Video Online!

Our Thailand Journey video is available online via YouTube!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKsWHDKYqcw

Hope you enjoy!

A Big THANK YOU!

Well, now that the team has made it safely back home with family & friends, Lisa and I want to express our gratitude to everyone in Mississippi involved in this trip. We understand that there is a great multitude who were unable to come to Thailand, but made the trip possible through their prayers and support. We are all members of God's family and it has been a privilege to serve with you. I pray our partnership will strengthen and mature as we continue to serve Him together.

The trip was a great success. We were able to gather important information and interview many Northern Thai people. As I shared with the team, I had more opportunities to speak the Truth of God's Word in one week than I normally would in a month. The team was a blessing to a struggling Baptist church in Lampang, a missionary family, and countless others along the way. We need to do this again!

It is not easy to describe what we did - prayer walking and ethnographic research just does not capture it. I've challenged the team to find a better way to communicate what they saw, did, and experienced, and how the Lord may be leading us to be strategically involved in His process of calling the Northern Thai to Himself. I wish I could be with you as they give their reports.

I do know this - the team saw the Northern Thai people. Lovely people who are more like us than different. They just don't know the joy of having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Please join us as we continue to pray.

Thanks again for sending the team. Russell & crew, thanks for coming - you are good people!

We love y'all,

Mark & Lisa, Luke, Adrian & Andy

back in the U.S.!

on the ground in San Francisco. Travel has been just fine. waiting on next flight to memphis, then to Jackson. Almost home!

Elephants, Vans and Airplanes

Well, we are officially on our way home! We started the day by riding elephants "just for fun" and then hopped a Thai Airways 737 back to Bangkok. We'll be taking off from Bangkok at 6 a.m. Thank you so much for praying for us! Please continue! We can't wait to see you all!

....and a Song in our hearts

Greetings! Today was another great day in Thailand. We spent the day in the "county seat" of the area, the city of Song. The three groups spent the day prayer walking and mapping the area just like we have done in Lampang, rural Phrae province and now Song. We mapped several Buddist temples (wats) and a Hope Christian Church. We also mapped some Presbyterian churches in Phrae and the outlying areas.

We continued to be blessed by our hosts, Lisa and Mark Patenaude. Mark and his family have been unbelievable hosts to us throughout our journey. Mark has been with us since our arrival in Chiang Mai and will be the one to drop us at the airport to go home. They are constant translators, travel agents, waiters, coordinators and overall "Thai experts". I know it has been taxing for him to be away from his family for this time, as it has been for us to be away from ours. We ask for your continued prayers for Mark, Lisa and the kids and their ministry here in Northern Thailand.

Our other constant blessing is our translator, Khun Ja. We would not have been able to accomplish many of our mission goals, eat, sleep or go to the bathroom without her unbelievable ability to translate between English and Thai. She is a dedicated Thai warrior for the Kingdom and is a very special friend to our team. We ask for your prayers for Ja as she continues with us on this journey to Chiang Mai tomorrow and then back to her home in Bangkok via bus. She will be traveling to Montana in January for mission training and hopefully she will be able to come and visit us in Mississippi during her year in the states.

We are all excited about this final leg of our trip. As I mentioned, we travel to Mark and Lisa's house tomorrow for a Mexican treat (yum) and then to Chiang Mai. We will do some shopping tomorrow night, ride an elephant the next morning and hop a plane to Bangkok!!

The Lord continues to bless this trip and I hope he has blessed you through it. Thank you again for your continued prayer support. Talk to you from Chiang Mai!

Photo Gallery

We have uploaded quite a few pictures to a new page on the web. They are grouped by person and by different days. Not as organized as would like, but at least they are where you can see them!

http://picasaweb.google.com/bluffcitydawg

enjoy

Same same, but different

Today we left the city of Phrae to visit Mark and Lisa's community. This was the side of Thailand that many of us wanted to see. Being from a rural area, the members of our team were glad for a break from the city.







Wherever we went, we were surrounded by rice in abundance. And the rice was surrounded by mountains. But every so often, when we least expected it, the area looked eerily like the world we left behind one week ago.










The people, as we expected, proved to be very gracious hosts. One of our groups had the opportunity to witness to the "mayor" of one village. (His picture is at the top of this entry.)Even sitting there in the shadow of a wat, he took one of our tracts. We talked openly about our different religious beliefs. Pray for this seed that was sown, please!

Other groups marked sites in the community and did prayer-walking also. The food today was out of this world. (We might come home with a few recipe books.)






Tomorrow is our last day of work, and it is very hard to believe how quickly our time here on the ground has passed. Soon we will be on our way back home! Our prayer is that God will use this work to reach the Northern Thai people. Please continue to pray for these new friends.