What Was I Thinking?

As we flew into Bangkok, we passed this rainbow, hence the title of these blogs about Thailand. It's Christmas night here and I have just returned from the Christmas candlelight service at New Vision Baptist Church where I also partook of their potluck supper. My roommate Zinan visiting from Budapest where he attends Pastor Graham King's Chinese church is on his iPhone on the other bed in this hotel room. If you ever want an inexpensive place to stay in Bangkok, I recommend this hotel, because it includes a good breakfast and Wifi and is near shopping, sidewalk cafes, and Thai massage parlors. It's called the Samran Place Hotel and it's near a sky train station too.  Since it's Christmas and I've mentioned the service, I'll put some pictures here now.  The handsome dude in the last photo is Zinan. I like him because he's quiet and kind and he makes a killer potato salad that I tasted in China last fall at someone's house. The service had lots of sing...

As you can see, Christmas preparations were in full swing when we returned to Manila, even at the airport where these pictures were taken. Our travel team split up. Pastor Steve and Emily had only a few hours before boarding a flight back to wintry Seoul, William was heading out to spend time with his friend Kyle and his family, Tain was bound for a hotel to rest, while I was going with Dawn and Nobu to San Mateo to visit with friends of theirs from previous missions trips they had taken through the International Christian School in Uijeongbu.  We piled into Pastor Arnel Cruz's car with his son Nico and our luggage for the drive through the traffic which was rather heavy on that Saturday morning. Eventually we came to the vacant home of another pastor where we would stay until we had to leave on Tuesday. I was exhausted. Why? When we returned from the visit with the children in the mountains, we had about five hours before we were to climb into a van a travel in the dead of night t...

If you have been reading my blog entries chronologically, you may be wondering about the best day I had in the Philippines. What happened to make it so? The answer was inside this little building... We rode in our green jeepney limousine up into the mountains for our last stop of our traveling conference. We came to this church  which was connected to a Bible school. It even had men's and women's dorms.  Young men and women came long distances over the mountains to attend the Bible school, and they were the majority of the attendees of the sessions in the church. A very enthusiastic young lady led us all in rapid rousing choruses between speakers.  But what made this part of the conference so special to me were these other attendees that we met in that little building when we first arrived.  At first, all these kids could do was giggle and hide their smiles. When asked questions, some said, "Nosebleed," which we were told meant embarrassment at using English. The pas...