Baby boy
After I made the decision to come back to the States to help my family I had about a week in Thailand to do ministry and wrap up a few things before leaving. I was able to spend time down at the border and even go with my whole team to visit our villages across the border, filling my heart up before having to leave.
While arranging things for my team to cross the border for a day trip, I asked our contact to stop by one of the villages to check on a mom and baby boy we were providing formula to (she wasn’t producing enough milk to provide all her baby needed). I got a call back that mom and baby were doing great, but that they were now having to share the formula since a there was an orphaned one-week old baby in the village. What?! I didn’t even know that a woman in the village was pregnant! Thankfully we have a supporter that has committed to paying for the formula for the first baby boy, and another ministry in town was able to donate formula that day so we could get more to them right away.
When we visited the village a few days later I brought some photos that I had developed from previous trips to give to the people in the pictures. They were flipping through the photos, handing them out, when they got to one picture I heard several people softly gasp… everyone gathered around and said, “it’s her”. Unbeknownst to me, I had taken a picture of the mother who passed away and brought it with me.
My heart broke. I knew the momma. I didn’t know her name, but I knew her smile and her face. I knew her three year old daughter was just getting to the point where she was no longer afraid of us. This was a sweet young mom who had a beautiful smile and you could see her love for her daughter. And now she was gone.
We asked lots of questions trying to get the story of what happened to leave a two week old baby boy without a family. Apparently the mom had her baby at a hospital in another town, but three days after giving birth she died of a heart attack. The father lives and works somewhere else and has the daughter. I’m not exactly sure if it’s a sister or just a really close friend who’s family has taken in the newborn, but we got to sit in her house and hold this precious baby boy.
With the reality of children and babies being sold for sex, slavery and even body parts I get nervous when children are unwanted or parents are to poor to provide for them (I don’t know what I would do if anything ever happened to the kids I visit). I was so relieved to realize that the ‘adoptive mom’ is a woman that I know from the village! She is an amazing mother of two young boys who has lovingly opened her home to this baby boy. The woman’s husband even came and sat down with us for a bit, he made a bottle and helped hold the baby after a freshly changed ‘diaper’ (not something we normally see men do). The man made sure to let us know that this baby will be loved and cared for by his family.
Leaving was a little harder this time around as the realities of the people here are no longer rumors and stories, but they are now undeniably real and affecting the people I call friends and family. The more we become a part of people’s lives here the more we are going to be faced with stories like this, and have a desire to help meet the needs of these people who just can’t do it for themselves. When I got the call there wasn’t a question of ‘if’ we would help provide for these babies, because the obvious answer was yes. The hard part comes when realizing that right now, these types of calls aren’t in the budget because our ministry budget is coming out of our personal budgets for the most part. Many of the events we do are covered by supporters or teams, but the daily and emergency things aren’t necessarily covered by anyone specific. When you wonder why I / missionaries keep asking for money remember stories like this…. of a newborn baby boy who doesn’t even have a name yet, who lost his mom and who’s father isn’t in the picture, of a young family who is struggling to feed their two boys who aren’t old enough for school yet have lovingly decided to raise a baby who is not theirs, and of a mother who’s willing to share what little she has to help keep this precious life alive… the funds that you give go towards me / missionaries provide not only for personal expenses but also giving an entire village a reminder that they are not forgotten and helps restore the hope that this baby boy will be able to live a long and happy life.
Give – Casey Wells or to Outpour Movement (general fund)
God, Family, Ministry
If you’ve ever served in a church or religious organization I’m sure you’ve heard: God first, family second, and then ministry (work).
It’s a wonderful saying and something that is sometimes hard to remember. Putting ministry (or work) first and letting everything else fall behind it happens more often than any of us would like to realize. Sometimes it’s confusing to know when your family needs more attention than the ministry as your heart and focus are pulled in so many different directions. I mean we are supposed to be doing ‘all things as unto the Lord’, right? So lines feel a little blurry sometimes.
For a while now some of my family members have been battling with different health issues. There have been a couple of times where the question of if I needed to go home came up, but I never had a peace about heading back to the States for my visit before my visa expires the end of the year. All that changed. I can’t say it was a specific thing that happened or something that was said, because I don’t really know. What I do know is that I need to be home with my family right now. When I finally made the decision and talked with my family and my team here there was an absolute peace that flooded through me. I know that I can’t change their physical health, but by being home for a bit it will help give my family a slight sigh of relief knowing that I am there to support them no matter what the future holds.
As I make the journey across the ocean in a few days will you please pray for me? Pray for safe travels filled with God’s favor, peace and rest. Pray for my family – their emotional, physical and spiritual health, for wisdom and discernment as we wait for answers in how to get them healthy again. Pray for my team & the ministries I’m a part of in Thailand and Burma – they are going to be on a skeleton crew for a bit as people will be in and out of the country, pray for peace, unity, and divine favor, revelation, rest, and blessings upon my whole team, the ministries we help with and the businesses we’ve started to help fund the work here.
He Needs Good Community
The other day one of my roommates and I got to take a friend down to check out the border area and meet our Burma contact. The border here is interesting because there is a small stretch of land in-between Thailand and Burma, it is a land that belongs to no-one (which is where it got it’s name “No Man’s Land”). Since the land belongs to no-one, there are no laws, it is a place that people go to when they are no longer welcome in either Thailand or Burma. You can only imagine the things that happen in a place that has no laws, lets just say it’s not a safe place for me to go for multiple reasons. From a distance the land just looks very overgrown, but if you look closely you can see that people have created homes under the brush and even have a well and small garden. Our contact said there are at least 150 children living there, which means that there have to be a lot more adults!
Our contact has built relationships with the children and the adults living in No Man’s Land. He was explaining to me that he was at the border that day because the night before he got a call from a drug-dealer that lives in No Man’s Land. This man called our contact asking for advice, his 3 or 4 year old son gets angry a lot and his mother is in prison, so he just doesn’t know what to do. Our contact told the man that his son needs good community, he just needs to be loved. So our contact was picking up the boy to take him to a playground and let him play and be around good community for a couple of hours! As we were leaving I handed our contact a few dollars, he looked at me and asked why I was giving him money. ‘Because you are looking after children, and tonight you are going to take that little boy to a playground to have fun and then you guys are going to have dinner.’ He was just as touched by my small gesture of paying for dinner as I was of him offering to take a boy, that is desperate to just be a little boy and to be loved, to a playground.
I LOVE that the people here who trust no-one, trust our contact. And I love that our contact understands that helping people feel loved, valued, trusted, and giving them even a basic education can transform not only that individual, but a whole nation. Our contact is discipling people in what a Godly life should be without ever even having to share the gospel with them (at least not sharing it quite yet). My prayer is that these relationships will continue, that our contact will continue to be able to reach out to people that no-one else can…. and that one day some of these people who trust no-one else will begin to trust the Outpour team as well, that we will be able to build relationships with them and help them see and grasp the goodness of God and of the world around them.
Photographs are not of No Man’s Land, but one of the villages that we visit in Burma.
Leap of Love
I originally wrote this blog for Outpour Movement, but I wanted to share it with you here as well. It can sometimes be difficult to live in a third world country so far away from the people, things, and language that you know… this is a beautiful reminder of why being here makes an impact even when it doesn’t feel like it.
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Have you ever had a kid come running and leap into your arms? Maybe it was your son or daughter, a niece or nephew, or maybe one of the kids from the Sunday school class you teach.
But was it ever a child that you didn’t know?
One that you never had a real conversation with?
One day soon we will share a bit more with these little ones why we are here and where our love for them comes from. I can’t wait for the day when language barriers fall away and they can understand what it’s like to make that same leap into the arms of Abba, Father God. Until then, we’ll keep greeting the kids with open arms and open hearts, loving every smile, giggle, and hug that we give and receive.
goldenglances 