Leah and Natalie's news

Dear friends,

It’s strange being in a different country and missing so many of the events in England that are a normal occurrence in your life. When we get back we will appreciate the seasons and the different traditions so much more. That’s one of the differences of living in another country – you long for those normal events with the people of your own nationality, and sometimes just not to be different from the crowd.

Recently there was bonfire night which was really strange because nobody celebrates it here and you mention it to the Americans in our school and there just like huh?! You start fires and pretend to burn a person on them??!! I wanted to pretend it was freezing and to make some onion soup and put some gloves on but it’s very hard to do in a tropical country, haha. The fast food here is to buy a little pot noodle thing in the shop, and then put hot water (from the shop) in it!

Christmas is coming up soon and it’s going to be a new experience as we’ve never had Christmas abroad before. Instead of cozying up inside from the cold and watching the Queen on TV, we’ll be in cool clothes and watching normal TV as Thai’s don’t celebrate Christmas at all. It will also be really hard because Christmas is about celebrating Jesus’s wonderful birthday but also about seeing family and showing them how much you care.

Last Christmas was great but it was not the same, as we knew it would be the last one in England so it kinda wasn’t as special as we wanted it to be. It will be funny knowing what sort of things we can do here as things like tinsel and christmas trees aren’t commonly sold here.

School is wonderful just now as we are involved in a lot of the extra activities after school and we have lots of lovely friends there. School work is good but also hard especially as I am now in high school – it can be challenging the amount of homework they give you. But every high schooler has to experience that otherwise school wouldn’t be the same, haha. Natalie also gets a lot of homework and she is in middle school.

It’s also great to be there for some of our friends who haven’t got a lot of Christian support at home, like a girl who is one of my closest friends who is Chinese. Her parents are Buddhists and she is a Christian but is forced to go the temple and bow down to Buddha. She isn’t allowed to go to church and hardly ever allowed to be involved in the Christian activities at school. On her birthday all she wanted from her parents was to be able to go to the Friday night fellowship group that they don’t let her go too. They let her go just for her birthday and she spent a lot of the night sobbing as she was just so pleased to be there. To me it just showed me how thankful I should be to God for having such a great Christian home to grow up in and how I should pray for her and her parents that they will see the way, the truth and the light.

God often inspires me to invite my Thai friends with me to morning devotions and to other Christian groups. They often tell me their busy but that doesn’t discourage me because I know that God is working in me to let them know about their creator and I pray for them every night. I believe that even though prayer doesn’t always get answered straight away it is always heard and that we have to trust that God will deal with it in the right way. That’s what I’m letting him do with my prayers about my Buddhist friends.

So I encourage all of you who are reading this link letter to proclaim Jesus to everyone you meet! It doesn’t even have to be you talking or inviting them to a Christian event. It can be you showing the love of Christ in you being an example and by showing how happy God makes you – or praying for them every night by writing their names to stick around your bedroom walls.

The system in Bangkok that is basically a public train, but above the roads and buildings. I looked at the Thai people around me with their little charms around their necks and I felt like crying out to God. You know why – I saw in their eyes this lost look, this look of I can’t trust in anyone but this little necklace. They didn’t look happy – I couldn’t see Christ shining in them, I saw sadness. The worst thing is they probably hadn’t even heard the gospel message before. That is why God has brought us here, for those people. That is our passion – to let those lost sheep find their shepherd. He has been calling them and looking for them, and we want to give them to Him so that He can be overjoyed at them coming to know the God who loves them so much.

Please continue to pray for us both that we can be a witness to those around us, for my friend that her parents would let her go to Christian things and God would open their eyes to him, and for us to continue to settle into life in Bangkok.

Thank you for praying for us, we really appreciate it

love
Leah and Natalie

December 2010