For Christmas, we joined my family on a beach trip to Koh Tao, here in Thailand. Though the trip was arduous (literally land, sea, and air), the island was torn from the page of a Clive Cussler novel. 20 foot boulders hunch lazily on top of one another down by the coast like a herd of elephants around a watering hole. Stony peaks erupt from the foliage above. The water teams with fish that hold no fear for man, because the island is within a nature reserve.
Joe is an Ahka man that I have recently become friends with. When Jacki and I met him and his wife at the local night bazaar, he told me he was a Buddhist Christian. I also found out he loved to fish. So, naturally, we set up a day to go fishing.
Thais are incredibly gifted in the arts and cherish these gifts as a culture. Here are a few sights and sounds from the Saturday Night Market here in Chiang Rai.
Last year was a hard year for many of our good friends. Jobs fell through, money grew thin, disease began to ravage them or their loved ones. Some of them lost someone close. When the locks blew off on this year, I felt like I was given something for you. If you feel like you’ve lost or are losing your dream, your family, your center in life, this year is for you. This is the year that you push back the opening of the tomb. In the story of Lazarus, Jesus showed up late and a sick man died. The man’s sisters were distressed and told Jesus, “if only you’d come sooner!” Jesus first wept with them, then in a public prayer said to his father, “Things happened this way so that people would know who I am.” Then he told Lazarus’ friends to push back the stone from the tomb and called Lazarus back to life. Here are three things to remember about this story as you walk into this year:
Jacki and I spent a week in December visiting our friend, Fred Garmon, and his PCL team in Cambodia. We spent a day on Tonle Sap lake, home to one of the largest gatherings of refugees on the planet. Later, we visited Angkor Wat, where I ran a half marathon.
If you would like to own a piece of art from another place on the planet and support missions work in the same act, talk to us about purchasing one of our hi-resolution files.
Jacki and I were hosted by our good friend Fred Garmon and his team at People for Care and Learning this past December. Fred generously took care of Jacki and myself for almost a week to come and visit their operations in Cambodia and run in a half-marathon with him and a few buddies. We had a blast. Jacki’s got the photos on her facebook, so, while I’m sifting through those, here are a few teasers from my small digicam.
Just a week ago, I gave a talk to the few brave Christians that attend MFLU. I felt it was an appropriate story to share with you as a continuation of our Risky Business talks. This one’s not about an Old Testament character, however. This one’s straight from the pages of my life.
I was 13 years old; the new kid on campus. She was the blonde-bombshell that every guy in middle school had a thing for. Her name was Kelly, and I had a thing for her too. So, after months of trying to find a seat beside her in class and attempting to dazzle her with my basketball skills at lunch, I decided the time was right. It was Valentines, afterall. To a teenage boy in the budding of romantic discovery, what better time could there be? Valentines Day was magical, enchanted. Anything could happen on Valentines Day.
I bought her five roses (five was her favorite number). Then I proceeded to spend several minutes constructing a simple note in my best handwriting:
Dear Kelly, I really really like you. Will you be my girlfriend?
Love, Andrew
The lunch bell had rung. Flowers in hand, note tucked into flowers, I strode down the stairs from the middle school hall to the circle, where I knew she would be. With every step, I resisted the urge to break into a full scale sprint. I had to be dashing, debonaire, suave.
She was sitting between two of her friends, Esther and Janna. They smiled as I made my way towards them. Kelly leaned towards one of them and they exchanged some inaudible teasing and giggled. I had hoped it was about how cute or romantic I was. My heart swelled even more with the thought. I smiled back, confident. It was perfect.
I finally stopped before Kelly, dropped to one knee and brandished the roses like a Musketeer brandishing his saber. “Oohs”, “ahs”, and bubbling girlish laughter erupted from the trio. Kelly blushed as she took the roses and mouthed a “Thank you.” Not knowing what else to do and wanting to preserve the magic, I rose, turned and left. Then I broke into a run and charged back up the stairs and into my next class. I was 30 minutes early, but I didn’t care. I sat there crackling with excitement.
The bell rung again, signaling the end to lunch, and as the students ambled into the room, Kelly filtered in among them. She saw me sitting at the back of the class against the window and made her way towards me. I noticed something in her hand as she approached. She smiled and placed the white, blue-lined note in my hand, then turned and found her seat at the other end of the classroom.
Not sure what to make of it, I unfolded the note. Her bubbly handwriting read,
Dear Andrew,
Thank you for the flowers. They are beautiful. I think you are great and I would really like it if we could just be friends. I hope that’s okay.
Kelly
P.S. You can have the flowers back if you want them, you know, to give them to your mom or something.
I don’t think I need to describe to you how I felt, but I will anyway. I was crushed. The scaffolding I had dared to dangle my hope upon swayed and crashed back down to earth with me still on it. I had taken a risk in opening up my heart to this girl. She had closed the door gently in my face with cute bubbly letters on it saying, “Fat Chance.”
What does this story have to do with Christmas, you wonder? Plenty. I’m not the only one who’s taken a risk out of love and been rejected. I’m sure you can crack open that high-school yearbook and point to a face or two with a story of your own. This isn’t an entirely human experience, however. It is, in it’s essence, the story of Christmas. Jesus loves you. He always has. But just like Kelly and me, you didn’t even know he existed. He couldn’t bear living without you. So he decided to come to you.
He climbed down the stairs of heaven and into humanity to live in your world. Then he found a mountain and walked up it. There he crucified himself, throwing his arms wide open and putting his love on full display for you. He did this for you and for every person on this planet. But, by and large, the response he gets is “Fat Chance.”
He took an extraordinary risk and made an outrageous gesture of love towards you with no guarantee that you would love him back. Whether you’d say “yes” or “no” didn’t affect his decision to do it. He would have done it either way. That’s what we celebrate at Christmas: the risk Jesus took out of love for you and me.
It doesn’t stop there. Every day he makes himself vulnerable again. He pursues you further and continues to put his heart on display for you. For some people, every day, they ignore him, reject him, insult him again. That doesn’t stop him. He loves you so much, he is willing to risk the pain of rejection again and again with the hopes that one day you’ll say “Yes”.
As believers in Jesus, this is the crux of our life with him. We are commanded to take the risk of loving people without any guarantee of love in return. Even when we are rejected, Jesus told us, “turn the other cheek.” In other words, “risk it and make yourself vulnerable again.” One day, maybe, just one day, your love will break through.
Six years after Kelly’s note, I took another chance. It was my senior year and the Valentine’s Day banquet was coming up. Though I didn’t have that thing for Kelly any more, something in me still wanted to salvage the hopes of my 6th grade heart and try again. I bought her a flower and found her in the library. I hid the flower in a newspaper and laid it down on the table in front of her. No note this time. I just asked her, “Kelly, will you go to the banquet with me?” As much as I had steeled up my courage for this, a flutter of panic still made its way through me as I anticipated her reply. Her mouth dropped open, she blushed, looked at her friends sitting nearby, then looked up at me and smiled. “Yes.”
This Christmas, the Christian club at our local university mustered up their resources and their courage to face the rest of their classmates and present the gospel to them through a Christmas Concert. The concert featured Christian students from the university, Thai Christian artists, a local church, and a major Thai model/actress/singer. Two member of our team are enrolled in MFLU as students and helped to set up the concert event. As a means of injecting us into the MFLU community, they gave us the role of photographer for the event. Doing so enabled me to connect with members of the club, meet some of the artists, and even talk with the president of the University.
Fireman. Princess. Rockstar. Ninja. We all had a dream when we were kids. It was healthy. It was good for us. Some people you know are still pursuing that childhood dream. Others have traded them, like a worn out baseball card, for a different dream. Whatever the case is with you, at some point in your life you begin to notice that your passion, gifts, experiences, and opportunities are converging. Often, it occurs some time after people surrender their lives totally to Jesus. It’s as though the haze starts to part on a cloudy night. Star after star of the constellation that tells your story begin to creep into view. If that hasn’t happened to you, it will. Don’t worry about it.
Somehow, when you are okay not being comfortable or “successful” by everyone else’s standards, and you can be content just loving Jesus and people, your dream is liberated. It’s a wonderful, exhilarating experience. Your next realization, however, is unsettling, terrifying, almost crippling. It’s the sudden comprehension of the incredible risks that you are going to have to make and the sacrifices that your dream is going to cost you. The next character in our Risky Business trilogy knew those moments very well.
Meet Joshua: protege of the first leader the nation of Israel has ever had. At the point in which we join him, he’s having one of those realizations. Forty years of walking circles in the desert have brought him and his people back to the banks of the Jordan River. The dream of living in the promised land is finally so close they can smell it. But just the other day, the unthinkable happened. Moses, the man responsible for leading them out of Egypt, giving them the law, and binding them into a people, literally vanished. That left Joshua in charge of corralling this ragtag band of nomads and marching them into Canaan. Among all his other problems, there is an obvious one stopping him and the Israelites in their tracks. The wide, surging Jordan River is blocking the entrance to the promised land like a death-star force-field. Nobody is going anywhere as long as its in the way.
This is where God joins in on Joshua’s mental conversation. He starts with “Do not be afraid” and says it over and over again throughout the rest of his dialogue with Joshua. He assures him, “I will be with you just like I was with Moses.” He helps Joshua envision that dream again and peps him up like a trainer peps his fighter up between rounds. Then, he gives Joshua the plan. “Get everyone ready to cross and march towards the river,” he says. “Have my priests carry my ark and walk ahead of everyone. Have them wade into the river. When you do that, I will pin it back and you can walk across into the promised land.”
You may have noticed a significant difference between God’s instructions to Moses at the Red Sea and his instructions to Joshua at the Jordan River. When Moses raised his staff, he was on the bank of the water. God split the sea and the Israelites walked across without so much as a soggy sandal. When Joshua crossed the Jordan, God told him to start walking. The priests waded into the river. Joshua’s credibility, his confidence, and his hopes were on the line. When Moses stepped up to the Red Sea, he was leading people out of slavery. God delivered them from their circumstances. But when Joshua stepped up to the Jordan River, God was no longer delivering them. He was shaping them into people who overcome obstacles. The dream was right in front of them, but if they wanted to live that dream, they had to take the risk of failure, humiliation, poverty, and even death. By taking that risk, they left behind their old method of life: dependence on God to deliver them from their circumstances. They crossed over to become a people who, through trust in God, conquer their circumstances and see their dream become reality.
So here’s what I have to say to you. Your dream is in Christ. If you have never met him, take the risk and engage him. He will come through, I promise you. And if you have met him and found your dream. Here’s my message to you. I know so many Christians who never make this transition. They keep waiting and praying. Their dream is burning a hole in their heart. The invitation is open and God is already at work on the other side of the river, but they are still standing on the banks. They are waiting for God to part the water and he is just waiting for them to start walking. Stop waiting. Start walking.
A video montage of our 2 day trip from Chicago to Chiang Rai and our first week of setting up our new home in this beautiful country. I’ve set the video to the tune of Make My Dreams by Hall and Oates, which is my jams right now. Enjoy!
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Hello to you. As you'll see, our lives are a conglomeration of unique people from ethnic groups far and wide, experiences both legendary and mundane, and lessons, both profound and simple. Welcome into our life, you can leave your shoes at the door.
