Itsara

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. Let me know if this doesn’t work for you. Update: I forgot to mention, the video has no sound. That’s a product of using a cheap digital camera that wasn’t designed for video.

The Coast team has just left Chiang Mai to go Bangkok, Rayong, and then back home. Cindy and I had very little to do with them this year. We basically just hosted them for a day and night last week and another one this week and that’s it.

It was really cool, though. We saw a few old friends and met a lot of new ones. It was actually really interesting to see people that I know only from the Coast mission trips. I wish we could have spent some more time with them and gotten to know them better, but it couldn’t happen this year. It seems we do less and less with them each year, which none of us really like.

But it’s the nature of what we do. Foster care (or children’s homes or orphanage or whatever you want to call it) does not handle mission teams well. Some ministries, like Philipp’s, have work for teams to do - things to build, outreaches to run, etc. But much of all ministry is relational, and short term teams just can’t do that. And unfortunately our ministry is 100% relational.

It doesn’t mean we can’t have visitors. It just changes the relationship. We don’t have work for a big team to do at our house, but we have a place for friends to come visit - live with us, see what we do, even get involved in family ways. Help cook, help clean, teach English (either overtly or sneakily - trying to communicate with the kids across the language barrier), etc.

Otherwise, with a big team, it has to be a vacation. That was one of the problems we had at Im Jai House. With all the teams they had coming in, it was always vacation, and the kids knew it. Once or twice a year isn’t a big deal (especially if it’s during their actual school vacation), but when it happens too often it can really wreck a home.

But I was talking about Coast. It was really good to have them and open our home like we did. We’re looking forward to seeing them in September.

Just got a package at the correct address so… I guess mail is okay!

Hm, gives me some faith in the Thai postal system.

For those of you who send us surface mail (that’s right, both of you), you can no longer use our PO Box as an address. Just to make it clear: Don’t send anything to PO Box 34 Hangdong Post Office! cuz we won’t get it.

We know what our new address will be, but there aren’t any street numbers on the front of the house yet, and I honestly don’t know what will happen to mail that is sent to us. Will it find us? I have no idea. So don’t send us anything for the moment just in case. I’ll let you know when it’s okay again.

These are our new addresses, but don’t use them until I tell you to:

It’s finally a reality. Our houses are finished, more or less, and we are moved in. The houses feel really big, which makes sense. We didn’t design these houses because we need the space now, but because we expect to need it in the future. Jess says she can already see how they’ll be filled. With the way we’ve been feeling lately, I don’t have her faith, but then again we’ve walked this road before and watched God fill the space he told us to create.

Anyway, the future aside, here are the pictures I promised. They were taken over the last few weeks, so the details might change from picture to picture as we’ve gotten work done. I’ve included captions for you. The inside shots are pretty much all from the Heines’ house. I haven’t taken pictures of Sean’s place yet, sorry (though I bet he has).

We have internet now, so pictures and some more information will be coming soon. The mission team from Coast arrives today and will be with us for a day or two, which is primarily what will delay things.

The move is over, more or less. We’re all in the new house. The old house is completely empty. Most things in the new house work and the rest is getting connected as we speak.

Unfortunately, high on the list of things that is not working is the internet. They said they would connect it last Thursday. It’s Wednesday, and they haven’t. And now they’re saying they’ll come on Friday and hook up Sean’s house and another day for our house. We’ll see about that.

Matt and Sandra are in the US now. Cindy, Isaac, and I are enjoying the break, though most of our time is spent making the house the way we want it. And the team will be coming soon to joyfully and wonderfully wreck our unstable lives. We can’t wait, I mean it.

Maybe we’ll get to rest next month. Or in September. We’ll see. I’ll take what I can get.

We’re moving in two days, if all goes to plan. There are still things unfinished over there, but if we don’t move this Saturday then whatever other day we do it will be very difficult.

But in particular, the phone and internet are not hooked up over there yet. Until they are, posting here and at Author’s Echo will likely be slim. While you’re waiting, read and comment on any posts you’ve missed. It’ll be fun. Really.

There was some kind of bug with the automatic e-mail system, so some of you might not have been notified of any posts for the last month or so. Sorry about that. Hopefully with this post that’s all fixed. If you’re like me and you have to read everything, start here and use the links at the top to move forward to newer posts.

If you’d rather just skim, go to the front page and scroll down to see if you missed anything good.

Every once in a while, Cindy and I talk about getting more kids. Unfortunately, in the last few months we haven’t felt like we can handle another kid, though we are constantly trying to hear what God has to say. I mean, if he says we can handle it then we will (that’s what we did last time, after all).

At the same time, the need is just so huge, and we see it so acutely with the kids we have now. Most of our kids are teenagers already, and we can see first-hand the results of abandonment in their lives. It sucks, and we are constantly faced with the fact that there may be nothing we can do to fix it anymore.

We want to take in older kids who were wronged to make things right. We want to take in older kids because frequently nobody else will. We don’t want older kids because, once they’ve been wronged, they are more difficult.

We want to take in younger kids who can still be healed. We want to take in babies so that they never have to be broken. We don’t want to take in more kids because we feel stretched to our limit more often than we’d like.

We want to take in as many as we can because there are so many kids who are broken or in danger of being broken! We don’t want to take too many because we want to be able to love and heal those that we have. We don’t want to take in any more because of the times we go crazy right now!

As you can see, we’re pretty conflicted about it. A long time ago, I told God I wanted to change the world, but there was just so much that needed fixing, and I felt that any effort on my part would be so small as to be insignificant. I wanted to change the world, but I didn’t know how or if I even could.

“But I’m already changing the world,” God said. “You wanna help?”

That’s why I’m here. I realized that I have absolutely no power or perspective to even begin to change the world, but God has both. If he tells me to do something, I can be sure that, even if I don’t see the point, it will be effective in some way.

There are millions of kids who are abused, abandoned, and unloved and who need parents that will love them the way God intended, but we can’t parent them all. Even the ones we do parent, we can’t be sure that anything we do is effective, but God asked us to do it. And that’s the only reason we are. That’s the only way to change the world.