About our Thailand Trip

Chantal and I celebrated our Christmas in Thailand last year (2005) in an orphanage. We went on a short-term missions trip with a team from her home church in Hong Kong, including her parents and her sister. It was a very good experience. We went to northern Thailand (near Myanmar and Laos), near the city Ching Rai. Many of the people who we were working with were of Chinese descent. Half a century ago, many KMT (Chinese nationalist) refugees had settled in northern Thailand when they fled the Communists half a century ago. Unlike most other KMT people, they never made it to Taiwan.

Because they are of Chinese descent, we were able to minister to these people using Mandarin, though sometimes Thai and other tribal language translations were still required (that area has many mixed minority groups). Most of them are not Thai citizens — they're refugees or minority tribes — so they also lack the opportunities to climb the social status. Even the children born there often do not become citizens because of the parents' language barriers. When the babies don't get registered in time, they cannot obtain Thai citizenship and receive the refugee status. They are not allowed to leave the country legally, so they're just kind of stuck in their remote community in a foreign land, mostly planting produce and raising livestock as a living. Talk about strangers in a foreign land!

We learned much about the necessity of spiritual change underneath the superficial yet real physical needs. These kids are "Christianized," but most of them are either not growing spiritually or do not truly understand the meaning of salvation. I saw similar experience when I spent the summer of 2000 in a Christian orphanage in Taiwan as well. That orphanage is also very short-staffed and could not pay special attention to the individual needs of the kids, but these Thai kids are poorer and their ambitions suffer with their lack of identity and opportunity for the future.

This trip provided an opportunity for Chantal and I to use The Lamb material first hand in Mandarin. We were part of the kids program, and Chantal did most of the teaching with the Lamb material. We only had two 2-hour sessions wit them, but we had to make do with what we had. She did a great job going over the key materials with visual aids. I also helped anchor some key points and wrapping things up in the end. We taught the lessons in Mandarin, but Pey-Lin (in orange here), a Bible school student there whom you'll hear more about later, also translated everything into Thai. The younger children, especially, have a more difficult time understanding Mandarin.

The visual aids really helped. Since we didn't bring any 3-D visual aids with us, Chantal's sister Joanne also helped a lot by drawing all of the posters (she's an artist), including a lamb, altar, dead rat, etc. They also used black ink mixed in clean water to illustrate the effects of sin. For blood, they used some sort of red iodine and dripped it over the lamb (which was also covered with fluffy cotton). It made quite an impression!

I also had another unique opportunity to teach the adults (most of them are involved in some way with the orphanage) on our last day there. My father-in-law asked me to teach a session because he ran out of things to teach. Almost all of the adults there were illiterate, and so most of what he prepared could not be used (he's the kind of teacher who must writes on the board when he teaches). These adults were uneducated, and most became "Christians" because they were afraid of ghosts/demons/enemies (Communists) and was able to find peace in Christianity. With only two hours, I tried to communicate the Gospel message as clear as possible.

Because they couldn't read Chinese, I used diagrams (bridge diagram, Creator/creature distinction), visual aids (removing a leaf from a plant, using black ink in a bottled water, dead rat, lamb, etc.). Without going into all the details, I was able to communicate chronologically the four irreducibles of the Gospel — a Holy God, a helpless sinner, a sufficient substitute, and a personal faith — to them as best as I could. Because several of them were not of Chinese descent but from the local tribes, their Mandarin was very weak. I don't think everyone understood it well. However, the visual aids really helped anchor some of the key points.

My father-in-law decided to sit-in the class, and I was a bit nervous at first, but eventually I got rolling and was able to communicate better. I had almost no time to prepare (I learned about the change right before bedtime the night before!), but thankfully Chantal was there to help me with getting the visual aids, and actually convincing me that I could do some of the things I learned from GS in that two-hour session. It was my first time doing chronological teaching in Mandarin.

During our last night there, Pey-Lin, the Bible school student who also grew up in the orphanage, requested to sit down with Chantal, myself, and two other team members to ask questions about how to teach the young children. She had a real burden for the people there. We were encouraged by her heart and stayed up deep into the night, giving her some pointers about the basics of communicating the message of the Bible to her audience and praying with her. In the end, we all wished we could have spent more time with them to encourage them and help them grow in Christ.

When we left, I personally left with a renewed desire to do missions, to teach the Bible to those who never heard the Gospel and those who desire to learn more. I saw the many needs they had, but also how I still need to be better equipped with the Word of God and "spiritually conditioned" for a more effective ministry. I also felt that some team members have trouble considering full-time missions because, even though they have the burden, they succumb to the fear of leaving their secured job and/or the familiar and comfortable surroundings. It is not something I don't/won't struggle with, but I pray that God will always keep the burden of sharing His glorious Gospel upon our hearts, and that we will not put obedience to His calling above our own personal fears and desires. I thank God for the opportunity to spend time with these dear people.


"You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth" (Acts 1:8).