It's been a few weeks since you have heard from us.   I contracted dengue fever in mid December and it took me about four weeks to recover. Around January 10 I started feeling better. I am grateful I got better before the week of January 16 as we had the privilege of having eight of our friends from Birmingham visit us for a mission trip to  Northeast Thailand.  

In the mornings we worked with high schools students to help them improve their spoken English.  We did this in the Nawapitiyacom high school which is located in Nakon Phanom province.   During our teaching time over 300 students heard a very clear gospel message and experienced the love of Christ from all the team members.  Ironically, we have more freedom to speak to students about Christ in Thai high schools then you do in the U.S.
 
In the afternoons we distributed Christian literature in villages and a hospital.  On Tuesday night we had an evangelistic service in the village of Ban Ko.  This village had no church and no Christians but that changed during our visit.

To distribute the materials we split into three groups.  One group went with me, another with Mary Kay and a third group went with Pastor Buakab.  During this time we passed out Christian literature and prayed with those that God lead us to pray for.

While passing out the literature the group that went with Pastor Buakab had an wonderful experience.  As they were visiting people in  the village they met a man who told them many years earlier he had become a Christian but the village head told him he couldn't and made him get rid of all the Christian materials.

Since then the village has a new leader and so the man told the team that he was very interested to learn more about Jesus.  In fact, he invited his whole family to come listen to Pastor Buakab share the gospel story.  At the end of their meeting the whole family prayed to become Christ followers. 

After the sun set we had an outdoor evangelistic service in this same village.  The meeting  started with videos for the children, native Thai "Maw Lum" singing using  Christian stories and finally a time of sharing God's word.  About 100 villagers attended.  One of our members, AT Scott, shared the gospel message with Pastor Buakab translating. 

At the end of AT's message pastor Buakab asked those who wanted to pray to repeat after her.  When she was done she asked those who prayed to raise their hands.  I saw about 30-40 people raise their hands, including the family that had prayed earlier.  At the end of the service  we asked the current village head to close the service.  Even though he is a Buddhist he told all the villagers to carefully consider all the things they had heard because they were important words. 

God did many more things on this trip, which I don't have time to share at this time.  Please be in prayer for the new Christians at Ban Ko.  We are thankful there is a Thai pastor to follow up with them.  Our prayer is that a new church will be started in this previously unreached village.

You can click on this link to view hundreds of pictures of our trip

Blessings,