One Awesome Week Down

An amazing week down and so many fun adventures to come. Today is our Sabbath day here at the Payap Christian Zone so I decided to catch you up on what we’ve been doing this last week. I’m going to give you a schedule of a “normal” week here at the Zone. Sundays begin with church at 9:00. Church lasts until about 10:30 and then class until 11:45. So it’s like the Minter schedule of Sunday worship. After church we go around to a local restaurant and then the afternoon is on our own. Then we have been going to Walking Street at night on Sundays. It’s a night market only open on Sundays. It’s crazy to see all the people and the street vendors.
Mondays are our rest days that we can do whatever we want.
Tuesdays through Fridays are pretty much the same during the day. We have equipping time at 8:45 where we have a time of personal spiritual equipping. We are going through the book of John and Richard Foster’s spiritual discipline book. At about 11:30 we walk over to the Payap campus to eat lunch with people. After that we walk around campus inviting students to our free English classes at the Zone. Around 2:00 we head back to the Zone to have a time of rest until 3:00 when are supposed to be downstairs to be friendly and greet people when they come for English class. The evenings are filled with amazing food and then hanging out at P’Little’s milk shop. She is a lady from the church who lives just two doors down and she has her milk shop out in front of her house.
On Wednesday nights we have prayer and singing at 20:00 and Thursday nights we have cell group with dinner at 18:00 and devo at 19:00. That’s our “normal” week.
I say “normal” because after this last week those were the only things that seem like we will do them every week. We also did about a thousand other things. Here are a few highlights. Last Monday Marissa, Kyle, Jason and I climbed up one side of the mountain here in Chiang Mai. Jason had found this trail and wanted to take us up it to see if it led to this old temple, and it did. It had some awesome views and I took several pictures. On Tuesday was our first day on campus. We handed out a lot of flyers for English class. When we got back to the zone there were four freshman guys hanging out and wanting to sign up for English class. Yes! God is amazing and brought four new people to the zone. After Tuesday the guys have been coming back often to just hang out. Also one of the guys, Aong, came to cell group and to church this past week. It’s awesome because he is so open just to hang out with us and he has never been around here before. Please pray for him and his willingness to stay around and get to know the people at the Zone and God more.
Friday was different than “normal.” We got up at 5:30 and took off for Bakaew for an English camp at a school there. My group got to the school a little late and the other interns had started singing and doing games with the big group of kids in about 6th through 8th grade. After a little introduction we split up into groups so we could do individual English stations with the groups of kids. My group was “body parts.” It was fun doing “head, shoulders, knees and toes” and “Simon says” with the kids. After a while all the little kids (probably about 5 or 6 years old) started coming out of their classes and attacking the playground where we were doing the stations. It was so much fun having all these little kids with the biggest smiles running around and wanting you to take pictures of them. It was amazing to see how our group interacted with all these kids. It was a blessing to me to see these kids being so happy just running around and being loved on by our group. After we finished the school day we went back to where the girls would be staying. It was where they have church. We hung out there until it was time for dinner. While we were sitting around talking a gorgeous rainbow came out. The weather there is about 10 degrees cooler than in Chiang Mai and the scenery was awesome. After a very delicious dinner with smoked chicken we went in to have a devo. After a few songs we found out that several of the kids we had worked with earlier that day had come up to participate in the devo, but there wasn’t enough room inside to fit them all. So we moved outside and kept singing. It was a blessing to see these church members out in the country worshiping together. It was an interesting night because we slept in a church member’s house on the floor. I was woken up by the rooster outside at 4:00, 4:15, and then sporadically until I got up at 7:00. It was fun. On Saturday some of us went back to the school to paint. It was fun to work with the kids from the school doing a project for them. Then on Sunday we went to a local orphanage with the whole church. We hung out with the kids all afternoon. It was a fun weekend!

Please keep everyone here at Payap in your prayers: Jason, Marvin, Marissa, Casey, Kyle, Erika, Un, Amp and me. Please also remember Aong and the new students coming to the Zone. Thanks for your support and keep praying!