John’s Blog | 31st December 2012

Greetings from Thailand.
As we prepare for our countdown to pray out the old year and pray in the new, I am taking a bit of time to express the things flashing through my head. Saying that God has blessed the Christian Mission this past year is an understatement. For example, most of you reading this had only one Christmas, right? To give you an example of God’s blessings for us this year, God gave us three Christmases this year.
On December 15 we travelled into the mountains about 70-75 miles from our church to visit a group of people that Pastor Jarat has been working with. This was their first Christmas. There were over a hundred people at the celebration. Thanks to your donations, we were able to provide some goodies for the children there. This group will also be joining our new organization. They start processing the paperwork next week and, God willing will become part of our group by the end of the year. Pictures are below.

We celebrated our second Christmas here at the Christian Mission on December 23. We thought we might have to cancel parts of it, however, God blessed it and all the people that were supposed to participate showed up and did a great job. God blessed us again by sending some people we never thought would come. Again, we had over 100 people. Thanks to generous donations by you, we were able to provide Christmas gifts for about 50 children at the Christian Mission. Pictures of this celebration are attached.
I am not sure that this is a blessing or not, but Maeo and I spend December 25 from 8 am to about 2.3o pm at the hospital in Sakon Nakhon. We knew, because of some new government policies, some of our medications were going to be stopped – financial thing. The blessing part is that our doctor there is a very, very sharp young lady and, with God’s help, seems to have found a replacement for everything and was able to discontinue one of my medications. After a week of taking the new stuff, and having no side effects; it looks like God answered our prayers to give the doctor wisdom to be able to sort everything our and come up with the right answers. We go back the end of January for a bunch of tests to make sure everything is working okay with the new medications.

Our third Christmas and blessing came on December 28. Mr. Pompun, a local radio and TV celebrity also has a slum village that he assists and for the past several years the Christian Mission has provided Christmas gifts for about 20 students. I didn’t think we would be going this year because it was December 26 before Mr Pompun contacted me. Thanks to the generous contributions made from folks reading this newsletter, we were able to include them at the last moment. Pictures are attached for this Christmas also. We still have one more Christmas to do, but don’t know the date yet. That will wait for another newsletter. As we close this year, again, thank you for your prayers and your support. Without them we would be nothing. The next edition will talk about some other blessings this past year. The final newsletter for 2012 – God willing – will have some of the plans for 2013. It is even more ambitious than 2012. May God bless and keep you all in his love and may 2013 be the best year of your life so far.

John, Maeo and the girls.