Here are the pictures of our girls and their band practice. They spent about 12 or 14 days during the month of April – from 8 am to 4:30 pm in a small town called Renu Nakhon, located about 40 miles from the Christian Mission. We left here at 7 am, dropped them off for the day and picked them up again at 4:30 pm to get home about 5:30 pm for dinner at 6. Then from 6-9 pm they had English classes, practiced music etc. The days they didn’t have band practice, they had English classes and homework. Praise God it is all over now and school starts on May 14. We will be getting back to a more organized schedule, God willing. Enjoy the pictures. The concert at the end was great. Please pray that they will continue practice here at the mission. God Bless, John and Maeo [Read more...]
John’s Blog | May 9th 2012
John’s Blog | April 29th
Greetings from the Christian Mission again. It is about 8:30 Sunday morning, and I will get a little bit done before church starts at 9 am.
Where to begin is the question. Sunday, April 22 was a day of miracles and history making events for the Christian Mission. For the first time in our history every believer who was in attendance testified to the glory and power of Christ and told of an event during the past week where God had blessed them. Second, 5 of our girls who are not believers testified to the power of God and something that he had done in their lives during the past week. More people testified at one time than have ever testified before. This followed the week prior when we had the lowest attendance we have had in several years. God is working miracles daily here. [Read more...]
John’s Blog | April 2012
Greetings and love from the Christian Mission. No, it is not April 11, 2012 – it is April 22, 2012. But, more of that later. The pictures here will bring you from Easter up to about the 13th of April and then we will do another letter and add to it. I want both of them out today so you can see the miracles that have been happening this past week, but this will lead up to things.
Our month started with an offer for our kids to go to a camp and learn Thai Classical Band Instruments. They were to go three days a week from 8 am to 5 pm. It is a 75 mile round trip – twice a day – to take them there and back. God blessed us greatly in that we start the final three days tomorrow and thanks to God, not one kid has missed a single meeting, not one kid has quit and all are learning – more about that later too. [Read more...]
John’s Blog | 7th April 2012
Greetings from Christian Mission, I think, sometime just before Easter. Palm Sunday is over and went well; for that we thank and praise God.
Vacation Bible School is history and praise God again. Our Bible Camp started on Wednesday morning and Thursday morning Bee’s grandmother died. However, since God was in charge, her team took over while she went home and all went well. As I get the pictures sorted out, I will include them. We had a total of about 35 elementary school students and 15 or so high school students, so it was quite a group. The questions for this year were three. How do we know God loves us, how much does he love us, and why does he love us? The Bible verse was John 3:16 and the timing could not have been better, coming between Palm Sunday and Easter. [Read more...]
John’s Blog | Soup in love in action
Greetings again. Our newsletter is going to be in several parts again. There are just too many pictures. It is about 1:30 pm, Thursday. Thailand is getting ready to close down for about 10 days to celebrate New Year. We are in day two of our VBS and there will be more of that later; hard to believe. Maeo told me that there are over 60 kids here today – including the teens doing the conducting.
Our newsletter today is to thank and praise God – Our Soup of Love program is back and going again. When it started several years ago we were visiting the 11 villages within our sub-district here. That went on for several years and then we started visiting the schools within the villages and did that for a few years; then we moved to the nurseries and just didn’t get much response. Then also our helpers disappeared. We had several adults, but they have decided it is better to be back in the world and Buddhism rather than assuming the responsibilities of being a Christian. The adults have been replaced by children and, of course, they are not available during the week to go to schools or visit villages. Our plan for this year was to go back to visiting the three villages in our immediate area and see what happens. We have changed the day to either Saturday afternoon or Sunday afternoon. There has been so much going on at the Christian Mission that we were not able to get started until March 31. Maeo had 4 girls volunteer to help make the soup and then another bunch to go out with us and deliver the soup door to door. [Read more...]
John’s Blog | March 25, 2012
Greetings from the Christian Mission.
Sunday evening is here and a busy weekend has been completed. Praise God we can divide ourselves into two parts. 
Bee and Bpun returned from their seminar on March 22 and put their learning into practice on March 24. We now have two English teaching teams. The first team is our girls, and the second team is a group of University students that I teach. In thanks for me teaching them for free, they agree to conduct one English Camp at a village school once a month. Saturday was their turn. Our girls did it the weekend before. The Blessing is that Bee and Bpun and our other teens remain here at the mission and conduct the regular children’s Saturday program. This way we don’t have to leave the younger ones out. Our Saturday programs continues from 9 am to 2:30 pm. The children receive singing – practicing for Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday right now – Bible study and English and games. God does bless us and your prayers do it.
Next time I will have to find a way to split my camera in two so I can take pictures of both the Saturday program here at the mission and our English Camp activities. For this one, I will be attaching pictures of our English Camp activities.
My day, and Maeo’s too, starts at about 6 am by getting up, breakfast and getting things organized. We depart here at about 7:30 am, with an almost full van load. We stop by the Catholic School in town and pick up Joe and Sandy Boys. They are working as volunteers at a school here and go with us on Saturday English Camps. Joe and I get along very well – he is retired military and other things and we are both 72 years old. We arrive at the school about 8:30 am. The school for this day is about 50 miles from where we live, so it is a way out. The camp starts at 9 am with three solid hours of teaching in the morning, and an hour or two of games and preparing skits for the close. At about 2:30-3:00 pm we gather for each group to perform something they learned in the morning. Usually we finish up by 3:30 pm and start back home with a very tired group. After about 15-20 minutes on the return trip everybody but Maeo, Joe Sandy and me are sleeping. We get back to Nakhon Phanom about 5:00 pm and the fun begins. We arrive at an all you can eat restaurant. You also cook your own food. It does my heart good to see these kids spend the next two hours eating, eating and eating. I get all the kids delivered and back home about 7:30-8:00 pm. Our teams usually have about 13-15 people. None of the students on this team have accepted Christ, so please pray for them.
Praise God, my second University class have told us that they also want to participate. That means in May, God willing, we will have three teams per month. That means we will be able to work with about 250 elementary/high school students. Thanks and praise God and please keep praying for us. More news later.
God Bless and keep, John, Maeo and the Mission kids.
John’s Blog | March 11th 2012
Greetings and more introductions from us here in Thailand. Most of you are aware that there are 4 churches that we work very closely with. One of them is the Kusakoi Church. I talked a bit about them as we had our prayer group meeting at their church on March 5. I have also mentioned in the past that the youth groups of the 5 churches meet every other month for worship, fellowship, food and some fun and games. Things start going about 9:30-10:00 am and end up between 2:00-3:30 pm. There may be anywhere from 50 – about 80 youth in attendance. Many of them are Christians and have accepted Christ already, but there are quite a few that have not made that step yet. We move around from church to church so no one church has too big of a burden. January was at Naratchakwai, March at Kusakoi, June will be at Nong Khon Kaen, August will be at Kuseman, October will be at the Christian Mission. [Read more...]
John’s Blog | Kusakoi Church
Greetings from the Christian Mission. This newsletter is going to be a little different in that I will be introducing faces and places that we work with on a regular basis but have not specifically addressed in the past. In our little group here we have 4 or 5 other churches we work with on a regular basis and they are churches that – through your prayers and finances the Christian Mission has been able to help from time to time. The churches are small, village churches, except for a small Baptist Church in Sakon Nakhon. The other churches are part of New Tribes Missions; however the churches are all “native” Thai churches. Three of the churches are involved in Bible translation from Thai to the local language. Within our churches we have several languages represented and Thai is not always the heart language.
What I would like to do is to introduce you to one of the churches each month. I will try to do it when we are having a combined group meeting. Currently we meet once a month for prayer; our youth meet every other month in a combined program, usually conducted by the youth; our churches get together every other month for combined Sunday worship and fellowship. There are usually 100 or so people at these meetings. Sometimes we move back and forth celebrating Christmas, New Years, Children’s Day, Easter, Father’s Day and Mother’s Day. The Christian Mission is currently providing financial assistance for school to students at two of the churches. [Read more...]
John’s Blog | Plans for 2012
Greetings from the Christian Mission. Thanks and praise God all is well on this side of the pond, in our little corner of the world.
I have been spending some time over the last week or so looking back on the Christian Mission and where we started and how far we have come. What has happened here over the last 7-8 years is not something that I or any other human being can take credit for. We have continuously been astounded as God continues to work his miracles here through many of you. Many children have a chance at a good life because either through the Christian Mission or the Thai Lao Cambodia Brotherhood. Children have had travel expenses paid for so they can receive medical care at hospitals 3-4 hours from us here. Just this evening one mother came back to let us know she had returned from a hospital visit in Khon Kaen. The child will return in about a year for heart surgery. This could not have happened without you. [Read more...]
John’s Blog | February 27th 2012
Greetings and praise God. Maeo and I are sitting in a quiet hotel room in Khon Kaen. We have had our first set of checkups and all is well. To celebrate we went to McDonalds for lunch and after shopping all afternoon, went to KFC for dinner. Now we will rest up and go for the next one in the morning. We will be at the hospital at about 7 am to get in line and then wait until 9 or 9:30 am for the doctor to arrive. If we are lucky to get there early enough, we should be on our way home by 10 am and that will be a 4-5 hour drive. I will put the pictures with this and try to get it sent out tomorrow afternoon or evening. The best laid plans of mice and men?????? [Read more...]
