Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely

The last few weeks have been some of the darkest weeks of my life. I have felt very much alone, even though I've been surrounded by people.  I have had to fight, fight the hardest I have ever had to fight in my life to keep my thoughts glorifying to Christ. I can't iterate enough how hard, dark, and alone I have felt.

Then on one of the last nights on Bangla we were walking down the street and I heard this very familiar song coming out from the bars. I was flashed back to middle school with these lyrics from the Backstreet Boys:

Show me the meaning of being lonely
Is this the feeling I need to walk with
Tell me why I cant be there where you are
Theres something missing in my heart  
Theres nowhere to run
I have no place to go
Surrender my heart, body and soul  

 Usually the bars are filled with LOUD, dance music; not a soft ballad, but this song couldn't be more appropriate. The bars on Bangla are filled with very lonely people; whether it's the men looking for company, or the girls looking to find a husband. They are lonely and I was lonely. But you see I hold the answer to being lonely...Jesus.

Even though I felt alone, and just when I was about to give up, I would hear His soft sweet voice whisper to me, "You're not alone." I was reminded how when Jesus was betrayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, and when Peter denied Him, and the disciples fled. How on the cross, Christ cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" If anyone knows loneliness it's Christ and He comforted me like no one else could. When I was longing for someone to embrace me and just hold me to let me feel that everything would be okay, I would feel His presence and His peace and His warmth.

It wasn't until last night when I was talking with one of my good friends that I learned why God was allowing me walk through this. Sometimes we seek people to fill the void, the void that only He is meant to fill. Alcohol, sex, drugs, relationships, movies, napping, all the ways of escaping, they won't fill that void. You will eventually sober up and remember what you were trying to forget. The climax will come and go. The high will pass. The movie will eventually end, and you will have to come back to reality. And you will wake up from the nap and the issues will still be there. What I learned is that sometimes the Lord has to take everything away so that we will realize He is everything. Which reminds me of these lyrics by Lifehouse that we sang during worship:

Cause you're all I want, you're all I need
You're everything, everything
You're all I want
You're all I need

He is everything, and if He has to strip me of the things I hold most for me to realize that so be it; because He will be strength and He will be with me.

Worship Changes Things

Have you ever been in a funk? You know, when it seems like nothing is going right and the enemy takes hold of your thoughts and you begin to believe the lies he is telling you? I am going to be really vulnerable right now and am going to tell you that's where I have been. The past few weeks have been really hard on me. It all started on the night of my birthday. You know that ONE day where everything is supposed to go your way. Satan sucks like that.  We came back from being out on Bangla and that's when the attacks started. I began to feel useless and that I was a disappointment to my Daddy. I began to doubt everything He had been doing through me. I felt like He had run out of grace for me. I was so frustrated with myself for believing the lies. All I wanted to do that next day was to stay in bed and cry. I might have actually done that... That night, just like every night, we had a worship service. I was torn. I wanted to worship but only half out of anguish and half out of my praise. Then something unexpected happen, and I don't remember what song it was, but the Lord told me to get off the ground and to stand up, and the Holy Spirit took over. Something changed in me. You see, it's very hard to worship the Lord when you are feeling sorry for yourself or beating yourself up for things you did or didn't do. See, I worship a good God. A God who is full of GRACE and MERCY, and FORGIVENESS. So when I turned the focus off myself and onto God, my countenance changed. I was full of His joy. Worship changes you.Worship changes the atmosphere around you. Our worship changes how we see Bangla. Worship will change Thailand. Worship is the fuel of missions. We all exist to worship Jesus Christ and to live a life that is glorifying to Him. We are to glorify Him with our thoughts, actions, words, and lives.

There is this picture/painting in my parents house that says, "Don't let the turkey's get you down," and Satan is one big,old, fat, ugly turkey. So I say to him, "Get behind me Satan," and I worship.

Innocence Restored

While driving to Georgia for training camp a short 2 months ago, my mother asked me, "What do you want to get out of this trip?" My only response was restoration. I wanted to see restoration in my girls and in Thailand. 

One of my favorite songs that we sing during worship is a song called "Zerubbabel"  by Rick Pino. The lyrics are pretty simple, and repetitive, but oh so deep and prophetic. The words, "When I'm with my Daddy, my innocence is restored" are repeated throughout the song. Little did I know just how prophetic that song would be as it would be the theme for the next few nights of bar ministry.

While walking down Bangla I saw a father walking through the street with his two daughters. One of the girls was bawling. I can only assume it was because of what she was seeing on Bangla. It would be very overwhelming and frightening to a young child. It's very loud and there are so many people. Instead of getting angry at her father, I prayed that she would feel her Heavenly Father's arms around her, protecting her.

Then when we walked back to the mall and waited for the other teams to get back, a young girl approached us. She was probably around 7 or 8 and came up to me and put this flower necklace around my neck and kissed my cheeks and then asked for 100 baht. I told her that I couldn't buy her flowers and tried to put them around her neck. She took them back and angrily walked away.  My heart instantly broke for her. She has to work and sell these flowers before she can go home. But the profits do not go to her, they go to either her parents or her owner. As she walked away I heard the Lord whisper to me, " I am going to restore her innocence." Her childhood has been taken away from her, and she is growing up way to fast. All I could do was pray that He would protect her.

The next night that I went out, we went to visit one of my friends. We played jenga and had so much fun. I noticed that several people had written on the jenga pieces. Words like "Beautiful Creation" "Jesus is real" and "Jesus Loves You" as well as various names had been written on the jenga pieces. I knew the Lord was prompting me to write something on a jenga piece. I had no idea what to write until it hit me, "Innocence Restored" so that exactly what I did. I asked my friend if I could write on the jenga piece and she handed me a marker.




The Lord has been so faithful. I have seen Him restore the innocence in my team and He is restoring the innocence of all those on Bangla Road.

God in a Box

Thailand is a  very broken place. The people that are here are looking for something, but what they are looking for won't satisfy in the end. While we were prayer walking at the Big Buddha, I saw this depiction of Buddha. He was in a glass box. I was immediately reminded of the other glass boxes I had seen in Phuket, the ones on Bangla Road. In these glass boxes women from Russia dance with the intention of enticing the male tourists to enter into the closed bars, where only God knows what happens. Both Buddha and the girls are idols and are on display. 
Now, the girls don't want to be there, but their bosses require them to and they are forced to do their job. It's heart breaking to think about what these girls are forced to do, and I am righteously angry at the men who force them to do it. Their bosses know that the tourists on Bangla are searching for some adult entertainment for the night, and want to provide them that service. Those bar owners are preying on the men and are objectifying the women. To be frank, most of the men on Bangla worship sex, and their god is in a box. 
As I passed this Buddha in the glass box at Big Buddha, the song "God's Not Dead" by the Newsboys came to mind:
Let love explode and bring the dead to life
A love so bold to see a revolution somehow
Now I'm lost in Your freedom
And this world I'll overcome

My God's not dead
He's surely alive
He's livin on the inside
Roaring like a lion


Buddha was a good guy who lived a good life but when he died, he stayed dead. However, there is only one man who ever lived, who died, arose from the dead, and NEVER died again. That man, my friend, is Jesus Christ, the living God. The first born of all creation. Phuket, Thailand is full of people who are spiritual DEAD. I am here to show them the new LIFE they can have in Christ. The true FREEDOM, in which they are slaves to sin no more.

Shine at the Shrine

A few days ago we had the opportunity to go on a little prayer walk around our neighborhood. Our contacts took us to the dam.It is absolutely beautiful up there. We then hiked up this little hill and arrived at this shrine:

We were told that the parents in this neighborhood send their children up to this shrine to have sex and become pregnant.  However, for the past few months they have been sending teams up there to pray and a few weeks ago they were talking with people in the village and they have stopped sending their kids up there, because the shrine has “LOST IT’S POWER.”

While we were up there I couldn’t help but have this feeling that this was a place where INNOCENSE had been LOST, I was overcome with grief for all the young girls, who are now mothers. I  prayed that the cycle would end.  A lot of women enter the sex industry in Thailand because of the abuse they endured as children. When does it stop? We began to pray for the people in this village that they would come to know Christ who is Healer, Restorer, and Lover of our souls. We prayed that they would have an encounter with the Living God, who is the giver of life, and that they would learn to love their daughters as Christ loved the Church.  The Lord urges us in Song of Solomon several times “that you not stir up or awaken love until it pleases” (2:7, 3:5, 8:4). This is for our own good! The young men now have this desire and their fathers urge them to pursue it, not knowing the damage they are doing to their body and souls. The daughters now carry this huge responsibility of being a mother, and perhaps even feelings of shame.  They are growing up too fast. Bangla Road will not look different until the daughters of Thailand are seen as women of Worth. Christ thought them worthy, and died for them, we think they are worthy too, and we will fight for them!

Cool note: Another group went up to prayer walk the next day, and one of the beds was broken. Sin is losing its power!