Sometimes dreams take a long time in coming.
Years ago Stephen wanted to work toward unifying the multilingual Church that surrounds us. There are so many different languages and backgrounds, but he wanted to have worship songs available in different languages in a way that it would be easy for everyone to sing together in the language of their choice. Ultimately, he hopes to have resources like this available to churches around this region, including recordings in difficult languages, translated chord charts, and more.
To start, it was a worship night, that has taken on different looks in different seasons of our life and of the Mae Sot community.
This month, Stephen worked really hard to gather together young leaders from the Karen, Burmese, and Thai community around us. They worked together to gather what songs are already translated and have the information available. They practiced to sing together, with different verses being led in different languages.
We also partnered with multiple para-church organizations in town to have a big enough space in the rain and to have a full band. It was a group effort to say the least, and that made it more amazing to see it happen last night.
Fifty or sixty people came, from different countries, backgrounds, statuses and ages. We all sang together in four languages.
It was beyond beautiful, and a really lovely step into this dream.
The Reinforcers were both scheduled to run sound, but only one was able to come due to a family situation. Because of the system Stephen chose for them, The Reinforcers are able to run it all from an iPad, which allowed him to sit in the audience with friends and sing along while he ran sound for the whole event. And while I don’t really know how to describe it to you–because you have to know him, to know his story, to know how much we pray for him and love him–but to see him using a new skill confidently among his peers, while singing along in Burmese and English; to see him really enjoying himself at a “church event”–it was a great opportunity. Sometimes church here can be very structured, for lack of a better word, and we want so badly to show this community how loving Jesus can be fun and natural and a part of your life; not just a boring sermon on Sunday.
We also had three teenage girls from the community join, able to sing alongside Christians from their school and in their own language, right alongside us.
It was a culmination of a lot of good things, and we are just celebrating that we got to be a part of it!