MISSION UPDATE: Redefining fulfillment

I honestly never knew how much free time I had on my hands prior to moving to Thailand. Idle evenings hanging out with the kids. Random bonfires with big groups of friends for no real reason in particular. Bible studies on relaxed Friday nights. Tucked onto the couch in our dimly lit living room while a fire roared in the wood stove creating all sorts of cozy.

I took basically every second of that life for granted. And I regret it.

Life now looks absolutely nothing like life then. We have no English speaking friends nearby with whom to gather. Extended family is out of reach, reducing visits to once every year or two. Three of my sons live on the other side of the world, meaning holiday gatherings with the whole gang don't happen. It's too hot for the cozy of a fire and instead of couches we have wooden benches.

I think, for me, one of the biggest daily struggles is the loss of slow mornings and quiet (I didn't think my life with 8 kids was quiet pre-Thailand) evenings with the family. Because our family is so expansive, it's exceptionally challenging to recreate the kind of home atmosphere we'd worked hard to foster in America. Here, you never know which of 25+ children will be having an emotional meltdown, or what window might be broken, or which screen might be torn through in a fit of anger, or if one bully might accuse another of bullying them requiring a whole interrogation, trial, and sentencing to commence when all you really want to do is squeeze deep into the recesses of a dark room with your eyes tight shut pretending life is peaceful and full of calm.

In fact, this life has required us to redefine words like peace and calm and quiet. Words like rest and sleep have had to be qualified because with more than two dozen kids, there's often someone sick or scared (or any other emotion) in the night making consistent, unbroken sleep something of a unicorn.

Throw in 100 degree heat with no AC, and we sometimes slog through the day (and sweat through the night) looking like drowned cats the unicorn dragged in.

But here's where it gets weird. Because not a single one of us wants to leave.

My girls arrived in Thailand at the ages of 14 and 16 and they've entered adulthood in the mission field. They know they aren't stuck here and they can leave any time. Their desire is to walk their lives out in God's will and in His timing. And as they've obeyed that, His response has been to knit their hearts to the work and people in front of them.

My little boys, who stepped onto Thai soil at the ages of 8, 8, and (about 3 weeks shy of) 5, view Thailand as "home". They barely know anything else, at this point. And they love the kids and people around us, in spite of having to share their parents with every child who walks through our gate.

My big boys live in America but they know every last child by name. They even know their voices and when someone calls out to greet them while we're on the phone, whichever son I'm talking to will yell hello back, often calling them by name having only heard their voice. They're invested. They're committed to this crazy family of theirs that just never stops growing. And when asked how many siblings they have, they'll laugh and say something like, "You're not going to believe this, but ..." This calling has seeped into them.

The last half of 2024 brought us three new children and a little girl with kidney failure. It brought us two, simultaneous hospitalizations and, at the same time, the sudden loss of two boys who returned to family. It brought a broken foot that was miraculously ( I never use that word lightly) healed following a prayer whispered over the child by a fellow missionary. It brought five fabulous volunteers and a surprise visit by Alex, my thirdborn son, who showed up before the break of day one morning and literally shocked me to my core.

The beginning of 2025 has brought healing to the kidneys of our sweet Chotika, the start of solar installation which has already reduced our astronomical electric bill to a more manageable amount. It brought an opportunity to attend a Youth camp with our teens (not common in a Buddhist country) which led to unexpected, but very welcome, changes in our kids. It brought a cobra-eating (that's the goal anyway!) peacock who adds to the cacophony of the place by screaming HELP every 5-7 minutes. Go ahead and try to convince me God didn't throughly enjoy the process of speaking all these amazing animals into existence.

That's probably about the best I can do at catching you up to speed from nearly 6 months of silence in this space. All I can really say is that we're still here, God is still pruning us (and sometimes we squeal when it pinches just right), and the kids are still ridiculously adorable. Even the almost-adult ones. We get front row seats to witness God do a seemingly impossible work on young hearts and, while sometimes we really do end up with broken windows and irrational tantrums, God never leaves them as they came.

He's a good God and He's doing good things. We're constant benefactors of His goodness and grace and as long as He'll have us here, we're delighted to stay.

Even if we do look like drowned cats sometimes.