. On my worst day there so far I had to wait 4 hours for a 15 minute appointment.

On the times I was prescribed medicine I had to take the initial prescription slip outside to a well-hidden pharmacy. Here I was given a receipt (but not yet the medicine) to take back to the cashier at another building. After paying I had to return to the pharmacy with yet another paper, wait and then receive my meds. Wouldn’t it be much simpler if the pharmacist could just take my money as well?

My biopsy was done in the operating room for the opthalmology department, in a separate building that I was able find using a map drawn by my doctor. This procedure is over a half-hour long. My eyelids were taped open and a bright light was shown into my (already light-sensitive) eye. Anesthetic eye drops kept my eye numb, but I was still forced to watch the blade come into my eye to take out a chunk of my cornea. Luckily, the light was so bright it was practically blinding me, so I could only make out blurred images. After the procedure they typically have the patient take the sample themselves to the laboratory (??!!) and pay for the visit. Fortunately, they took pity on me as a foreigner and had someone take it for me, though I did have to wait at the cashier counter with a huge patch over my eye and the anesthetics quickly wearing off.

One up-side to Thai healthcare is how cheap it is. The biopsy and subsequent labwork was under $100. The most expensive doctor’s fee I’ve paid was about $25. Just a few days ago I purchased antibiotic eyedrops and oral medicine for less than $2.

As for my eye, it has healed from the biopsy and the ulcer is not improving or getting worse at this point. Initial results from the biopsy showed no organism (which can’t be possible); on Monday I will find out the culture results. Until then I am on anti-biotics to prevent a new infection, but the doctors are still in the dark as to what I have or how to treat it. Pray that Monday’s findings would be conclusive and lead to my healing. I do trust the doctors I am seeing, as this hospital, for all its craziness, is seen as the best in the country. Because it is a university hospital they are up on the research and have access to the best equipment. God knows every detail of what is happening in my eye– pray that he would reveal that knowledge to the doctors.

Unfortunately for me, I have one of the hottest houses in the community. This is mainly due to the corrugated metal roof and no drop ceiling or second floor to catch the heat. And because my house is surrounded on all sides by other houses, virtually no breeze reaches me at all. Even with a fan pointed at me and the door and windows open I constantly drip sweat from about 9 a.m. until after 5 p.m.

The upside to this is that it gives me added incentive to hang out in front of the community and chat with people there. There is quite a bit of shade and a nice breeze, plus an ice cream truck or fruit seller comes by every 20 minutes or so. There’s never a shortage of people to talk with, and to commiserate about the heat together (even the Thais are suffering. At first that was comforting to know that I’m not totally a wimp, but it’s also somewhat disappointing that I’ll never fully get used to this– the human body can only adjust so much).

I am frequently sweating through my clothes on the short walk from my house to the bus stop. There have been times on the canal taxi (more aptly described as a sewer boat) where I have felt sweat running down my legs and pooling at my ankles. I’ve had to guzzle water to not feel dizzy and headachy by the end of the day. I’ve started following the Thais’ example and taking multiple showers a day, and putting on large amounts of a wonderful menthol body powder that’s popular here.

Tomorrow (a delay of one day, for those I mentioned this to) I will be heading to Kalasin, an area up-country in the Issan province where a large number of Permsup residents are from. During the 3-day Songkran holiday in April Thais in Bangkok return in droves to their home provinces to be with their families. I will be joining some of my neighbors for a week in their village. I am really excited to be able to bond with Bang and her family and to learn more about Thai and Issan culture. But pray for endurance in the heat as I will not be able to escape into air-conditioning as I am able to do here at times. Luckily, the holiday has digressed from a time of Buddhist blessing through water-pouring into a national water fight. I hear that farangs are particularly targeted and that people frequently ice their water before dousing people. So that should help some with the heat.

God has been using this time to remind me that this is a part of what it means to lay down my life here; he is teaching me how to be content no matter the circumstance; to identify with the people he has sent me to in this aspect of their life. And this season will end soon– the rainy season begins in May. So, praise God, I have found myself able to push through and endure more than I would have expected. Thank you to those whose prayers have also given me strength.