Itsara

By permission, I submit this viewpoint of my friend Paul on the previous post on missionary woes. I think Paul makes a very good point, and I find it particularly interesting because he’s not a Christian himself.

PS About your post concerning a home church’s view of missionaries:

A tenet in psychology is that often a person’s outlook is expressed through their institutions and their statements about other people. While I understand some of the concerns (redirecting limited resources to other regions, worries about injuring local culture), I simply don’t understand the rest. Would a dollar spent in the West help more people than a dollar in a 3rd world country? Isn’t there an implicit selfishness in keeping money at the home church - for what? a new gym? And doesn’t this resistance imply that the people at the home church believe that the missionaries are somehow living frivolously? By extension, doesn’t that then imply that the people making this complaint would use funds frivolously given the chance (such as a person who always thinks people are stealing is probably a thief)?

Really, if someone wants to dedicate their life to something that I think is a good cause then I’m not going to try and stop them. And I’m certainly not going to claim that resources are better spent on myself than on them.

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Looks like I’ve been slacking on the pictures a little bit. Well here are two albums: one of Christmas Preparations at Im Jai and one of our Christmas trip to the States. Enjoy.

Over the past year, I have begun to write a post about miracles no less than 5 times and until now have never posted one. It is such a huge topic, and I have such strong feelings on the subject, that it is difficult for me to cover what I want to cover in a way that is satisfactory to me. So for now I won’t bother being satisfactory. I’m not going to try and argue whether or not miracles happen; for this post I will assume that they do. I want to talk about some faith I learned with regards to my personal struggle with miracles: namely, if miracles can and do happen as I assume, why did they never seem to happen in my own experience?

I often thought that if only I could see just one big miracle - something that I could know, without a doubt, was a miracle from God - then I could say, “I really do believe.” (more…)

Our friend Phil wrote this post on a few things he’s heard Christians say to or about missionaries. Phil and his family are also missionaries here in Thailand from Switzerland. They live in Chiang Mai and, among other things, work with some of the hill tribe villages in the surrounding mountains. Here’s one of the things he’s heard, and his quick response:

2. Missionaries steal the resources of the local church.
One of my favorites. What shall I say. Whose resources are they anyway?

Go ahead and read the rest. We’ve talked with Phil about this stuff before. In talking with folks that have been missionaries out here for a while, we’ve discovered just how blessed we are to have such a supportive family back home. We keep hearing horror stories about what various churches and missionary organizations are requiring of people.

We’ve always said that we were coming out here no matter how much support we had - it just so happened that there were lots of people who wanted to help us. But we always wondered what we would do if someone said, “We’ll continue to support you, but you have to raise X amount of money,” or “We’ll support you, but you have to live in America 1 out of every 3 years,” or “We’ll support you as long as you can make X converts per year.”

I can understand the intent behind these, and I can imagine the bad situations that might have required such things, but if someone tried to push what we considered to be an unreasonable expectation on us - in exchange for their money - I would probably say (as respectfully as possible), “Thanks, but in that case we’ll pass. God’ll take care of us.”

On the other hand, any skeptic can easily point out that I’ve not yet had to rely solely on God’s provision. Perhaps I would change my tune if it meant the difference between making X converts and forced fasting. But at this point, I don’t think so.

I should note that I don’t think all expectations or requirements are unreasonable. If Coast asked us to (for example) keep a detailed account of all our spendings for their own tax purposes, I would consider it tedious but not unreasonable. What’s more, to my mind it would be helping out my family. The stories we hear are worse things though. A church researching missions in Southeast Asia and deciding a budget that a family must raise in order to go - when living in Thailand will actually be half that much. A denomination requiring 7 years of “missions training” and then denying the person who went through this the country they feel God is calling them to, but rather assigning them a domestic pastorship.

For the interested, Bruchko is a fun read on a missionary who was denied several times, in several places, the very thing he was certain God was calling him to. He went on his own and found God to be far more dangerous, and far more faithful, than anyone bargained for.

Since I always have so much trouble trying to figure out what to tell you and what not to tell you, and of course everyone wants to know what life here is like, I figured I’d start doing these posts that I’ll call Wan Tii (it’s Thai, maybe I’ll explain later, or maybe I’ll decide it’s stupid and change it). Every once in a while, I’ll just walk you through a day of mine, and maybe Cindy or Sean can do the same, if they want to. I hope I can make it interesting. (more…)

I try to update at least once a week, but as you all know I’m not always able to. This time it’s because my parents are here visiting us. It’s really good to see them, and to hear about all the changes coming in their lives, and to share with them our lives (including some major changes which I’m sure will find their way to the blog sooner or later… I know you love it when I do that).

It’s really fun for me to see Chiang Mai through fresh eyes again as we take them around to the various markets, tourist attractions, and of course to Im Jai. It’s double-fun because they’re sort of seeing the world for the first time. They recently got off a trip they made to Mexico (the real Mexico, not TJ) in which they felt God strongly calling them to live there, to retire there, to continue their ministry there. So it’s fun watching them go through realizations (or in many cases, merely confirmation of old suspicions) about how America is different from the rest of the world.

We’ve talked about the idea that America may be the only different country, where as before I might have assumed that all countries were like America with a few exceptions. Now that I write it, it sounds like a stupid assumption to make, but I made it. I’d be willing to bet we’ve all made it. We just don’t realize it until we go to another country and say, “Why are they doing things like that?” My parents noticed that many of the differences they saw in Mexico are the same here, which surprised them precisely because of this assumption. Things such as safety being given a lower priority compared to practicality and cost. Or relationships being given a higher priority than schedule or Getting Things Done.

Not all of the differences are bad. America does some good things really well. For example, I think America is one of the few countries where everyone assumes that you are American and that you speak English, regardless of what you look like (in most countries, if you look like I do people assume you are a foreigner and don’t speak the language, and they treat you accordingly). America is very friendly in that sense, unless you don’t speak English of course in which case America could be worse.

Ah, see, no matter how hard I try I can’t get away from seeing the bad things. I’m a born and raised cynic. I’ll drop it. Just wanted to let you know what was going on. And there are some very exciting things on the horizon, not the least of which is that we (everyone at Im Jai) will all be moving to the new site in less than a month. Stay tuned.

My brother’s exhibiting some of his art on Saturday. If you’re in San Diego, check it out.