Today I left Aiden with Joshua and joined a team of people in traveling to a Mien village. We traveled for about 45 minutes on a normal Thai road and then for about 25 minutes on a twisty-turning-up-and-down road.

I must stop here and share with you about Thai roads. They do drive British-style so you drive on the left side of the road. To a person who grew up in the US the road looks like it has only two lanes, one going one way and the other going the other way. The truth of the matter is that there is actually 4 lanes and occasionally 5 lanes on the road. The motorbikes travel to the far left, the cars going in the same direction are just to the right of that and then there is some crazy passing action that happens when a car and/or motorbike is going too slow. Oh, not to mention the dogs, chickens, walkers, bicyclers, and other such traffic sharing the road with you. Driving is exciting here, thank goodness we are not the ones behind the wheel!

Anyway, I will take you back to that stomach-churning road in my story:

By the end of the trip I was beginning to feel a bit ill and then I found out that the last 4 miles or so had only been paved in the last month! Wow, I would have been even more queasy if there had not been any pavement.

The reason that we were going to the village was because there are about 6 Christians there and they do not have a church. The closest church is 10 kilometers away on a very bad unpaved road and the fact that it is the rainy season has made that church fairly inaccessible to these Christians. We were going to have some worship time with the Christians and encourage them to remain strong.

On the way, we stopped a few times at the Christians' houses to let them know we were there. It had rained all day today so they were home and ready to meet when we got there. We walked across a rickety bamboo bridge to get to the house where we were going to meet. Taking our shoes off at the door, we sat on a plastic mat which covered the cement floor and began to sing worship songs. I do not, of course, speak Thai much less Mien so I sat and enjoyed the sound of my brother's and sister's worship and prayed for them.

One of the Mien workers from the clinic then told a story from the book of Daniel. The Old Testament has not yet been translated for the Mien so this team has been trying to tell them stories from the Old Testament with accompanying pictures so that they can understand how God works.

After that we had prayer time. I found out that the house we were meeting in belongs to a man who had just become a Christian in the last month. Previous to that he had been involved in drug stuff and so some people were wanting to kill him. He had been shot and decided that he wanted to follow Jesus. He asked for prayer since people were still wanting to kill him. There was also a request from a woman whose husband is a Christian but who is unable to quit drinking alcohol.

After praying together, we asked if anyone at the meeting had any minor medical needs since we had brought a big box of meds from the clinic. Ryan became the point person for helping to decide who needed what.

These are some prayer requests for this village other than the ones mentioned above that I wanted to share with you:

1. For the Christians' continued growth
2. For their witness to their neighbors
3. For the Old Testament to be translated into their language
4. For some sort of literacy class to be set up so the Christians can read the Bible on their own even when there is not outsiders to bring worship to them.

Thank you for your prayers!