Itsara

In my last two posts, I talked about the first phase, what we need to do before we leave, and the second phase, what we plan on doing when we get there. I hope that this has been interesting for you, but more than that I hope it has answered some questions. The third phase is really everything that happens after we have an orphanage. This is really our vision rather than any hard and fast plans.

Phase III (from The Day We Have An Orphanage until God Only Knows When)

There’s nothing we really know about the future. Everything is up to God once we get over there.

We think it’ll be 2-5 years before we actually have an orphanage. Cindy’s dream (though she should really tell it in her own words, because I can only give you a filtered version) is to be the Mom of the orphanage. Going on Im Jai’s model, we don’t expect a lot of adoptions. Im Jai House only adopts 1 child per year at best (out of 50).

But that’s only bad if the goal of the orphanage is get all the children into good homes. In a way, that is our goal, but we consider that the orphanage itself is also a good home. We intend to love and teach the children as we would our own, and (as Audrey so nicely put it) to raise a bunch of little world-changers. If we can get them into a home with loving Christian parents who would do the same, so much the better. And maybe God will call us to market our little world-changers to the Church at large, but if not we don’t mind raising them all the way.

While we were in Thailand in July, my mind was racing with all the things that we could do if/when we moved there. I was almost overwhelmed with all the various ways God’s Kingdom is working over there, and I wanted to be involved in all of them. In my notebook, I wrote some of them down:

“Things to do: work at orphanage, start orphanage, teach at Centre [a missionary-run student hang-out that also teaches English to students], help white churches, help Thai churches, be a hub for missions teams.”

I wanted to do all of these. And don’t forget that when I originally got excited about the idea, I wanted to plant a church. I still want to do all of that, in addition to my own creative endeavors. But God spoke really clearly to me about my part in the Kingdom. This is from my notebook immediately after the previous excerpt:

“The orphanage (read: poor, alien, fatherless, widow) is #1 priority [sic]. The camps are another (missions teams?). Anyone helping the poor, alien, fatherless, and widow is another. Anything else is secondary or tertiary.”

In the last few years, I have been struck by God’s heart for the poor, the alien, the fatherless, and the widow. You cannot read the Bible, in particular the prophets, without hearing about them - God talks about them all the time! He loves them, and He will not hesitate to thrash anyone that mistreats them and to bless anyone that loves them. So it was clear to me that if we’re doing this on God’s calling, then the outcasts of society have to be our focus.

One thing I loved about our trip in July was just how real parts of the Bible became to me while I was out there. Working with Coast’s Branch ministry, I have attained a real face (actually many faces) to put to “the poor.” They were faceless before, and now I know them. In Thailand, “the fatherless” have also become real to me. And “the alien” now brings up images of the Karen, even though I only know them second-hand (and I have no doubt that I will know “the widow” soon enough). We intend to love these people, and to assist anyone whose mission is to love them as much as we can.

That last part references another part of our vision, which is to be a sort of hub for missions teams. A lot of you already know how much Cindy and I love to have people over at our house. Not just for the afternoon, but even living with us. This is not something forced, but something that is a natural part of our personalities (I know for myself, I learned it from my parents). I can’t imagine why that would change just because we’re in another country. We want to provide as much support as possible for anyone coming to love the people that we want to love.

We already know that Coast has plans for future trips to help the Karen (there’s another one planned for this June - if you’re interested, I can hook you up - as a bonus, you’ll get to see us in our new home), and in the long run we want to be able to provide housing and translation and all the other details that can make trips like that a pain so that anyone can just come and love. And of course, people can work with us at Im Jai and one day we’ll have our own orphanage for people to work at.

Finally, there’s the interesting political circumstance that Thailand, and Chiang Mai in particular, is suitably located close to at least three closed countries (countries that won’t let missionaries in because they’re missionaries) yet is itself within an open country. This makes it a great jumping-off point for missions teams to Burma, China, Cambodia, and other southeast asian countries.

In fact, I hope one day I can take a trip to Kunming, China and maybe find some of my old friends from my trip there. We’ll see.

But as I said, and I can’t say it enough, we don’t know what’s going to happen. Our theme/motto/game plan for the July trip was “flexibility,” and we needed it because practically nothing happened the way we thought or planned it would. I fully expect this next step to be the same (all the more reason to keep reading this site as our plans are changed beneath us!), but God is good. He’s called us, and I have complete faith in His calling.