Extremities- Living in a postcard, speaking in a bumper sticker

I have been in Thailand for a month. It’s been the longest I have ever been over-seas.. and the longest I have gone in a while without hugging my Mommy. Thankfully, I am under fabulous leadership. I am with a team that breathes vulnerability and speaks from a heart of grace and words of love. I am serving a God who says that I am enough, even my darkest moments.. and I am residing in a country that is a territory of darkness, and titled “the land of smiles.”

I titled this post “extremities” because the last month, but more so the last week, has been incredibly extreme. I have felt extreme happiness, extreme fear, extreme excitement, extreme sadness and have exercised faith in an extreme of existence: surrender.

The happiness came and cornered me every time I took a moment to stop and think about how awesome my life status is currently. I live in Thailand, with six besties, two older sibling rock star mentors, and under a God who loves love so much He created it. Extreme, right? I feel blessed, lucky, and when it comes down to it, completely undeserving, but I will get to that later. Point being, Thailand is beautiful, and even more beautiful is the way that God has orchestrated this trip.

Fear. Oh fear. Last Monday, my team, our leader, and myself drove an hour outside of the city we were living in and spent three hours jumping off of platforms, zipping down strong cords into a lush green jungle. We screamed and laughed and made more noise than the orphanage produces in a year. It was so fun. I’m scared of heights, so it was scary if I thought about how high I was, but it was so fun, so crazy and so packed with adrenaline that I couldn’t stop to think about the danger potentially involved.

The next day we went to a “fish spa,” and dunked our feet into a small fish habitat, located on the inside of a mall, and giggled as they noshed on our dead skin, exfoliating the surface of our skin. More funny than scary, but still different and weird and extreme in its own way.

After a day of down time spent between the hostel we were staying at and our favorite coffee shops, we were off to the day of extreme excitement. It started with a 25 minute long ride to an “orchid farm.” Now you have to understand, just driving here is an adventure, if you’re in Thailand. The orchids were pretty and I was still half asleep, and then we got back in the truck and drove to one of the coolest places I have ever been.. ever. It was a small village with five families total that lived there. We pulled up and a small and sweet Asian woman sold us some bananas for 20 baht. Then we drove for another 5 minutes and what do we see walking next to our truck, like within reach? AN ELEPHANT. We got to the actual village, waited a few minutes and then mounted the elephants. MOUNTED. As in, we rode the most precious animals. We laughed and smiled with our mouths open because we couldn’t even talk. We got to sit on its head and then go up onto the seat if we wanted. It was so stinking cool, I can’t even explain. When we finished our ride with the elephants, we drove to a trail head and started and hour long trek. We ate pad thai for lunch in a single standing wooden building on the top of a big hill and then continued onward. We hiked over a river and through the trees.. J.. and then finally got to a BEAUTIFUL giganto waterfall that was magnificent and huge. We drank some water at the top and hung out for a bit and then started back down.. You would think it would end there, but no. THEN, we went to a little river side shack and got suited up for white water rafting. (Which p.s. is not to white because it is Thailand, so it looks like the chocolate milk rivers in Willy Wonka J) When we got the instructions on how to listen to our guide, a torrential down pour began to cover us, and the river, and everything else. But, as soon as we got the right life jackets on, we hopped in the river and went on one of the craziest rides of my life. Still not done. We met up about a mile later down the river with a bamboo raft and jumped onto it, then rode it down the end of the river portion. The night ended with seeing an English speaking movie (which is a real treat), ice cream from McDonalds, and talking with Rachel, one of my best girl friends in Woodland. If that isn’t exciting, I don’t know what is.

Rewinding a few nights prior to that, we decided to prayer walk one of the red light streets. That is where extreme sadness hit. What I saw is hard to put down in words. I would rather describe my heart and its broken condition than the victims of poverty, walking in desperation, and doing what they can to survive. The girls out there are my sisters. My equivalent. My age, my gender.. and in more of a hopeless life situation than I will probably ever understand. They are attacked with the poverty they have grown up with, disabled by their lack of education, and just like me, just like all of us, doing what they can to survive. They are bought by the same root of brokenness, but a different bloom of desperation. They are bought by men that are broken. Men that are drowning in their need for an escape, a fix. And then they engage in something that was created to be intimate and holy, and further their cracks of dependence on this broken, broken system.

I didn’t see men covering their tan line from their wedding ring, or wiping their eyes from the pain going on inside. I didn’t see the girls growing up in villages and I don’t pretend to know their stories. All I know is that there is a severe brokenness in this place. What I did see were the red tinted bars. The girls and their cat calls. The smallest skirts I have ever seen on the smallest, most beautiful girls that I wanted to cover. Which leads me into the next and final extreme. The extreme of surrender.

I found myself back at the hostel within a half hour of being in the girls’ presence, and the common theme between how my team was feeling was “puke.” The reality of life here is so filthy that it was making us sick to believe it. It was making us angry at the system, at the men, at the girls, at the.. something. Anything. It’s just not right. The following night we were at Matt and Laura’s house. We started our debrief and within five minutes we were all weeping. How can things get that bad? Why can’t someone fix this? Why can’t God swoop down and rescue the girls from their desperate need for money, rescue the men from there desperate case of emptiness? Matt ended up speaking the truth straight into our hearts. This world is broken. One country over there is genocide going on, murdering hundreds and hundreds because of a difference in ethnicity. Here there are women selling themselves on the streets because they want to feed their child, and they need to eat. In America there is a disease of being lukewarm, of seeing the world as “not to bad” and seeing ourselves as independent enough to not need any God. The globe is plagued with brokenness, and not one of us is worthy of lifting their nose at the other. We are a broken people. But.. then there is our God. Our God who for SOME REASON, chooses us. Chooses to save babies in America from being uneducated, chooses to save babies in Africa from being consumed in material possessions. I don’t know what He has saved babies in Thailand from, not yet, but He has placed each one of us with incredible intention. The extreme surrender came in when I realized that if I was born in Thailand 20 years ago instead of America, if I had no education, no training or skill, and had a drive in me to keep breathing, those girls’ stories would be my own. I am nothing more than a story of salvation. A story that shows that God loves His people, He can rescue, He can heal, He can teach and produce change and shake the earth. My surrender came when I realized that this is ALL about Him.

To say the least, I feel that Thailand is changing me. An awareness of the harsh realities occurring in the world around me has shifted my thinking. I wish I could be superman and rescue my sisters off the street, but what I am is a beloved child of God. I am no superman, I am no all holy person. I am a redeemed child, and Him using me would be His power, and my honor. I surrender to being powerless without Christ. I surrender to trusting that He’s got it, no matter how much sometimes it may seem like He fell asleep on the job. And, I surrender to Him, that when it’s time to go Jason Bourne on the darkness and screwed up system of this country and this world, I am all in, and I know with 100% confidence that I am on the right team. Team Jesus. All the stinkin’ way.

So, this week has been extreme. All kinds of extreme. I write these last few words on my bunk back at the orphanage, and after a week in the city of Chiang Mai, and it is good to be home in the silence. Please pray for the girls at the orphanage, for a bright and hopeful future, for the health and energy of my team and myself, and the deep brokenness of the world that we live in. Thank God that God is in control, and this weight does not have to be ours, but if we can, let’s change the world, yeah? Thank you for reading. Thank you for praying. Thank you for having a heart for the world around you.

Kelli :)

Thailand Rain

Default: Had some issues with pasting and keeping the correct spacing, I think I got most of the words split, but if not, bear with me!

There is a problem here in Thailand:
it rains.
Now-hold that thought.
The culture here is so darn different. It is beautiful, it’s spicy,it’s slow, and it is Buddhist. As I explained earlier, parents don’t want their kids, so they get rid of them, and then the kids end upgoing into the street. From the street, people with huge hearts and passionate love for Jesus come and take them off the street. Then the kids go to a home. Then there are a bunch of kids, without parents, without individual attention and there are only funded if they’re lucky, (and in a home.) And this is a problem. The leaders of my program have talked about this as a “Band-Aid on a wound.” There is alot larger of a problem going on than what we are dealing with here at the orphanage. It’s not that the orphanages aren’t doing well,although some of the many are not. It’s not that the Jesus lovers aren’t dreaming in big enough ways, which typically is not theproblem. The problem starts in a similar place to where it begins; the villages.

Going back to the rain. My buddy here, Courtney, asked us to pray for the rain tonight. She is so frustrated with smelling bad. We sweat hard and in large quantities when we do physical work, and pretty much every other time of our Thai lives. Like normal people, we get our clothes together and go down to the washing machine. We go through the typical process of washing our clothes and then take them to the line to hang up. About an hour later, it rains. And let me tell you,Thailand rain comes down hard. We joke about having a setting on an alarm clock as “Thai rain.” It is amazing to go to sleep to, and even better to wake up to. However, that junk stinks. Thai rain could most definitely be a purchased sound, but it would never make it as a scent. So, we wash our clothes that are badly in need of washing, hang them up in their cleanliness, and then notice them getting drenched as we run inside when the rain hits. And then, our clothes stink. About an hour later comes the next point in the process, we bring theclothes into the house and hang them on the bunk bed ladders, on the fan, on the door; wherever we can put them really. About 24 hours later, they are dry, firmly starched and smelling similar to when we started the laundering cycle. Thankfully, we came here prepared, or somewhat prepared to have comforts, like fresh smelling clothes andbodies, taken away, therefore it’s not that big of a deal. I mean,it’s just clothes, and it’s just scent.

The issue with the parentless children though, that is a big deal. It is similar to this laundry issue in that it is a seemingly downward spiral. Child homes take in kids and have issues of their own. Girls go into prostitution. Homes get over populated. There are not enough towels for all the girls, whatever. And then back to the beginning of all of this: parents keep giving their kids away.The process is enough to make you crazy. What do you go after first in trying to fix this? Play your role as the intern that teaches danceand smile through the experience? Do your part as the director and weed out the business aspect? Tackle the many projects that come at you? But what about the process that is continuing? It is bigger than just construction projects and providing for the angels we currently have. But we have to walk forward in our duty that we are assigned to.The position we signed up for. You can see how this gets messy quick,yeah? Any step in this whole thing is enough to make you hurt on these kids behalf, to have your heart broken. And it just keeps spiraling. Now, we know full well that these 42 beautiful girls at the orphanagewe are a part of are better off here than they would be in their village, just as we know that our clothes are better off after they have been through the washing process, even if we do question it sometimes. We will continue to love on these girls and do everythingin our power to make their lives full, happy, healthy, and filled with Jesus, just as we will continue to wash these stinky clothes. It is frustrating when we hit walls with our girls in communication and just sit and look at each other, just as it is frustrating when we check on our clothes and they are hard and crusty, but you push forward in those situations, get over it and deal. We are going to put up a drying line inside the house tomorrow, after some good man thought(accredited to Ben, another intern) similarly- we hope to come across ways to fight this broken system. But it continues to rain. And parents continue to give their kids away. And it seems never ending. Ugh.

BUT, you know, we have faith. We love Jesus, not just as a statement or a slogan, but really, we are obsessed with our God. We believe that He works in broken systems, in broken people, in a fallen world. He adores the 42 girls we get to be around, and He adores every kid thatis abandoned on the street. Those are some positives, lets not forget that the rain does have a nice sound, right? At least our 42 gals get 3 meals a day, yeah? That there is some purpose, some something. We will stick with this no matter how hopeless the “system” seems, because we have hope in our God. And on behalf of my team I will ask you to please pray also. Pray with us that the spinning will stop. The feeling is similar to a dog chasing its tale. We can argue every point. We can be discouraged, too easily. But then quiet whispers come to mind, like the one that says even if the cross were just for one of us, just for me and no one else, He still would have done it. If Jesus dying on the cross were only to save you,He still would have died on your behalf. Even if it were 42 out ofthe seemingly endless population in need, Christ would have given His life for just them, and if that is enough for Him, than it is enough for us. Pray that God would keep us dreaming of solutions. Pray that He would keep us filled with hope. Pray that He would move. Pray that He would deepen the wells in our hearts of faith and Love. Pray that we would connect deeply to these girls here. It’s good to know that He is in control. ☺ And it is good to have you on the team. Thank you-dear friends.

Fun Video!

I had a lot of fun making this! Hope you enjoy!