Love is Sharing!

I'd like to think that my lack of posting is due to the hectic nature of a short-term mission trip, where every second of a far too quickly dwindling month should be spent on something more important than writing on the internet. I sure hope that's the case because I'd like this blog to help me remember all that's been going on and everything that I think about. I think far too often I rely on my faulty memory and end up wasting some valuable a-ha moments.

And secondly, I still can't decide how much I want to write in this blog in terms of my own personal emotions and thoughts. I certainly don't want this to be a list of things I did. Perhaps more important than the actual events are the way that they have impacted a person.

The next few blogs will be some overdue backtracking, so please bear with me.

The week between July 14th and 21st (when the Korean team came) was fun but pushed me off routine a tad too much. I admit I got caught up in the heyday of meeting a bunch of new genuine Korean girls (as did the rest of the guys on the team ha!) as well as some really cool brothers. It was a whole new world for me as my only source of Korean exposure comes from the rather diluted Korean-American experience. Most of them could barely speak Korean and being forced to speak Korean constantly for the first time in a long long long time, I became quite cheng pee hae at my poor excuse for being Korean. A small, but valuable lesson of life - I'm Korean. Learn Korean. (Exactly how I'll accomplish this I don't know...)

STEM, Grace Fellowship, and the Korean team joined together to hold a camp at the Horizon resort on July 17th through the 19th. The camp was called "Grace Fellowship Episode 1 - Love Is Sharing" (I asked why it was called "Episode 1", the answer? Because it sounds cool.) I know we had been praying for 40 non-Christians to come, but only around fifteen came. There were a lot more Christians from Grace Fellowship, STEM and the Korean team than there were non-Christians, but in hindsight, it turned out to be perfect.

The camps that STEM held in 2005 and 2006 revolved around teaching English and sharing the gospel as a kind of side-thing. This camp however was centered around the theme of love and sharing. When I initially heard this, I couldn't even imagine what kind of activities we could do. But Grace Fellowship planned all the events and schedules and gave the Korean team and STEM time slots for our skits and special songs. (On a side note, I'd like to add that I was truly blessed and impressed by the fact that Grace Fellowship planned everything. Pastor Jeff always says that the number one priority of STEM is to support the local church, not supplant it.)

I think the most memorable activity was this candle/prayer ceremony and love feast. I'm too lazy to look for the pictures so basically P'Koy (Grace Fellowship's pastor's wife) made the shape of Thailand with chopsticks on the ground and everyone stood around the outline with candles in our hands. We sang "Dangshineun Sarangbatgeewieh Taeyunnan Saram" and prayed for each other and the nation of Thailand. Then we participated in a love feast where we expressed our love for one another in hugs, words, and feeding each other snacks.

The camp felt much more like a Christian church retreat rather than an evangelistic camp, but nevertheless two Thai girls named Aom and Kay accepted Christ as their savior. Aom had been coming out to Grace Fellowship for a couple months and had already helped us out so much before she was even Christian. Kay is the younger sister of twins that already attend Grace Fellowship. Kay had wanted to become Christian for almost two years and was afraid about what her mother would say, but the Spirit moved her to accept at this camp. (Remember my "Sign From God" post? Dan Matsuoka implied in his comment that I was stretching the text to fit my own situation. It's true. But God still did encourage us that day. And now, two Thai students were saved. What was the number of each animal Noah was called to take on the ship? Two! A Miracle! j/k)

I believe the biggest lesson we learned from this camp is that more than the couple thousand dollars STEM and Korean team spent, hours on dances, skits, and dramas, seeds were already being planted for months and years by Grace Fellowship before we held this camp. I was reminded of what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 3:6-7, "I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth." I think far too often short-term teams go to mission fields thinking they're going to reap this huge harvest by all their own preparation, but in reality, short-term teams know way too little about culture or language to effectively evangelize. Short-term missions is designed to support the local church or long-term missions. And God truly revealed this to be the case, but in the end, we all gave glory to God for His working.

I'll finish this post with one last thing about Grace Fellowship. What I love and admire about Grace Fellowship is that it is not a church that opens only on Sundays, but is open practically 24/7 to all who wish to come and just hang out, do homework, play board games, or talk. Obviously the fact that it's literally right across the street from the university helps create this type of setting, but at Grace Fellowship, Christians and non-Christians interact on a daily basis. There are activities periodically throughout the week where some seeker-friendly messages are shared, just to get people thinking about the meaning of life, love, death, and other important things that many people often ignore amidst of all of life's hustle and bustle. More direct, gospel messages with opportunities to accept Christ are given every so often, but hell and brimstone is forced down no one's throat.

Grace Fellowship seeks to create relationship before anything else. In America, I think we rely far too often on truth-encounters (direct gospel messages of heaven/hell, etc) that tend to scare people away or bring hasty judgment upon Christians. But here, Grace Fellowship uses relationship to share God's love with action before any words. The goal is to try and make others see the overflowing joy and the worth of a purposeful life in being a Christian.

One added benefit of this approach is that when people do accept Christ, they are already plugged into a community and have understood subconsciously what it means to love and share within the church. The physical community established even before personal salvation is only made stronger as the new believer now joins the spiritual community. Think about American Christianity and its emphasis on revivals and individual salvation. People do get saved and accept Jesus as their savior, but a lot of times people don't know what to do after that. They are told to go to church, but everyone knows how hard it is to become a part of a new community. It is a scary and vulnerable situation. And far too often, American Christians believe that commitment to one local church is not as important as their own individual relationship with Christ - they fail to see the very direct relationship between individual salvation and corporate community. So there are just way too many Christians hopping from church to church with a consumer mentality, seeking this perfect church that does not exist.

I don't know if such a ministry could work, even at Sarang. I try to put myself in the shoes of being a Recomm leader again and trying to reach out to others this way but it seems impossible. All I know is that the purposeful interaction we have at home between believer and non-believer is far too little. The church as been called to share God's love with all people, not just within the church. So I challenge anyone who's reading to try to think of ways we can do just that.

"Expect great things from God, attempt great things for God." - William Carey

With much love,
Eric

Korea Team and Camp

This won't be a very interesting update, but I'm updating so you all can keep me and the team in prayer.

The Korean team arrived last night at 1:30 am. There are 16 girls and 8 guys, all around our age. They also have a pastor that's with them.

I woke up in the middle of the night as they were moving around and orientating themselves. I couldn't fall back asleep because I began worrying about how our teams would work together. So I prayed before I went back to sleep.

This morning during our prayer walk in CMU, I couldn't stop thinking about our teams working together again.

Our QT passage was on Acts 15 which is about the Jerusalem Council where Peter and the believers from the Pharisee party argued over whether Gentile believers should keep the law of Moses and become circumcised. In the end, they saw how God was moving and were able to come to an agreement.

As we head into the camp this weekend, problems may arise from language, cultural, or even liturgical differences. Please pray for us and the Korean team and the Thai Church that we would look to how God is moving and work together for His kingdom.

Also continue to pray that God would bring out many people to the camp. We still have not met our quota of 40.

Will update more later! Thank you for everyone who's been praying for us, it's been quite encouraging.

A Sign From God

So the past two days and today make up a national Buddhist holiday. Students usually go home for four days of Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday and ditch school on Thursday and Friday. Our ministry revolves around going to school cafeterias during lunch and making friends, and as you can imagine, a university devoid of students makes our ministry pretty impossible.

We've been stuck in Grace Fellowship for the past two days, doing literally nothing. On top of this, it's been raining on and off so we have not been able to go outside. I made Tina learn the first verse and chorus of "Gee" by Girl's Generation so we can teach it to the students. Haha. (She's pretty good, but she wants to kill herself because she hates the song... Imagine what ACA would think of her now!)


Next next weekend (July 17-19), we have a evangelistic camp coming up and we are hoping for forty non-Christian students to attend. There's also a 24 person team from Korea coming next week to help us with it. So far we haven't been able to spread the news of the camp, because we haven't made any friends! So while the team and I were praying last night, God told me to pray for urgency. This being my fourth trip to Thailand and the third camp that I'm helping out at, I think I had a very self-reliant and unfocused approach to the upcoming camp. But for all the training we had to do and the support we had to raise, if we could not bring just forty students to this camp, we would be wasting not only our trip but the time and money of countless people.

Today we woke up at 7 AM and went out to the university to prayer walk. It was a bright and sunny day, the kind you see after the rain has let up. There were puddles evaporating on the road and all sorts of life coming out to rebuild and begin the routine of life again. I walked towards the lake/pond in the university and above me I saw a bird fly by with a stick in its mouth, probably to build a new nest or repair its old one that was destroyed by the rain.

I had a thought for a split second, "Maybe it's a sign from God..." Personally, I'm cautious of these kind of things because I don't want to read in my emotions and thoughts into everything around me and force myself to see things. But, I decided to take it in faith and turned my Bible to Genesis 7. Forty days after the waters abated, Noah send out a raven and a dove. The dove returned because it had no place to land its feet. Then Noah waited another seven days and sent out the dove. This time it returned with a freshly plucked olive leaf in its mouth. "So Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth." Today marks the end of our first seven days here in Thailand.

"Then he waited another seven days and sent forth the dove, and she did not return to him anymore." In exactly one week, the Korean team will arrive in Chiang Mai (July 15). Don't really know if that means anything, we'll see.

But what really sealed this sign from God was that as I was writing this post, I read that "in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat" (v.4) I gasped and tears came to my eyes as I realized that the seventeenth day of the seventh month, July 17, is the first day of our camp!

Right now I am filled with great expectations of God and His plan to move in Chiang Mai University. He has reminded me and promised me that as long as I trust in Him and pray for Him to move, He will take care of all things. Even though we won't be able to do much ministry over the next two days, I am completely confident that by next week God will provide and work in the hearts of CMU students to get them to sign up for our camp.

Praise God!

No Other Name

Acts 4:12 (ESV) "And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved."

On Saturday, July 4, 2009, the team and I headed up Doi Suthep (Suthep Mountain) with thousands of other Chiang Mai University students. Every year on the first Saturday of July, Chiang Mai University students run up the mountain with their respective departments as a school spirit event. However, this event is not only for school spirit. The largest temple in Chiang Mai, Wat Pratat, sits on top of Doi Suthep and overlooks the city. The thousands of students that run up the mountain (about 20,000), then proceed to worship at Wat Pratat to bring blessing upon themselves and their school for the coming year.


My team and I trekked the arduous 18 kilometers (~11 miles) in hot, sticky, humid weather in about three hours. (I may post some videos we took later) Along the way we passed by ornate ceremonial processions of flowers, statues, Buddhist urns and students dressed in traditional Thai clothing. At the same time, students drinking beer in the back of pick-up trucks flew past us as they laughed and cheered in celebration.

When we reached the top of the mountain, we came upon this flight of dragon stairs that lead to the actual temple. I could not help but remember Jesus' words, "For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many" (Matthew 7:13). Here was the gate that was leading thousands upon thousands to destruction.

When I'm at church at home surrounded by thousands of other Korean American Christians like myself, the reality that Christians are the minority is hard to grasp. But now, I witnessed with my own eyes that for every thousand members at Sarang Church, there were two thousand Thai students to match walking up these stairs to destruction. Truly, the people are God are too few in number for the almighty God we serve. I prayed that God would have mercy upon these students who knew not what they did, and that God would open their eyes and accept Christ as their savior.

Finally we entered the the temple (after paying a foreigner's fee), and we looked around. I saw the Buddhists passing by and ringing these bells in a row to invite the spirits. We prayed against these spirits and invited the Spirit of Christ to come reign in the hearts of the Thai people.




Here the students sit in front of the monk as they chant with him and listen to his teachings.









We entered the inner court of the temple and saw students walking in a procession around the central building holding lotus flowers with their hands in a prayer position. I saw Buddhists lighting candles of incense and praying to Buddha. There were others shaking a cup of sticks to see which falls out, which would correspond to a matching blessing or good luck charm.

I took this picture of this lone female student lighting incense candles and soon after I was shocked to realize that this was one of our friends, Pukpik. I've known Pukpik for three years now, having met her on my second mission trip to Thailand in 2006. She's been very open to Christianity and comes out to many of the events here at Grace Fellowship. She's even visited Sarang Church when she visited California.

But here she was devoutly praying to Buddha, not the living God. I realized that as open as people may be towards the gospel, and as much as people may be "seeking," until Christ is accepted as their lord and savior, all is meaningless in the end without Christ. She may come out to our events and even sing our songs, but without knowing Jesus personally, she is still destined for hell.

I looked to the left and saw my friend Art whom I've known for four years, since STEM 2005. He was walking in the procession with the other students. However, Art was talking on his cellphone and waved to us. Buddhism for him was obviously cultural, and he was partaking in the activities just because everyone else was.

Just like seeing students going up the mountain either religiously or just for fun, here in the temple there were devout Buddhist worshipers and others that just did so for the sake of it. But whatever path these students were choosing, religious or secular, it was not the path of eternal life.

God reminded me about the passage I had meditated on this morning. Acts 4:12 "And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved."

It's so easy to overlook the gravity of the situation. When I think about the prostitutes on the streets and the gender confusion that's literally everywhere, you realize that the Thai people need Jesus. But when I look at some of the nicest, friendliest, most hospitable friends that even come out to our Christian events, I sometimes fall into the lie of Satan that they might not need Christ. Why do these generally "good" people need Jesus? Aren't they living decent lives and not hurting anyone?

But God showed me on that mountaintop with thousands of students worshiping a false god in a false temple, that there really is no other name by which we can be saved. In the end, everything and everyone falls short of the glory of God. Buddhism, secularism, living a good life, having a nice family, being a nice person - these things do not restore our relationship with the creator of the universe. Only what Christ has done can bring us to God.

Please pray for Thailand, that God would shine His light in the darkness and that they would know and worship the name of Jesus Christ our savior.