It was a sticky-hot night in Bangkok, the kind where most people leave a wet mark on the vinyl as they vacate their bus seats. On this night, we had the privilege of riding in a taxi, the number of people dictating that the cost would be equivalent to each of our individual bus fares. We were thirty minutes late to our meeting, and the driver had just made a wrong turn. “ไม่เป็นไหร่” (Mai ben rai/no problem) we told him; in Thailand it’s best to meet timeliness as it is handed to you. We dove back into our conversation, in which we’d learned he’s in his mid-forties, still married, and has two daughters. He told us how proud he is of his family as he pulled a photo of his older daughter out of his wallet. We passed it around the car complimenting her beauty, but more importantly, her achievement of recently graduating medical school. He choked up a little as he told us about his younger daughter. “She’s still figuring things out,” he explained in Thai with a thick accent from the Northeast of Thailand. Minutes later as we reached our destination we told him how we would be praying for his family, and that our God loves His children and answers prayers.

In conversations like the one above, we praise God for allowing us to study Thai. We could have easily ridden in that man’s taxi for an hour having only said hello, goodbye and thank you, but through what we’ve learned in just five months of language school, we are able to have opportunities to build relationships and to have increasingly meaningful interactions with the Thai people. Recently, however, we’ve had to make some tough decisions and cut back on things that we feel are important.

Before I go on, I want to take a moment to acknowledge how good you already are to us. Thank you for reading our words, knowing our hearts and trusting in us as servants to the Thai people. Thank you also to those of you who pray for us and our work regularly. Thank you to those who have partnered with us financially in the past and those of you who continue to do so on a monthly basis; you are truly a God-send.  Thank you, too, friends who call, skype and email us; we may be far away, but we like to think we are still connected.

That said, we believe in the urgency of our calling. When we made the radical decision to leave our lives in the Bay Area, we left feeling comfortable that we had enough of a financial cushion to bootstrap our work here. Our prayer was that over time we’d grow a solid base of people back home that would catch our vision and want to partner with us in fulfilling it. Our purpose in writing to you today is that we would like to ask you to pray about partnering with us to see Thailand transformed. Going into 2015, we have approximately 70% of our basic living expenses covered. This does not include the additional $400/month it takes to study Thai, but as we’ve shared, we believe that in order to effectively touch the lives of the Thai people, we need to speak their language. We are happy to discuss our finances with you further and want to pledge increased financial transparency moving forward, but we also acknowledge that not everyone wants that much detail. If you would like an outline of our expenses, you can find them on our fundraising page or contact us directly.

We’d like to ask you to find time in your busy schedule to prayerfully consider the following:

We want to say thank you again for keeping up with us what we’re doing in Thailand. We are excited to share a few more encouraging testimonies coming out on our members-only section before the end of the year (Newsletter subscribers are already a part of the club!). Until then, Merry Christmas!