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!