Today, we have been married five years!

Five years, with four of those spent in the little town of Mae Sot, Thailand.

And recently, one relaxing week spent on the beaches of southern Thailand to celebrate these five years! But more photos on that to come when I’m not in the middle of said relaxing.

Despite the many words filling this blog, I never know what to say of Stephen. He’s simply my best friend, and I’m so thankful he is willing to spend so many days and hours with me.

Our first year together was such fun, spent in the tiniest studio apartment and lived on the tiniest budget. I remember our evenings out to get Braum’s ice cream cones, a date for less than $3.  I remember turning the shower on full heat, completely empty, to warm up the room, simply because our water bill was included in the rent.

And then we took the leap to Thailand, where the last four years have just held more mayhem than we ever thought possible. I can confidently say I wouldn’t have made it without his unwavering patience, grace, and kindness to me. He has allowed me the space and safety to learn, to hurt, & to question. It is amazing to see him be the image of Christ to me, as well as to so many around us. He loves well.

And he has made it an adventure. He makes me laugh when we are really just frustratingly confused. He makes it romantic when we are really just in the armpit of Thailand. He is my best friend when the two worlds we live in feel so far apart.

I hope five years is just the beginning.

This is pretty much just that: our weekend, in photos. Please excuse the number of poor quality photos taken from an old iPhone. I was capturing the moment and quality was thrown out window more times than I realized!

We kicked off our Friday night with a community movie night! We had a friends’ projector this week, so we announced we’d be playing a movie, with Burmese subtitles at 6pm on Friday.  The kids were home from school all day on a holiday and were checking in every few minutes to see if we were still waiting until 6. They were excited!

We watched Despicable Me–a kid-friendly choice that seemed pretty safe. Stephen also found a website that had Burmese subtitles he could upload into the movie we already owned on iTunes. (I know, he’s a genius!)  It also has quite a bit of physical and slap-stick humor, so even those that can’t read or understand any of it were in for a good time.

And that worked out well, because the subtitles just didn’t exist for certain parts of the movie.

It was more fun than I would have guessed. We hung a white fabric from the window and everyone crowded into the driveway and onto the street, sitting on mats, climbing on our motorbike, and some standing the entire time.

It was such a great picture of community–to hear everyone laughing together, to hear one adult reading out the subtitles in the back for those that can’t read. It reminded me of two things: how grateful our neighbors are for the simplest things–a movie on concrete that they might partially understand; and how far a little bit of hope, joy, and laughter spreads.

Despite the poor quality of this photo, I love it. This mother and daughter laughed so loud throughout the entire film. They just enjoyed themselves so much that they were fun to watch.

On Saturday, I spent most of the day preparing for another dinner & movie night. A friend of ours recently had knee surgery and is out of commission for a few weeks, so we have hosted a movie night the past two Saturdays to get her out of the house and bring people together for dinner and some fun.  This week we had about 17 people planning to come eat lasagna, salad, & bread.

Thankfully, I had some helpers. Yaminoo chopped all of the tomatoes for the sauce…and only managed to catch her finger once 🙁

Lay Tah Oo wanted to help chop vegetables for Kayak, so he took a butter knife to some cucumbers. He would usually cut two, give one to Kayak, and then sit back to eat the other himself.

We also squeezed in a few games of Memory while things were baking or cooking, and Stephen oh-so-generously let Lay Tah Oo try out his cymbals.

This was oh-so-fun to him and oh-so-deafening to us. But that smile!

…And then we fed seventeen people dinner and watched Dan In Real Life, with no photos to capture it.

Sunday morning we made our usual trip to the tea shop & market at 8am. And despite the serious faces, they had fun!

We then went off to church, and for the first week, had some visitors join us!

We are really praying for this–that they will want to keep coming with us, that more will want to come. We are particularly praying for interested in the teenagers and adults; while we love bringing the kids, that is a lot of kids for us to keep up with!

There was a little mix-up, and we weren’t sure Jor Gee, the six-year-old boy, had permission to come. We had him wait at our home while we went to check with his mom, and he was in tears. She had said yes, so we went back to get him. As we were sitting in the service, his older sister Yedi, on the far left, said to me, “Yaminoo, Nyein Nyein, Yedi, Kelli, & Stephen–Jesus–happy! Jor Gee–no Jesus–sad. Yes Jesus–happy!”

That, in a very simple form–is my prayer! I pray that they see the joy and love in the Church, and ache to return with us week after week! We are really praying for this amazing opportunity for our neighbors to hear truth so clearly communicated in their language, and in some ways, for them to get a glimpse into why we do what we do!

Our Burmese church service was followed by an English home church, and then a walk to the Sunday market.  Just a kilometer or so from our house we can purchase some vegetables and gifts while we pass nearly everyone in the neighborhood and stop by the little stalls of many more.

And then we were off to take two women to a pregnancy & childbirth class being offered in town about 7pm. Another small charity is offering a twelve-week course for expectant mothers and leaders in the community. Two women have been regularly attending, and a couple others have visited. They also receive a bag of fresh vegetables to take home each week!

And then at 9pm, when we pick them up from class and call it a weekend.

Thankful today is a Sabbath Monday for us!

This little guy is in my Wednesday English class. He’s learning so fast and is so proud when I cheer him on.

And this week, he showed up with a little watch drawn on his arm, so he was right on time!

He is also the one that comes to get our recycling every day or every other day.  We have always separated out our recycling for the neighbors so that they can sell it as another income source.  He learned pretty quickly where we keep it in the kitchen, so he comes in every day or two and asks to use the bathroom so he can walk by and see if there is any recycling for his parents. I feel like they have a deal that if he brings it back for them to sell he can pick one or two things to keep himself.

In an effort to promote honesty–that he wants the recycling and really doesn’t have to go to the bathroom–I’m teaching him the word “recycling.” If you’ve ever seen the Friends episode where Pheobe teaches Joey to speak French, it’s going quite a bit like that. I say “recycling” and he says some other random assortment of consonants. Oh, well.

It is so fun to see the kids in our neighborhood grow up. It is so fun to see them understand puzzles and learn their alphabet and count to twenty! It is so fun to see them learn to share and learn to follow the rules. They are on holiday until November, so we have been having lots of play times in our house.

Some of them still struggle a bit with the puzzles 🙂

It has been so nice to see it go so well! They have learned not to write on the walls, so I don’t have to watch them like a hawk when they color. They have learned not to steal, so I don’t worry about every little toy and piece of candy and coloring book disappearing out the door. They have learned not to pass the curtains, so they don’t wander into our house. They have learned to ask to go the bathroom and get water, and they can go on their own without being supervised! They have learned to put a diaper on the littlest ones. They have learned to share!  It was fun to have things go so smoothly.

Yaminoo and I have been playing Memory together for years, and she just this week started letting her little four-year-old brother, Lay Ta Oo, play with us. She started teaching him to turn over two cards and try to remember matches; she will help him and point out which ones to turn over.

One afternoon Lay Ta Oo came over and asked to play Memory just the two of us. We haven’t tried this before, but I agreed. He dumped out the cards and said he was ready to play. The first four matches he had laid out in front of him, so he got those pretty quickly. Then he began to actually remember them, and he was so proud!

It was really fun to see what he had observed. Since Yaminoo has taught him by pointing out matches for him, he began pointing out matches for me. And since I always cheer the kids on for finding matches and tell them they are smart, Lay Ta Oo would do the same! Each time I’d get a match he’d cheer for me and try to say “Yay!” and “Very good!” It was pretty adorable.

By the end of the week he’s gotten good enough that he’ll correct Yaminoo. She would try to point out a match to him, and he’d cross his arms and defiantly choose two other cards–also a match–and smile so proudly at himself! It’s such fun to see him grow up, and this felt like a little rite of passage. I see lots of fun Memory games ahead!

Yaminoo–which I used to spell Yuh Meh Oo, but I’m now learning the way her documents spell it, and I’m thus trying to teach her the same–came over to cook with me on Friday.  She clearly had an announcement she had been rehearsing, and she paused in the kitchen and turned to say, “Tomorrow. And tomorrow. Yaminoo go to Myanmar. Five.”

I wanted to be sure I understood, so I repeated back, “In two days? Yaminoo will go to Burma for five days? Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday? Then Yaminoo will come back?”

I was a little worried about the coming back, so I repeated, “Yaminoo come back, right?” I really love this girl, so I wanted to be sure I understood.

She assured me she was coming back with a smile. We’ve had similar conversations before I leave. In the past she’s spent quite a lot of time at our house. Her household seems much more stable now, but in more unstable times she could be found at our house for most of the time between 3pm, when school finished, to 9 or 10pm at night.  I’ve always gone out of my way to make sure she knew before we were leaving, and that we’d be back after so many days, weeks, or months.

And now it was her turn to tell me she’d be traveling, but that she’d be back. She looked so proud for successfully communicating.

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Fast forward those two days, and we’re giving Yaminoo, her cousin, her two aunts, and her grandmother a ride out to the border.  We make it three-quarters of the way when our gas pedal loses all it’s oomph.  Literally, all oomph is when the throttle cable breaks, leaving you stranded on the side of the road.

We helped our friends and their bags load into a songtaew to go the rest of the way and Stephen took a look at our situation. As we pulled it over to the side of the highway, we were informed it couldn’t block any of the fruit and meat stands which line the sidewalks. So we pushed it further and on to a little side road.

And we called for help.

We were looking at this situation: a broken-down car on the side of a major highway, in one of the more shady areas of a shady little border town we call home. We weren’t really able to help our friends much after all. The heat of the day was bearing down on us, and we were now very late for our Burmese church service. The good friend and knowledgeable mechanic that we called was scheduled to preach for the second church service today–our expat home church–and Stephen was scheduled for worship. In both of them being huddled around the car, we were threatening to really mess up the plan for home church.

But so it is.

And we decided it most certainly could have been worse, so we’ll just choose to count our blessings!  While we were on the side of the road–an obvious group of traveling Burmese with plenty of bags and two white foreigners–police passed us and did not stop to “help.” Since not all of us were paper-bearing, that is a blessing!

Our friend, Matt, was a huge help by tying a cable to the throttle, threading it through the hood, and driving it to the shop by pulling the cable through the window. It’s pretty great that our little home church community takes time to actually be the church to each other, even when we have sermons to preach and songs to sing in just a couple hours.

We drank some nice iced coffee while we sat on the edge of the highway, and the fruit-stand woman certainly tried to have a friendly chat with us.

  News spread pretty quickly that we attempted to help get our friends to the border, but didn’t make it the whole way.  But our car is being fixed, and we got a nice laugh with the community about what they labeled our “cheap car.”

 It’s nice that we all get by with a little help from our friends!

Disclaimer: This is version twelve-and-something of this post. It’s been rewritten and reconsidered and rethought more times than I could count. But I keep wrestling through it, particularly in the events in our neighborhood over the past week. Ultimately, I wanted to post it not because it is right or finished, but because it is a part of our story here. It is a part of our heart breaking for these people and wrestling through black and white in a very gray world. It’s part of a learning process.

“I am not who I want to be, but I am on the journey there, and thankfully I am not who I used to be.”
Erwin McManus, Soul Cravings

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It’s a holiday this week. It’s a Burmese Buddhist holiday, so not everyone is celebrating; but all our neighbors certainly are. The positives include a week without school for the kids and a variety of Burmese snacks being brought to our door throughout the day. There are fancy dresses and photos to be taken. The negatives include cheap, poorly made fireworks being set off by children we love from before 7am to midnight. That is a lot of loud, near-hospital-visit fireworks.

As part of the holiday celebration, people line their homes with candles at night. It is absolutely beautiful, and if it didn’t signify that we were Buddhist, I would certainly join in. Instead, it is a reminder of the vast number of homes that need prayer, love, and hope.

I think about faith and religion and truth so often here; I take it in and ruminate on it for months and years. Because really, this is why we are here. I don’t want to help our neighbors temporarily, and to be honest, I really can’t. They will likely still be poor and marginalized; they will likely still lack papers or education or access to healthcare. Development is a slow game.

But can I be really, really honest? I don’t want them to just pray a prayer, either. I don’t want them to just accept Christ to escape hell; I want them to know Him.

And that’s where the rubber meets the road, and I have to wrestle through verses and pray through why I’m here and ask questions of why we live on the support of the Church. What do we pray for? What are we working for?

I want them to know eternal hope. I want them to experience Christ in a way that changes them.  I want them to see the way Christ changes our country and our marriage and our money and our afternoons and our discipline of children and our trash and our friendships and our breakfast. I want them to see Christ in our smiles and in our sleep and in our words. I want them to see Christ in our language learning and our books and in our car.

Because that’s where He is!  He is in all of those things for us, and he is revolutionizing and challenging the way we see all of these things and make our decisions about these things.  And when I see how beautiful it is in our lives–the redemption, the grace, the blessing, the hope that encircles our car, breakfast, trash, and marriage–I want that for them!

I don’t want them to pray a prayer and stop there.  I see this analogy of a mansion and a tent–“I have experienced the mansion of Christ! It is beautiful, and it is worth living my life for! Oh, but here’s a tent for you. I’m sure it will get you through the rain.”

That is how we live here! We are always the ones in the “mansion”–our two bedroom house with walls–while they live in “tents.” That is what the world has offered them!  That’s not what Christ has offered. Christ has offered something far greater, and that is what we ache for.

I wrestle through this constantly. How do we communicate this? How do I even communicate it to you?

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I was reminded of all this again as I was driving in the car. We don’t have a working radio|music-player-of-any-kind, so I was singing. A song from way back came into my head, a favorite from high school. It’s a Jars of Clay song, Love Song for a Savior.

In open fields of wild flowers
She breathes the air and flies away
She thanks her Jesus for the daises and the roses
In no simple language
Someday she’ll understand the meaning of it all
He’s more than the laughter or the stars in the heavens
As close a heartbeat or a song on her lips
Someday she’ll trust Him and learn how to see Him
Someday He’ll call her and she will come running
And fall in His arms and the tears will fall down and she’ll pray,
I want to fall in love with You

While I was singing through this verse and chorus, God brought a picture into my head of one of the little girls in our community. I imagined her all grown up, smelling the flowers and thanking Jesus for them. I imagined her remembering her childhood and finally understanding why we played Memory so many times and why I gave her hug after hug. I imagined her learning trust, running to Christ, and praying to fall in love with Him.

And then there were the faces of so many little girls from our neighborhood. And moms and grandmothers. Seeing Christ in the flowers and in laughter; learning trust and prayers; calling to him and hearing him answer.

I was just struck by how much I want them to know that–mansions of love, hope, grace. Mansions of starry nights and wild flowers and laughter and music.

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Sometimes I get lost in the theology. I ask myself, but what if they don’t have a tent or a mansion? Maybe a tent isn’t a mansion, but then wouldn’t a tent be better than nothing at all?  And maybe a mansion is just a pursuit of some castle I can’t even comprehend this side of heaven.

I want them to know Christ here, yes.  But if they accept him here; if they do just pray a prayer–they may not truly experience Him here, but they will in eternity. And I can’t claim to fully experience Him here, either–we are all only seeing in a mirror dimly (1 Corinthians 13:12).

I find myself in more theology than I know how to swallow. I don’t want to get lost in the language or the analogy, really; I want to get lost in the Savior.

I want to know him and experience him so that I ache for the same for them.  I want to love our neighbors so deeply and so tangibly that I ache for them to experience him, too; that it is a prayer constantly on my lips. I want a passion for Him that creates a passion for them that comes out in every Band-Aid, Memory game, and alphabet song.

I want to live so that we are seeking a community mansion. A community that knows him and experiences Him–as much as we can here, but ultimately in eternity. A community that sees Christ in the day to day, and will someday know him fully.