Round II – Back In Mae Sot

Our team has kept talking about God having returned us to Mae Sot so we can go through doors previously closed to us. Normally, at least in my experience, words such as those don’t necessarily come true in the moment. They are merely a balm on a wound until much later when they do come to fruition. It’s almost never an immediate truth… unless you are our team right now, in which case it is.

It’s exactly as we have been saying: we saw and sometimes knocked on so many doors that we never got to go through, and now we are reopening those doors and encountering new ones every day.

God is good! So good.

This first thing began more or less the evening we got here. Our relationships with the people around our team have been amazing the past few days. A World Race team on the second-to-last month of their journey lives in the team house with us. Our groups have remained largely segregated in living, ministry, and free time, but they are nevertheless pouring into us and us into them. We worshipped with them on Wednesday night along with the Outpour staff.

Outpour’s people have also changed their approach to us. Now that we have a much longer stay in Mae Sot, they have all sought to be intentional in building relationships with us in a way they were not before. I have been so glad to spend more time around them, drinking deep of their vision for the work they are doing here.

On a similar note, I am happy to have had the opportunity to go back to the Refuge — one of the churches Outpour supports and which we held church with each Sunday last time we were here — to tutor. We kinda-sorta spent time with the young people there on Sundays, but I yearned to have more of a relationship with them than our ministry could accommodate. Like I said: doors we saw, but could not open last time we were here.

I spent more than three hours helping a twelve year old pronounce English on Thursday and another two and a half on Friday tutoring chemistry for a seventeen year old girl. On Thursday, our ride back home was late to arrive, so my teammate and I talked to the kids for a while and joined the group for worship and prayer. Our contact for Outpour says that tutoring may well become a regular part of ministry this time.

Saturday we biked down to the Thai-Burma border to prayer walk just outside of “No Man’s Land”. It is an area between the borders which neither Thailand nor Burma lays particular claim to. We encountered a woman just off the path carrying her son on her hip who approached us and wanted to talk. She told us of her circumstances through our translator and then invited us to come see her village.

It was tucked back from the river a little ways, accessible via a thin path like a deer trail through thickets of tall grass and jungle-y undergrowth. We sat down briefly with the village leader, who wrote our names down so that we would always be known and welcomed there. A pair of soldiers gave us a tour of the village, ending at the home of the first woman we met. We prayed for her and her family, and it was really cool!

Then on Sunday we finally had the chance to try attending Mae Sot Grace Church, a church not connected to our contact’s ministry that we found by pure chance the very first week here. I attended with another teammate and ended up eating lunch with the pastor and his wife. They urged us to return next week, and I think we will!

All-in-all, God has been showing every member of our team that He did have a reason to bring us back here. If all this happened within less than the first whole week, I cannot wait to see what else He has for the next 28 days.

This post is short and concise, since we’ve all been quite busy, but expect to hear of many more things in much more detail in the days to come.

We are having a blast chasing God with all our hearts.