Itsara

For those of you keeping track and praying, everything seemed to go fine at Immigration today. They’re going to send someone to Im Jai to talk to us, and a couple of our friends/co-workers, just to make sure that we’re really married and everything (standard procedure, apparently), and in a month I go back and theoretically get my real 1-year visa extension.

And, for the same praying people, I’ve got an updated request for the teenagers here. Our Bible studies with them, which are now Monday through Thursday, have been up and down (incidentally, we realized last week as we were taking them bowling that we have somehow stumbled upon our own youth group - it’s almost as if God tricked us into becoming youth pastors). When the difficulties come, they come because (a) the kids are often just not interested (apparently, teenagers are the same all around the world) and (b) it is difficult to keep them interested when they don’t want to talk and when we have to talk so slowly and poorly. We have had a translator lately, which helps, but even listening to a translation is difficult for them, especially if they don’t care in the first place.

So pray for their hearts. Pray for our language skills. And pray especially that God will guide us until we stumble upon what it is that does interest them enough to think about these things for themselves. We desperately want to talk with them, not at them. They’ve had enough of the latter already.