15 hours later

It has been 15 hours since I talked with Mr. Sombat. I just talked with my fellow teacher, Matt, who went to have lunch at Sombat's place, and the elderly gentleman told him the same story as I was told yesterday. The doctors looked inside him from the top down & from the bottom up looking for this problem that they had seen before, but they couldn't find anything anymore—the lesion had completely healed. Mr Sombat told Matt that it was our God who had healed him. Apparently, there were some Thai people having lunch at the same time as when Matt was there, and Mr. Sombat turned to these people & told them about how our God—this God of the Christians—had healed him from this illness that was supposed to have had him 'under the knife.' Matt told me that the look on these Thai people's faces as Sombat told them the story of his healing was a look of wonder and amazement.

A non-believing man tells of how this foreign God heals him from this potentially life-threatening sickness. That is amazing. That is "Book of Acts" type stuff. This isn't you're ludicrous "my leg feels stiff & then the preacher put his hands on me & now I can move it... but then 18 hours later, it's just as stiff as it was before" placebo effect rubbish. This is real. A bona fide miracle.

God still does do this stuff. That's awesome, and I find myself humbled in light of it but awe-struck at the same time. What a crazy/beautiful God.

“Your God. I Believe Your God Heal Me.”

I’m literally flooded with emotions right now. I don’t know what to think—it is like my head is not on straight &/or I’ve been smacked across the back of my skull with a heavy, blunt object.

There is an old gentleman who runs a food shop / sidewalk eatery out of his house that pretty much every farang staff member at GES has gone to for who knows how long. His name is Sombat, and apparently he has been dealing with a rather serious gastrointestinal problem for many years. It had become so bad in the recent months that the doctors were telling him that they would have to perform surgery in order to fix whatever was wrong. The downside is that Sombat is well advanced in years—probably about 70 years old—and as far as surgery goes, the older you get, the less advantageous the risk of an operation becomes.

His pre-op screening was scheduled for Wednesday—yesterday. On Tuesday this past week, one of my fellow teachers, Matt, & I stopped and talked for a bit with Sombat after we had finished our meal. Matt asked if we could pray for him before he went to see the doctors the next day. Sombat, like the majority of Thailand, is a Buddhist, and because of this, he graciously accepted the prayers offered up for him to a foreign God, since any good thing has got to help (right?). We quickly prayed for the man as we were standing in the shop, asking God to heal him & that Sombat would know—if he did get healed—it was because of God that he was healed.

Wednesday came & went. Today, I just finished my meal at Sombat’s place, and after paying, I asked the man how his doctor’s appointment went. He told me, as best as he could with his limited English, that the doctors took a scope and looked up inside him from underneath & down from the top side for the problem. He told me that the doctors said the lesion in his “stomach” had sealed up, motioning with his hands by taking his pinkie finger and wrapping around it with his other hand, as if to seal off the tip from the rest of the finger. Instead of the surgery that the doctors had told him was going to be mandatory, they gave him some medicine to take & he was told to sleep a lot for the next month, until he went back for a final check-up.

He stopped, looked at me and said, “Your God. I believe it was your God that heal me.” There was a look on his face of unmistakeable joy and honesty that it would have been impossible for me to in any way think he had just been polite, trying to make the farang who prayed to his foreign God feel good for offering up “good hopes.”

I walked away surprised, overjoyed and completely taken away. I’ve pretty much been a basket case ever since. Here I am in Thailand, feeling useless & drained; on the verge of giving up on my God because he supposedly threw me here in Thailand to do stuff for Him, but all I’ve been doing has been schoolwork. The first—and most recent—time that I ever prayed for God to do something big was to heal my best friend’s father from his cancer. I had firmly believed that God would; then 3 weeks after rigorous prayer, my friend’s dad died. I was sent in a tailspin, having to reassess everything that I had ever believed: This God who I was serving—was He even real? He told us to ask Him to do stuff & to “believe and not doubt” that it would happen, and that it would, but here I was, totally devastated by the fact that God didn’t come through in the way that I had expected when my friend’s dad passed away.

I find myself reaffirmed that God does listen; that prayer does work; that God does love; that God exists. Furthermore, I find myself horrified at how I’ve let my walk with God very much slip away, recounting the many adventures that we have had together in my life.

Then there was this man, a Buddhist, who had more faith in my God than me. A man who believes that a God who was not his own reached out and healed him. That takes faith; more faith than I can confess to ever having. God has always been mine—He’s always been “there”; a part of my existence. There hasn’t really ever been a leap to grasp Him for me, as fundamentally, my very life has been founded on Him from day one of my life. I grew up in a Christian home & decided to follow Jesus at a very young age, so in that respect, I’ve had it easy. On the other side, though, I’ve never been subjected to the “otherness” of God—having to reach out and take hold of a supernatural being & relate with him without really having a background to set that relationship. I haven’t had to decide to switch allegiances from one god to another or from one set of religions / spiritual beliefs to another. Yet, here is this man who credits this God, which wasn’t his own, for restoring his health.

Increase my faith, God. Increase my faith.

And you Christians who are reading this, pray for Sombat—that this event would lead soon to his decision to give his life over to Christ.

Le Struggle

It's been a long, busy month.

I remember in June saying that I would try to post updates to this blog about my Thailand adventures every other week. Perhaps I was a bit too ambitious; nonetheless, I still hope to be able to do that.



August Highlights

To sum up August over here at GES in Thailand—at least for me—there is only one word: Gong Show. The first week of the month heralded the last week of our interim Chemistry teacher's presence, as she was to return to school on the 7th. Being the resident Chemistry teacher, it was my job to take over the course load that she was bearing & incorporate it into my already busy schedule. At that time, the school hadn't really considered that 8 of my 24 hours of in-class instruction were directly conflicting with the Chemistry course load that I was to resume. Having been myself filling in for another class—the English 10B course—I didn't really have any flex room, and the school didn't really anticipate the fact that there would be no 10B English teacher when I took over Chemistry. I'm pretty sure that the Thailand mentality of "ignore it & it will fix itself" came much into play here, where my thoughts are that they were hoping I'd be able to teach all of the high school math classes, all of the high school chemistry classes while still managing to teach the 10B English class at the same time. In fact, the first copy of my revised schedule reflected just that—that I was to do all of this. Thankfully, the laws of physics overruled the school & my restriction of only being able to be in one place at one time won out (though, as we will see later on, this wasn't an isolated case).

Jumping into Chemistry was alright, for the most part. At the beginning, I pretty much had to have the students tell me what they'd learned in the course so far, for although the previous teacher covered the content, with these students there is no guarantee that they retained a single thing. As for my 10B class, they were pretty much abandoned for a whole week, until the lines of communication finally connected & it was discovered that the school was short one teacher. For the next two, weeks, however, the 10B class was completely dissolved, being conglomerated into he 10A class—a student body whose English proficiency is, for the most part, pretty good (in contrast with 10B who, at the beginning of the year, didn't know what a door or a window or a stair was). The 10B parents were becoming a bit upset with the school, for the students were placed into classes & were not given any textbooks with which to study. The sad thing is that not a single person knew how long these students would be remaining in these classes.

Then one day, there was a bit of a "melt down." I was asked to come into the Thai administration office for a chat, and pretty much I was told that the parents of all the 10B students were making very angry phone calls to the school, questioning the academic standards of the school and—since I was technically the "home room" teacher for the 10B students—that I was the primary cause of this "failing" of the school in the parents' eyes.

I was taken aback, to say the least. After being lectured about not doing my job, about not teaching these students, about not having enough textbooks for these kids, about failing these students' parents & failing the school in one of my primary job requirements, I was then officially directed to create a new ESL class which would occur at the same time as my current ESL instruction time, where I would be responsible for an intense, comprehensive instruction plan for these 10B students, to help them with the coursework that they currently were taking. The great irony was that not only was I not teaching the 10B students at all any more, but that having the 10A & 10B students who were enrolled in ESL for the morning (which is supposed to be a total of 14 students, but only one ever shows up) to be part of the same class for ESL in the morning was strictly forbidden—there would be too many students in the one classroom. I mentioned this to my employer, but it fell on deaf ears. I was, then, perforce to teach two separate classes 5 times a week at the exact same time. End of discussion.

Feeling greatly encouraged, being told that the school's failings to its students were my fault because I didn't have enough textbooks for the kids (which, apparently is my responsibility, even though the school didn't order enough textbooks to begin with)—even though our English administrator told me to not bother with textbooks for these students, since they couldn't understand the material anyways and that they would be moved to a new class as soon as things were worked out—I went back to my classroom, trying to figure out how in the world I would be able to teach two classes at the same time without being in the same room. No, no I didn't do that. I instead thought of just walking off the school property and never coming back. I had had it.

But then, my first class of the day began & the students—praise the Lord for them—lit up the gloomy day with their smiles, energy & enthusiasm for the material. Were it not for my kids, I most definitely would have been gone before lunch that day.

After school, I talked to our English administrator, telling him about this "meeting” that I had had in the morning. I let him know that there was absolutely no way that I could be doing this, and I asked for his advice help. He picked up a sheet of paper off of his desk and handed it to me, saying, "Here."

Not sure what I was receiving, I looked at the sheet & was immediately met with a wave of dumbfounded relief. He had handed me a schedule for the new 10B teacher, and after a second of me looking at it, he said, "That should probably help." No kidding. Needless to say, my anxiety and stress levels immediately dropped from a balmy 300% to a more manageable 85. Oh, and I decided to remain teaching at the school.


Current Conditions

Right now, if you were to ask me how I was doing, I would probably tell you that I was drained, strained and empty. I've been chastised from some of the lower grade-level teachers of doing too much work, that my personal health (mental, physical & spiritual) would be at-risk were I to remain working at the same rate that I currently found myself. They're right, admittedly, but I unfortunately cannot see myself reducing the workload. I am teaching advanced Mathematics—algebraic theorems & trigonometric proof that I myself don’t even fully comprehend, yet I am responsible for disseminating said concepts to the children in my classroom. Needless to say, I spend hours pouring over the material to try and wrap my mind around the information enough to be able to present it to the students in each & every lesson. Suggestions have been made to me to let the students teach themselves, but I don't know if these students—who, as a whole, haven't the determination to complete 6 homework questions in 3 days—would be capable of "teaching themselves." At present, I employ a cooperative learning approach to instruction in my class, grouping the students into teams, where a representative distribution of abilities (poor students & over-achievers) are compelled to work together in order to progress along a scheduled system of rewards. It works out well, but even the brightest students wouldn’t be able to teach themselves this material. Ask yourself: could you effectively master the concept of "rationalising the denominator of radical expressions" all by yourself, or do you think that someone who's at least been exposed to this stuff sometime before would be of great benefit to your learning?

That being said, I am at an impasse. I feel torn in many, many directions. I am overwhelmed with the amount of work that I have to accomplish on a week-to-week basis—so much so, that it beings back dreadful memories of those 100+ hour school weeks during final projects with my double-major (the temporal investment here doesn't appear to be as much, but the feeling is reminiscent—one of dreadful drowning). However, I am fully aware that the only way I can accomplish this task is to rely wholly on God. And there's the catch: I've no time to give myself a respectable meeting with God anymore. Deadlines, projects, marking, content mastery & lesson plans all haunt me for 18 hours each day, leaving me only with a 6 hour respite in my dreamless sleep.

Add on top of all this, the desire to retain some semblance of a presence within our community, and I might as well tie those concrete shoes onto my feet before jumping into the swimming pool. I am consumed by work; I am stretched by community; I am torn by my relationship with God. As a result, I feel empty, broken and useless.

I have not felt more alone spiritually right now than ever before. God seems to me to be a distant memory, and I constantly have to fight off the thought that Christianity is a delusion. I feel abandoned by God, yet I cannot cast Him off: I've seen Him & experienced Him too much to say that He isn't real. He just seems to have gone on hiatus or something. Or rather, I am probably much too busy doing stuff that I do not give Him the time of day to commune with me.

Would I say that I'm under spiritual attack? I'd love to, but since I am currently _in_ this situation, I cannot really say that I am—the thought that I've been living a hoax is just as prevalent in my thoughts, so there is no consolation; there is no way for me to judge without bias. You, oh reader, probably can. If you're of the spiritual persuasion, you'd probably conclude that there is a war going on & since I've placed myself in a front-lines ministry position, I'm apt to be attacked pretty heavily. I myself just do not know. Not anymore.

All I know is that I'm tired; I'm empty; I'm stretched to capacity & I would like some rest. Please don't quote any Bible verses to me about coming to God to get rest—that will only exacerbate my frustrations.



But please, do pray.