Dec 2018 Update: Enjoy the Silence

First of all, thank you so much for your monthly support!  Your generosity means a lot to us, and may the Lord bless you for your faithfulness.

I’m starting off this month’s update with a short endorsement of the 2016 movie, Silence,directed by Martin Scorsese.  I highly recommend that you see it!  I’m not going to spoil the movie for you, Silence basically tells the story of two Jesuit priests who travel to rural Japan during the 1600s in search of their missing mentor.  The movie is an emotional roller coaster and develops some pretty deep themes made all the more poignant to me considering the work Lori-Ann and I are engaged with here in Thailand.

I had heard that Silence was controversial and, after seeing a couple of previews here and there, I thought the movie looked interesting enough to give it a go.  I’ll be the first to admit that Silence isn’t easy to watch for various reasons and I think one critic says it best: “The movie is hard for religious people because it subverts some of the genres,” [Reverend James] Martin explains. “And it’s hard for non-religious people because it demands that you see everyone’s faith with complexity. This isn’t the fake spirituality of ‘If you believe in God, everything turns out great.’ This movie says you can believe in God but bad things might still happen. And then it asks, what do you do with that faith.”

Silence made me reconsider the nature of my relationship with God in a couple of ways:

• If I’m being honest, God normally doesn’t respond to my prayers in the manner that I think He should. Nor does He respond linearly:  A + B = C does not apply.  This is not a bad thing.  His ways are truly mysterious…yet good!
• God’s silence during the trying times of my life may appear to be hurtful.  But sometimes that silence is a first step that leads to hearing Him (how can I hear Him when there’s so much noise going on?), or it is an opportunity to discern what His silence really means.

Anyway, I highly recommend that you check out the movie and decide for yourself.

Lori-Ann and I continue to be busy as we wrap up the year.  A lot has been going on with us at ZOE since our last update, here are some highlights:

A shot of my formal work shoes 🙂  Because we take shoes off and on so much in Thailand, most everyone here wears sandals to work.

Our guards (Thai staff) doing self-defense training. I try to keep up with them in vain, they are just too young and too strong.

Every year at ZOE the American staff get together to celebrate Thanksgiving but, as you can imagine, obtaining the right ingredients for Thanksgiving dinner can be challenging.  Lori-Ann was tasked to bake one of the turkeys and it took us days to find one.  It may be hard to make out the price tag in the picture but this (scrawny) 14-pound bird costs over $60!

We were recently invited to visit a house church of one of our ZOE staffers who is also a local pastor.  It was nice to worship alongside a number of our ZOE Thai staff.

We were overjoyed to have visitors during the holiday season!  Long-time friends Gary and Lois Watanabe stayed over with us for a weekend.

We enjoyed a lovely evening with Shawn and Yazhi Nie (from my mom’s church) during their stopover in Chiang Mai.

ZOE has the privilege of partnering with Thai law enforcement and other NGOs on local projects.  One of these projects is maintaining a safe house near the city called a Child Advocacy Center (CAC) for at-risk children of Burmese workers.  These workers are contracted to work for 6 to 12 months before they have to move on to look for new work and uproot their children in the process.  With the beginning of the Christmas season, we hosted a Christmas party for some of these children at our CAC.

2018 was quite eventful for us…we can’t believe the year is almost over already!  If you are planning on making a charitable donation by the end of this year, would you consider giving to ZOE?  Going into 2019, we are at 80% of our fundraising goals.

Also we would greatly appreciate your prayers for the following needs:

• Continued prayer for our marriage.
• Please pray for our health, we’ve had some recent physical trials, including poor Molly who endured a difficult two weeks.
• ZOE is the first NGO in Northern Thailand to become an official emergency shelter for trafficked children (the second NGO in all of Thailand).  There are nine existing emergency shelters but they are all run by the government.  With this designation, we can host more children with less red tape.  But this means we need more childcare staff who are called to work with us at ZOE, so this has become a pressing need.

We wish each of you our dear friends a special and blessed Christmas season.  May you know God’s love deeper and more intimately in 2019.