God is so good

Last weekend, our team made a trip to the largest Buddhist temple in Khon Kaen. The temple was absolutely beautiful covered in gold and ornate paintings on all nine floors. The nine floors represent the nine levels of heaven that Buddhists believe in. With each new level, the room gets smaller, until the ninth floor where there is barely any room. This reduction of size symbolizes the Buddhists' desire to achieve nirvana, or feeling absolutely nothing.

Watching as people placed money in machines to get their future or bowed down to golden idols for good merit was heartbreaking, but it truly opened up my eyes to their need to hear the gospel. This is so different from America where people hear but simply choose not to believe. Thais are born Buddhist and grow up as Buddhist. It is not a religion to them. In fact, after many conversations with girls here, it doesn't even seem like a decision to them. Buddhism is their life. And that's that. They do not think about who made the heavens and the earth. They do not think about where they will go when they die. They have no one who says how much good is good enough. They live their entire lives trying to do enough good works to be perfect to get to their heaven. Did you catch that? They're trying to attain perfection.

This past week our team was able to have several gospel conversations, and we are meeting more and more people every day. God has been so faithful to open doors for us to meet people and to start having those deeper, more meaningful conversations. Tomorrow we are having the Baptism service at our church, and many of us have invited Thai non-believers to come see. This service can have a great impact on non-believers, not to mention the mere fact that they will be around the loving body of Christ.

Please pray for us as we continue to labor in conversations of broken "Tenglish" and beg the Lord to open their eyes. He is the God of this city, and He is doing amazing, undeniable things here. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost. I am so blessed to be a part of this.