Not sure how many of you grew up with Sandi Patti playing from a cassette tape, but this title is inspired by her.

We went to see Aung Moo in the hospital today, and he is doing miraculously better!  He is not intubated, and he is able to talk and eat. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a Burmese translator today, so we don’t know how sanely he is talking. But he is talking. Currently, he is restrained because he keeps attempting to pull out his IV and catheter.

The nurses seemed pretty optimistic, but they are a little annoyed. Usually family members stay up at the hospital to help feed him, change his catheter bag, and other housekeeping tasks.  We learned today that his friends stopped staying with him at the hospital because the nurses and doctors kept asking for money for his care. They were nervous, and decided to stop coming. We are going up with a few friends in the morning to talk to the nurses, request that they not ask his friends for money, and try to win back some points by providing people to care for him. I think this will also help with some confusion, for him to have friends and familiar faces explaining the situation and procedures being done.

From what we understand, he is still receiving antibiotics, and we don’t yet know the extent of damage caused to his brain. However, Stephen and I were both absolutely floored to see how well he was doing. He is breathing on his own! He is moving! He can speak!  After seeing him last week seizing in our living room and then lying motionless to a beeping respirator while the nurses asked what type of cremation they should do, this is a miracle in and of itself.

Please continue to pray for his healing, particularly for any brain damage that was caused by the encephalitis. And really, pray for God to be glorified in this miracle–in our community, in the hospital, and in Aung Moo’s life!

See all these long pauses?

I write a little snippet here and a little snippet there, but honestly, I’m leaving out some wonderful stories in between. And some horrible ones, too. I keep pausing.

And today, I asked myself why. Why I am not writing anymore?

I’m fearful. I’m chickening out–what to say, how to say it, how it will be read. Thankfully, fear destroying my blogging life is a small loss. Life continues whether I blog or not.

But the problem is much greater. I’m realizing that fear is consuming other areas of my life and heart.

I’m fearful of the decisions Stephen and I are currently making: that we’ll make them wrong, that we will ask the wrong questions; that we will be foolish or impatient or slow or selfish. I’m fearful for our marriage, that we will struggle and not recover, that we will create negative cycles, that I will fail. I’m fearful that God won’t provide for our finances–for today, for this year, or for later in life.  I’m fearful of myself: the sin I am capable of, the mistakes I am making; the choices and responses I have every day.

We have spent the past few days in Chiang Mai, where we had some good meetings, albeit challenging. We had one meeting in particular yesterday that went really well, honestly. God answered some big prayers and we both left optimistic. But even in my optimism, I told Stephen in a skeptical tone that I was “maybe even a little bit optimistic.” Even in my hope, I am fearful.

Due to these meetings being had, we have some big decisions in front of us this week. And even as I think of them, fear overcomes me.

So we are praying against fear, and I wanted to ask you to pray that with us. I know, we have asked this so much recently. I am still asking. Please pray that we, and particularly I, would be trusting.  Please pray for wisdom in the decisions being made. We are particularly praying that we would “be wise as serpents and as innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16).

May the long pauses end soon and may trust envelope us.

Stephen loves music, and we have tried to bring over many of his instruments to allow him to continue to pursue music from here. Through our trips over and with the help of visitors, we have a studio equipped with an acoustic guitar, a keyboard, an electric guitar, bass guitar, djembe, ukelele, and a backpack guitar.

He is pretty equipped to play whatever he wants. Well, almost.

One of his favorite pastimes while sitting in the car is playing drums: on the steering wheel, his knee, the gear shift, the dashboard, my knee, and my headrest. After a recent performance, he decided, “I think drums is what I miss playing the most. I really miss being able to play drums.”

“What else could you miss? Don’t you have most every thing else here, where you can just play it when you want? That’s probably why you don’t miss those things. If you do miss them, you just play them.”

Long pause.

“Yeah. That’s probably why. But I still miss drums the most.”

This won’t be long, due in part to exhaustion and also in a lack of knowledge. We are now in Chiang Mai and reliant on friends in Mae Sot to keep us updated on Aung Moo, the man with meningoencephalitis, and the community.

As of today, Aung Moo is still alive–a miracle in and of itself–and he is improving! I was told that he now moving, but when I asked if he was consciously moving and awake, she wasn’t sure.  Either way, we do know that the treatment is helping, as are the prayers!  Please keep them coming. We are praying for continued healing, continued awareness, and for healing from any brain damage caused by the encephalitis.

Thank you for the prayers, please continue to pray for Aung Moo and the entire community. We’ll update as we know more.

Let’s see.

I went for a run about 4:30pm, trying to pray for our friend in the hospital and think it all through. But then I didn’t want to run back home, so I started toward where Stephen was at a friends’ house, teaching their teenage daughter for her photography class. I met him just as he was leaving and promptly burst into tears.

And my wise husband decided we should start by calling some friends and going to pray at the hospital.  Yim, who I just love more as we continue to work together, called another staff member, Pranee, & her husband to come to the hospital. Pranee’s husband is a local Burmese pastor, and they are an incredible couple working to share Christ in the migrant communities.

Just as we were leaving our house, Mo Bya came over to get an update. I shared what I knew and said we were going to pray. He and the friend with him said they’d go up to the hospital to visit him, and they’d be right behind us on their bicycles.

We gathered around the hospital bed to pray, obviously creating a scene: three white Americans, one Thai-Karen, one Thai-Shan, and one Chinese-Burman gathered around the bed. Midway through our prayers, eight people from the community arrived and gathered around. We prayed for healing, we prayed for the community; we prayed for God to be glorified.

While we are gone, we asked Pranee & her husband to be a contact for them–we gave them some of our community fund so that the community can contact them for help. We are really thankful for this, feeling like they have somewhere to go and to a couple that really, really loves the Lord.

The nurses asked about resuscitation and what we would do with the body if he died. They are skeptical, telling us the slight chances he has. We spent over an hour talking together.

And now, we are just praying. We are giving thanks for friends that will come along to help with translation and give prayer and love this community as much as we do. We are giving thanks for the community support–he has constantly had friends at his side. We are giving thanks that we have another opportunity to show our neighbors where our love and hope lies. We are giving thanks that it appears this is a less-contagious strand of meningitis.

And we are praying for big things, maybe even bigger than we were before. We are praying that he will be healed and without brain damage. We are praying that our neighbors, the doctors and nurses, other patients, and even our friends around us will see that God is big and He heals and He loves even the least of these.  We are praying that God will be glorified.

He is already using these circumstances to draw us to Him and to His work in us.  Now we are praying He will use these circumstances to bring others to know Him. I hope we are blessed with “just enough foolishness to believe we can make a difference in the world” (Franciscan benediction).  I hope we are persistent enough to bother & to beat down with our continual coming, but find that “God gives justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night” (Luke 18).

Please, continue to pray with us. Pray for miracles with us.

I went back to the hospital this afternoon to check on our patient from yesterday. We learned that he was misdiagnosed. Instead of being in a detox, he has meningitis with encephalitis, or meningoencephalitis. He is in the ICU, and his prognosis is poor.

Please pray for him.
Pray for his three friends, sitting with him at the hospital.
Pray for the community, that meningitis won’t spread.
Pray for wisdom for everyone involved.
Pray that everything would somehow be to the glory of God.

This is all hitting me very hard. Seeing the very real possibility of this man dying, who was just in my house yesterday; knowing that we could have been his only encounter with Christ and hope. Seeing the hopelessness and sorrow in his friends’ eyes. Feeling such a deep love for this community and being so helpless in so many ways.

We are going to Chiang Mai tomorrow, and we’re trying to determine how to know about his situation and watch for more cases while we are gone. God is good, and he knows exactly how this will turn out. He knows exactly how He will be glorified. But please pray with us.