First Term Over, First Trip Coming Up
Monday, May 14, 2007
Time for a little update.
We’ve been very busy, but Friday was the last day of the first 3 week term, and things have slacked off a bit, which is nice. Today we spent time alone, as part of the mentoring program, and I had a good time beside a little lake at Chiang Mai University.
Wednesday we leave on our first mission expeditions. What all we’ll be doing I’m not totally sure, guess we’ll find out when we get there. I know we’ll be visiting some slum areas and an orphanage. If you are getting my email updates you should be hearing more about this.
It’s been a great three weeks, and I’m very glad I’m here! Definitely consider coming if you have any inclination towards missions! That would include about all of my readers, I suppose.
The last three weeks, God has been teaching me some of the most valuable things I have ever learned. In our Biblical Theology of Missions class the focus was on God’s desire to be known by all people groups in the world. There are absolutely hundreds of verses in the Bible, especially the OT, that evidence this. From the huge amount of supporting biblical data, it seems pretty obvious that God’s primary concern is that people acknowledge and glorify him for who he is. Understood correctly, the theme of scripture points to a God centered Christianity focused on worship, with missions necessarily flowing from that worship, with the aim of bringing more people into a relationship with God where they too can worship him. It’s been powerful for me to realize this–it helped correct a mission focus that was somewhat distorted.
I’ve received input on a couple other of my “burning” questions. I would tell you about them now, but then this update would be getting REALLY long.
I really appreciate the spirit of the place. I haven’t detected “Christian” arrogance or any sort of western superiority. On the contrary, we hear a lot about cultural sensitivity, and have been warned clearly about not expressing distaste for local food or customs. I didn’t realize how different Thai culture is from ours, for sure. Offending someone is the ultimate taboo, and showing proper respect to ones elders is extremely important. Because age determines how you address a person, it is proper to ask a new acquaintance how old he or she is when you meet them, if there is any doubt as to which of you is older. But since we don’t know the language, we haven’t really experienced this kind of thing yet. Feet are highly offensive. You MUST take your shoes off when entering a house, and even some workplaces. You are not supposed to “point” your feet at someone, like we do sometimes when we cross our legs. And of course the king is revered highly. Money, because it has the king’s picture on it, must be handled with greatest care. Recently there was a fiasco between the Thai gov’t and google’s youtube.com, where a video on youtube was highly offensive to the king, because it displayed a picture of the king with the soles of someone’s shoes pointed at him. The Thai gov’t promptly blocked access to youtube.com and threatened a lawsuit against google. Amazing.
In other news, what I am looking forward to most after the missions expedition is having my very own pastor and dear friend Ken Miller here! That will be nothing short of awesome! He’s going to be teaching a “History of Missions” class for 3 weeks, which I am looking forward to very much!
That’s all for now. Be sure to keep checking blogs.i-g-o.org for other more interesting news from other students. And thank you for keeping us in prayer!
