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  The adults have been replaced by children and, of course, they are not available during the week to go to schools or visit villages.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.

We drive down the streets and stop in front of houses we know have many little children or senior citizens. Some are there to meet us and at other houses we deliver the soup to the door. During the hour and a half we were out delivering, about 150 bowl of soup were handed out – feeding about 200 or so people.

Prayers and Praise God:

• VBS team from 4 different churches uniting to do VBS here and then take it back to their church.
• The 40 or so kids who are attending VBS.
• Ploy – who says she has accepted Christ – and a mother that is not happy, but has allowed Ploy to make her own decision and will respect that.
• Lita – who says she has accepted Christ – this morning – pray that mother will accept it.
• Bpun – who has accepted Christ – whose mother accepts it but whose grandmother has refused permission for her to be baptized.  Beem 2 and Bee who are younger sisters to Bpun and watching closely to see what happens.
• Bee – our youth leader – whose grandmother died a couple hours ago. We don’t know if the family is Buddhist, Catholic or what.
• Nun – who went to spend a couple of weeks taking care of a sick aunt and has disappeared. We haven’t heard anything from her in over a month and she is not answering her phone.
• The number right now is 12 and we don’t know where it is going to stop. We have a new 7^th grader and another 7^th grader who has been coming to church but not living here yet. She is the younger sister of Tao, our 9^th grade boy who has left.
• John and Maeo as we try to work all of this stuff together. The 25 or so children we have in various stages of English classes here at the mission.

Thank all of you and praise God for your prayers, your emails and other support that helps us to keep going. God Bless, John, Maeo and the group.