Firm Foundation

Hello, friend!! As some of you might know, my squad’s time in Thailand has come to an end. Before transitioning into sharing about the amazing works that the Lord is doing here in Malaysia, the Lord put it on my heart to share a few things with you!

On March 16th, my squad was reunited for the first time since January 27th! All three teams traveled from their various ministry locations to Chiang Mai, Thailand, for our two-week-long Teaching and Debrief period!

Debrief and Teaching weeks are a time designed for squads to be poured into, trained, filled up, and rest in between countries.

As you may know from my previous posts, my role on my squad is Logistics. I serve in this role alongside my sweet, joyous, and hilarious friend, Ella.

Majority of our role consisted of behind-the-scenes serving such as making sure the needs of our squad and leadership were met every single day. Ella and I coordinated housing, supplies, transportation, and food for 21 people; planned adventure days; answered hundreds of questions (haha!); spearheaded the squad’s visa extension process; and scheduled transportation for 17 of us to travel to Malaysia.

Ella and I often joked that while our role was not overwhelming, our responsibilities were constant. Each day throughout that two-week period, Ella and I were busy caring for and serving our squad and leadership from the time we woke up to the time we went to bed. This forced both of us to learn what it meant to walk in true dependence and rely on the inexhaustible resources of our Heavenly Father each day so that we could continuously emulate the servant heart of Jesus and walk in selfless love!

Stewarding this role also provided Ella and I with a unique opportunity to see the Lord move in some pretty miraculous ways!

No matter how many hiccups, roadblocks, or how much resistance we were met with, the Lord prevailed time and time again. He is truly sovereign over all, and nothing surprises Him! Never have I experienced the faithfulness and miraculous provision of the Lord in the little and the large as I have stewarding this role!

In Christ, there is truly no lack!

We can rest in Him no matter what our circumstances are, knowing that He goes before us to prepare the way! He is always moving and working, even before we realize that we need Him to!

What a blessing it has been to be able to experience this firsthand! Our Father is so faithful and so very good!!

So that you can see what I mean by this, I want to share a few of my favorite testimonies from those two weeks!!

• After long and busy days of serving, Ella and I, each evening, would have to go to the grocery store to get supplies and food for the next day for the squad. Somehow, even though everything in the grocery stores would be in Thai and we had no idea where to even begin looking for the things we needed to buy, we would end up in the exact spot we needed to be, at the exact right time, without fail!!!
  This happened every time we went to a store for the 2 weeks we were in Chiang Mai!! It was almost as if God had stocked each store just for us to wander through! The Lord’s kindness, consideration, and faithfulness in His guidance, even when we had no idea He was moving, built our faith and trust in Him for things that were much larger!!
• Our squad was set to be in Thailand 2 days past our visa expiration. Because of that, we had to go to the Immigration Office to get a visa extension. What was meant to take only a handful of hours became a chaotic 2-day process.
  Our Airbnb host was, by Thai law, supposed to have filled out a form for each of us called a TM30 and submit it to the government. However, because he was a Chinese immigrant, he did not know that. On the first day, he was very uncooperative, which led us to exhaust every other possible option. We thought we finally found a solution that would work, but when we came back on the second day, we found out that we were back to square one and that our only option was for our original host to fill out the forms.
  Even though this process had the potential to be extremely stressful, Ella and I had such a covering of supernatural peace and joy. It was so abundantly evident that God was with us, working the circumstances in our favor! At each turn, God made a way for us, and we were able to rest in the promise of His faithfulness! And eventually, after lots of prayer and paperwork, some quiet worship in the middle of the Immigration office, and several hours of having to use Google translate to communicate with our host and try to convince him to either help us or give us a refund, God moved his heart, and the rest of the process went smoothly from there on out!
• Our original plan to travel to Malaysia was to take 4 trains, as that was the only form of transportation our budget would allow for. However, on Saturday morning (the day we were going to start traveling), Ella and I miraculously found $800 extra dollars in our debrief budget! This allowed for us to pay for two sleeper bus tickets for everyone so that our longest travel from Chiang Mai to Bangkok (10 hours) and Bangkok to Hat Yai (16 hours) would not have to be via train! Praise God!
  Once we reached Bangkok, Ella and I left to find the bus station for our bus to Hat Yai to get everything ready for the rest of the squad. However, our Grab driver could not find the bus station. After wandering around on foot through the streets of Bangkok, with all of our stuff, trying to find the station on Google Maps, we finally got to where the station should have been. To our disappointment, there was nothing there. While Ella was trying to see if there was anywhere else it could be on maps, I decided to pray and ask God to point us in the right direction and send us someone to help. Right after I finished praying, an elderly man turned to us and asked where we were going! He didn’t speak a ton of English, so he pointed us across the street to a vendor. That vendor, after hearing our story, pointed us further up the street to a travel agency who she said should be able to tell us where to go. Once we made it to the travel agency, we were pointed back in the direction we came from to a hotel. Once we got to the hotel, it was clear that we had been scammed.
  Ella and I then went back to regroup with leadership and set out to a nearby bus station with Elijah. When we got there, we quickly realized that all of the buses to Hat Yai were already gone for the evening. With time running out, we began to search for anything that would take us to southern Thailand. Once again, I decided to stop and pray for God’s guidance and direction. Several moments later, a woman walked up to us to help! She pointed us to a family-owned bus who said that they had 17 extra seats, they could hold the bus until 7:00 p.m. so the rest of our squad could get there, AND they could take us to Hat Yai! Praise God!!
  By the grace and miraculous provision of God, despite the surprise scam bus station and missing a train, we made it to Malaysia on March 31st, 57 hours after leaving Chiang Mai!

God is so good and so abundantly faithful!

~

As some of you may have heard from the news, on March 28th, there was a 7.7 earthquake that struck Thailand and Myanmar.

Thankfully, in Chiang Mai, the earthquake only reached a 4.9. While my squad did have to evacuate the houses we were staying in for about an hour due to the intensity of the tremors, we were blessed to have had no injuries and no damage done to the villa we were staying in. Despite that, I don’t think it will be an experience that any of us could ever forget. It was truly surreal to be on firm, dry ground and yet feel like we were on a boat in extremely choppy waters.

However, while Chiang Mai was able to escape relatively unscathed, the devastation in other parts of Thailand and in Myanmar was severe. Thousands have lost their lives, and thousands more have been displaced, their homes and businesses destroyed.

Please uplift these nations and all affected in prayer.  

~

Later that same evening, my squad was struck by a metaphorical earthquake. Two of our squadmates were being sent home, and because we were beginning our travel to Malaysia the next day, we had limited time to say our goodbyes.

As I’m sure you can imagine, after a day where we had gone through a literal earthquake and a metaphorical one, my squad was quite shaken.

But even through both emotional experiences, God was still good. Earlier that morning, before any of us had any idea of what the day held for us, God had weighed it on our hearts to sing the song Firm Foundation for our morning worship.

God always knows what we need, even before we recognize it!

What a powerful and needed reminder those lyrics became to my squad in a time of shock, sorrow, and confusion!

Instead of giving in to our fear and doubt, we could lean into His promise and truth, which was so fresh in our minds.

Christ is our firm foundation, even when everything around us is shaking. 

He has never let us down. He is faithful through the generations and in every season.

In Him, no matter what we go through and the chaos around us, we have joy and peace that makes no sense.

We won’t be overtaken, because our strength comes from Him! 

God has never failed us, and He won’t start now! 

Amen!

~

In the two months that we were serving in Thailand, the Lord cultivated a burning hunger and thirst to dwell in His presence within me. This hunger to know and make known is one that has only continued to build and has changed me (and is changing me still) from the inside out!

Oh, what a beautiful place it is, to fall radically in love with the King of Kings! To seek to dwell and learn to foster deeper intimacy with Him in every moment, not just a select handful. To know and experience Him in ways I never thought possible.

Oh, what a joy it is, to learn to live from a place of worship! To cultivate a heart that beats to honor, to glorify, and to please Him with all that I have and all that I am.

Oh, what an honor to be ruined for Him—undone, unraveled, and consumed, all to be remade and molded in the image of the Son. To fully cast off the old and walk in freedom and authority as a child of the Living God.

Praise God truly for new works, new beginnings, and new heart postures!!

Serving and sharing the Good News in Thailand was so incredibly sweet and filled to overflow with the presence of the Lord. The time we spent there and the people the Lord lead us to encounter touched my heart so deeply.

I am honored and feel so blessed to have been able to be a part of the beautiful works He is doing there and to witness His loving pursuit of the Thai people!

It is so evident that the Lord is pursuing this nation and that He has claimed them for His own!

If you would like to pray, here are some prayer points:

• For His glory to be revealed to the nations of Thailand and Myanmar through this earthquake, for both nations to come to know Him and for them to encounter him, for miraculous moves of God in the lives of those affected and their families, and for safety, salvation, provision, and healing;
• For a ceasefire and long lasting peace in Myanmar;
• For the churches in Thailand and Myanmar to become beacons of hope and light for their communities that nonbelievers would be drawn to; and
• For the people of both countries to receive dreams and visions of Him.

Stay tuned for more information about Malaysia!!!

God bless!!

Joyfully His,
Areonah