Thida and her family are such dear friends of ours. She reminds me regularly that I need to open a restaurant to sell bread, cakes, and all the meals they’ve ever tasted. She says she’ll be the kitchen manager and it will be so successful. She even tells me often that they’ll move their whole family to Burma with us if we’d prefer to open a business there!
Her husband built them a beautiful new house about three months–it sits back across a river, so you cross a handmade bamboo bridge to get into a shaded piece of ground, surrounded by trees. The house is beautiful, with three small rooms, a living area, and a kitchen. It’s the most elaborate shack I’ve encountered, with a collection of materials pieced creatively together. After building, they didn’t have electricity at their house, but would have to pay to have the government wire it out to them, particularly being Burmese. So they waited a few months without electricity, coming to our house each afternoon with a selection of flashlights and phones to recharge for their family of 12.
And just weeks ago, they got electricity to their new place. They they bought a refrigerator.
This is where she came to me: they had bought a large fridge for about $75, used from somewhere. She said her husband had told her last night: Stephen & Kelli use their fridge much more, making bread & cakes and such; and they have a smaller fridge. Why don’t we just trade? They could use the big fridge and we would be fine with the small one.
This pretty much melted my heart. For her family of twelve, she wants to trade me for my 4 foot fridge, so that we can have a larger one for all our baking? The sweetest.
At this point, we’ve declined–I feel like I could just go buy one out of savings, but we’re making do! It doesn’t feel like a necessity yet. And she does have a family of 12!
And more than anything, I’m just honored that we do life together, with a willingness to swap appliances. She has been such a picture of Christ to me, even as I don’t know exactly where she’d say she is on her faith journey. We’re just having lots of conversations, and ultimately, I think she grasps the idea the church and the love of Jesus more than many of us.
“And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.”
Acts 2:44-45