Itsara

One good thing about being separated from friends and family by 8,000 miles of ocean is that my birthday can start now, and it won’t stop being celebrated for at least another 38 hours.

Well, okay, not the real houses. We met with the foreman and architect to go over the basic plans for the last time before they make up the full blueprints. These model houses that Sean and I built are based on the latest set of design plans that we got from that meeting, and at the moment they’re the closest thing we have to what the future houses will look like. You can also see our oddly-shaped land.

Update: I forgot to say that the brown house is to be the Heine House. The grey house is the Abbott House. These are also not the final colors, just the colors we chose for our models.

In two weeks we meet with the foreman and architect again to go over the real blueprints and make any changes we need to make before signing the contract. We’ll also find out exactly how much they will cost. Right now, all we have is an estimate (though from what we’ve heard, it’s pretty accurate) of 5 to 5.5 million Baht for both houses (that’s about $140,000-160,000). With the sale of our condo and a couple of other large gifts made towards this purpose, we have almost enough for the whole thing. Maybe we do have enough, but I can’t be sure until we have a final quote. In any case, if you’d like to help us out with this, please feel free.

The last time we spoke with the contractor, he said the houses could be done around April or May. It’s fascinating how God has timed all of this. A few years ago we hesitated on using the old land because we weren’t yet sure what our needs were. That turned out to be a very good decision, because now I feel like I know what we’re doing. Mostly.

Our contractor is a Christian who built one of our friend’s houses. He told us about how, like many Thai Christians, he came to Christ thinking Jesus would help him get out of his debt. He learned that following Jesus had nothing to do with that, and only then, when he had devoted what he had to Jesus, did he start to become successful financially. He says he runs his business as transparently as possible. He cares more about honesty than about making money. Some other weird connections: this guy owns Cornerstone International, which runs the school where we learned Thai (in fact that’s where we have our meetings, so all our old teachers get to fawn over Isaac and Abigail when we come), and, strangely enough, he is the brother of the guy who sold us the land. Chiang Mai really is a very strange, small world.

Imagine what would happen if there were no electricity one morning at church. What would your church do? Would they trudge on through worship unplugged? What would that be like?

At our church on Sunday, there was no power for the first half hour or so of worship. The worship team just led with two acoustic guitars and a vocalist, singing songs that “everyone probably knows”. It was actually really cool – a reminder that it’s not the music that enables us to worship God, but our hearts.

But the lack of power revealed a lot of things that showed how consumerist we tend to be when we come to worship. It was suddenly more obvious when people showed up late, and it was really obvious that they were still chatting while others were trying to worship. I realized this goes on all the time and I just don’t notice because the sound drowns them out, but on this day, when I felt like we were all trying to come together to worship God, it felt… really rude. Not rude to me, but to the King of All Creation that we worship.

Another aspect of the consumerism was evident in myself. With no power, the worship leader couldn’t lead alone. We all had to be singing together in order to create the same amount and quality of sound that we normally had with power. Not that the quality of sound matters, but what’s the point of singing to The King if we’re going to do it lamely? I was technically on break from leading worship, and a part of me was quite reluctant to sing out – after all, it was my week off. I was immediately convicted by that feeling and began to sing just as if I were part of the worship team – louder even, because there was no mic.

I don’t think we realize, normally, that when we come to sing praises to God, we are singing before the King of the Universe. I don’t think we even understand what that phrase means, especially in America. In Thailand, the king is a big deal. There’s a whole procedure you’d have to go through if you ever even had to accept a small piece of paper from him. It would involve a lot of bowing and kneeling and lying face first on the ground, if you were even allowed close enough. When you go to the movie theater, you need to stand in respect of the king while they play a song and video for him before the movie starts. The king’s head – the most honored part of the body – cannot be lower than anyone else’s, and even the image of his head cannot be disrespected. Heck, the country banned YouTube for a while because of some videos that were intentionally disrespectful to the king.

In America, we tend to think of these things as propaganda. That’s a cultural bias that understandably comes from a history of fighting against evil kings and cruel tyrants, but what if the king is a good man? What if he is perfect? Surely such a king, who would sacrifice himself for our sake, is worthy of these kinds of respect and even more. So what are we doing, then, when we come into the King’s presence chatting with each other? What does it say about our attitude towards His Holiness that we think it’s okay while worshiping to look around distractedly, or cross our arms, or complain about the music – as if the music was meant to please us?

Think about that. We come to church thinking that the worship is supposed to be cool for us, but what we don’t realize is that all of us are part of the same chorus. Imagine a choir in front of some Earthly king or queen. While they’re singing their songs of praise to him, some of the members in the back are leaning against the wall, arms crossed, maybe chatting about the mistakes the choir director is making. “Honestly, I don’t see how the king would be pleased with this worship at all,” one of them says coyly.

Really? If the king’s going to be mad at anybody, do you think it’s going to be the director who’s trying to worship or the lazy choir members? Fortunately we are not worshiping the archetypical angry monarch who cries “Off with their head!” at the merest slight. We are worshiping our Father in Heaven who knows that we are just children. Maybe he even thinks it’s cute that we’re not really paying attention to what we’re supposed to be doing, but he’s still going to talk to us afterwards. I think it’s cute when Isaac looks back at me before getting into something he knows he shouldn’t, but cute or not, he still gets whatever consequence is coming.

I strayed off of my original point a little bit, but this – our attitude towards worship – is more important. Not just how we think, but how we act, how we sing, our body language – everything. That doesn’t mean we have to sing well – though if we have the ability then it absolutely means that; it means we put our whole heart into it. We are worshiping when our hearts are focused off of ourselves and others entirely and onto the living God and how amazingly great he is. And we don’t require electricity or music or even worship leaders to do that. God’s already given us everything we need, we just need to use it.

Whoops, sorry about not posting. Let’s see… this week the four of us (Adam, Cindy, Sean, and Prang) met with the foreman and architect who are going to be building our houses and went over our plans. We paid the first of many payments on these things too, so it’s starting for real now. Based on the plans we gave them, they’re going to draw up some real plans with side-views and stuff and we’ll see what they look like and if we need to make any changes from there.

When I get a chance, I’ll try to do some stuff in Sketchup to give you a good idea of what our houses will look like. Today Sean and I are going to the land where he has staked out where our houses might go. We’re going to move them around some and see what things look like and where we’d like things to go. It’ll also be the first time that Pan, Alaypa, and Lutiya will have seen our land, so it should be fun.

Otherwise we’ve been busy with the normal: homeschool, outside school (what do you call it? It’s not public school, and “regular” school makes homeschool sound abnormal), parenting – the usual. Cindy and Isaac are at a women’s retreat (baby’s allowed), so it’s just me and the kids again. I think I can handle it this time, although yesterday I was making sketchy high rises when I was supposed to be making dinner. It’s okay, dinner was made and we watched a movie. I think The Pacifier might be funnier in Thai.

And I’ve been trying to write fiction (my 300 words a day became 300 words a month because I keep rewriting the intro), but then I got distracted by this. It’s essentially a language/game engine for writing text adventures (aka interactive fiction). Text adventures were among the very first computer games I played, so this tool is pretty cool. It also makes programming stupidly easy. I mean, the source code for sticking the player in a prison cell with an empty plate and a chamber pot (that the player can examine, pick up, and drop) is: “Prison Cell is a room. An empty plate and a chamber pot are in the cell.” It’s the most readable code I’ve ever seen.

I’ve got another family picture for you too, but not yet. I need to crop it and upload it and I just don’t have time to do that this weekend. Maybe early next week.

CINDY’S STATUS:
Recently Read: Every Woman’s Marriage by Shannon Ethridge
Currently Reading: Searching for God Knows What by Donald Miller
Choreographing: Meant to Live by Switchfoot
Bible Verse Most Pertinent to Life Now: II Corinthians 12:9-10
Last Day of Good Night’s Sleep: Sometime in 2006 (can’t remember)

ISAAC’S STATUS:
Number of Teeth: 2.5
Last Put in Mouth: Zipper on Daddy’s backpack
Last Said: “Bow bow bwow”
Most Recent Discovery: Power strip behind TV stand
Favorite Song: “I Love to Laugh” from Mary Poppins
Color of Last Poop: Red (thanks to papayas)

One of the fields on the customs form I fill out every time I return to Thailand is “Occupation”. I never quite know what to tell them, but I typically write “Teacher”. At first, it was because I (supposedly) taught computers at Im Jai. Since then I mainly meant my homeschool teaching, but I’ve been doing a lot more than that lately. I’ve taught a 40 year-old ex-monk to ride a motorcycle. I learned, and subsequently taught, Macromedia Flash to a 12 year-old friend of ours. I’m teaching English to Pan (not well – we’re both still too lazy about it).

Now I’m teaching a fiction writing class for a homeschool co-op we go to on Mondays. A bunch of homeschooling mothers (primarily) get together and teach classes for whoever’s interested once a week. I don’t know quite how I became a highschool writing teacher, but that’s what I am now. We’ve only had 2 classes so far, but I’m learning.

The first week I was woefully unprepared. I was ready with extra simple questions suitable for children, and open-ended questions suitable for adults. But I was not prepared with in-between discussion questions for teenagers (I guess because I don’t have as much experience teaching them). But I learned. Last week was a lot more fun. I was more prepared and we did this thing called “A Thousand Ideas in an Hour” (credit to Orson Scott Card) where we start with some simple idea and then ask simple questions of it to pull a story out of it. We started with a 20 year-old man who was starting a job in a bank and ended with a miniature bank heist pulled off by a security guard and framed on one of the customers.

I’ve got just 10 more classes to pull off before it’s over. We’ll see if I can keep coming up with stuff. At least the kids are pretty attentive so far. That helps.

Stream of Consciousness Warning: The author of this post makes no guarantees as to its coherency, relevance, or enjoyableness.

I’ve had trouble figuring out what to write. I’ve been considering my job as a parent, and it’s weird. It’s really slow, and, unlike any other job I’ve held, I hardly ever see the results. In many cases, I can only see the results if I look back far enough, but since we’ve only been parents for 1.5 years, there’s not very far to look back yet.

It’s a really difficult job. I’m considering that it may be the hardest job in existence, which means that it is also very likely the most worthwhile (a thing I suspected). I am essentially a 24-hour on-call teacher, chauffeur, doctor, security guard, safety technician, judge, spy, health inspector, drill sergeant, repairman, sys admin, counselor, linguist, janitor, ninja (yes, ninja), and climbing toy. I thank God for the relative calm during the day when there are only 2 children, I hope for the day Sandra can go to Grace, and I sometimes reconsider my resolution to homeschool Isaac.

In that calm, I have found the time to write an average of 300 words a day (hopefully it’ll go faster when I know my new characters better), and research a wealth of Wikipedia articles ranging from Anarchism to Cement, from Ireland to the Mormon Church, from Christian monasticism to Pirates versus Ninjas. Don’t ask me why. I could tell you, but the answer would be long and uninteresting in most cases. And those are just the tips of various icebergs; I like Wikipedia.

We may have found an architect/contractor for our houses. There are some details to be worked out, but nothing to worry about. We’re just a little closer to finishing this thing. We also have some estimates. The two houses together will likely cost somewhere between 5 and 6 million Baht (about $140,000-170,000), and could be finished sometime next April or May. Those are just estimates though, nobody quote me on anything.

Isaac is getting around everywhere, and he’s far taller than he used to be, so new shelves need to be made Isaac-proof. We created a makeshift playpen for him by closing the door to the kitchen, pushing the loveseat to block the way to the front door (where shoes, books, and wires are), and shoving an empty laundry basket to fill in the gap (there has to be a gap so we can get in and out). It used to be that pillows were enough to stop him, but he can get past those now. I doubt it will take long before the mystery of the laundry basket is solved. In any case, this makes it slightly harder for us to get in and out of our family room, but it makes it far easier to get things done while he’s exploring.

And yesterday when I was leaving the house he waved to me and say “bwah-bwah”. That was pretty awesome.

And because I enjoy doing it:

STATUS
Recently Read: Odd Thomas and Brother Odd, Dean Koontz; Darwin’s Children, Greg Bear; (reread) Dune, Frank Herbert
Reading: Nothing!
Writing: Tales of Dark Water, trying out a draft of Chapter 1, “Seeing Stone”
Last Played: Mexican Train Dominoes
Latest Nickname for Isaac: “Jaochai” or “The Young Prince”