a gift.

For those of you who have followed along, I think it’s quite obvious we spend many of our days in over our heads.

We live in a border town, working in a poor migrant community, operating in a different language. Now raising our recently-adopted toddler. We have a few small side businesses we support: local bread & flowers sales, sound reinforcement, a sewing project. We teach English to about sixty kids every week; we attend a local church in another language. We provide cajon, guitar, and (new!) singing lessons every week for the youth.

Oh, and we live overseas, trying to keep all of our paperwork up to date while we wait for our son’s paperwork to be completed.

There are two of us.

Yeah, I think we’re in over our heads.

And if you’ve followed us for the past decade, this isn’t a sudden realization. We’ve spent plenty of years praying for help, seeking it, and waiting for it. We have trained up neighbors to help in various ways and delegated whatever we could; even if that meant teaching a new language or skill.

And more than anything, we’ve just let God provide and amaze us and care for us.

And he has, again.

We’d love for you to meet Lun Ngai. We’ve known her for a few years; she’s been our Burmese teacher and my self-defense teacher. She helped teach our Life Skills classes for community dinner last year and helped us translate for our Family Christmas. She’s a dear friend.

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And now, she’s a team member!

(Our lives are so odd I’m not sure I know how to put this into text, but I’ll try.)

She recently resigned from her job at a local organization and she’s attending a Bible school part-time. She’s continuing to teach us Burmese weekly, and we began to explore options of how we could work together.

She’s excited about community ministry. She’s excited about women and families and youth. And as of March, she’s excited to join us!

For the foreseeable future, she’ll be attending Bible school classes part-time, and she’ll be teaching both Burmese & English classes around Mae Sot for some income. Since it is difficult to raise support in the local church, we are also transferring some of our monthly support to her, to allow her to serve in our community, too.

She’s already jumped in with the youth and kids; she’s helping with our Summer Book Club and she’s teaching every Saturday at Schoolhouse (more on both of those to come!).

We have been planning a bible study to lead up to Easter that was scheduled to begin last Friday; she’s been helping us prepare and pray through this. It’s now on hold until we know how Covid-19 is handled locally; but we’re still excited to have her help us!

We are beyond thankful to have her with us. While we both operate in Burmese most days, talking about difficult things in another language is challenging and risky. We are really thankful to have another Christian working with us, who speaks Burmese and is the culture in ways we will never be able to know or be.

And so we’re thankful! I don’t really have the words, except to say we’re so excited for where God is going to take this, and my heart is grateful every time she walks in the door.