Journal of James's Journey with Jesus

Mission Trip Entry Part 1

I am finally writing about the mission trip after such a long time. This mission trip was really different but it was one of the most edifying ones I have been on.

I was glad to be led by Brother Jeff and Sister Tammy, our church's missionary couple in Thailand, and I was deeply edified by my team leader Ian, one of the regional/pastoral leaders of Brighton church. I will speak more on their influence later.

The first thing that hit me was the excitement of going to Thailand again. From day one to ten, I was on cloud nine, making jokes all the way. It has been like this ever since the first trip. I immediately recovered from the month-long depression I had been battling.

The flight must have done something to my brain’s wiring systems. Gui Zhen and Jaslyn said I laughed more naturally and was really unrestrained, unlike in Singapore. I have returned to sanity now that I am back.

I am also thankful for receiving feedback from Sean that I was encouraging and breaking the ice in people. Previously, people found me irritating, which hurt me and got me questioning whether my personality was pleasing to God.

My conclusion: God wants to change my character, not my personality. We are to grow into Christ’s image character-wise but God did not intend for us to have the same personality, just as we all have different DNA. I let others see the true me though I would be vulnerable because God desires truth in the inward parts.

I know that there is a time to be serious and a time to have fun. Maybe it is just me being insensitive but I wonder why people prefer to be serious most of the time. But I will follow suit so as to not ruin the ministry of the Word or relations.

The main message I felt God was speaking to the whole lot of us was to depend on His Spirit, not on our own might and power. It is ironic how we can be Spirit-filled and yet not Spirit-led.

I speak for myself because I am accustomed with the protocols, procedures, guidelines, rules and formulas of Christian living that I often work on hindsight and human perspectives, not on God's prophetic Word of the moment.

God taught me to depend on Him the night I was preparing my first sermon for an adult cellgroup. What I usually would do was to construct a message from my memory bank of Bible verses after deciding what to share about.

This time, all I did was pray in tongues in my room while doing other stuff. The whole sermon formed by God's inspiration while I was still penning my journal, complete with three points, Bible verses and structure. How powerful dependence on God is!

The next day, I preached without much nervousness because I was preaching God’s Word, not my word. The glory was to God and the pressure to perform was on Him. It felt awesome giving the glory to God and saying exactly what He wanted me to. Healing even took place when Gui Zhen prayed for an elderly woman who had acute stomach pain during altar call.

Brother Jeff and Sister Tammy were simply awesome in teaching us about how evangelism should be done. Our method of evangelization was totally different from the previous trips. In the past, we went from house to house giving tracts, sharing the gospel head-on and praying for the sick.

But Brother Jeff brought to our attention what Jesus said when He sent out the seventy in Luke 10:5-7. "When you enter a house, first say, 'Peace to this house.' If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him; if not, it will return to you. Stay in that house, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house.”

What we did this trip was to spend time understanding the Thai people and their culture. On a few occasions we dined with them, eating papaya salad and local delicacies. We did move from house to house but we did not rush to get every house over and done with. The missionaries changed tactics after they followed up on people who received Jesus and found out that some of them accepted Christ because of us, the foreigners. They wanted to ensure that the Thai people knew exactly what the Gospel is.

After I shared to someone using the usual approach, Brother Jeff found it surprising that we did it this way and told me that it had to be done in a spiritual way. Brother Jeff brought to my attention that Jesus used parables and the Jews understood them perfectly because He used things that were from the environment and lifestyles of the Jews. Brother Hubert told me on the last mission trip that we must be able to preach using any object of the surroundings.

Brother Jeff taught us the four keys to open people’s hearts to Jesus: power, humour language and culture. The power key, miracles and signs, is the most convincing but not the only way. Ian made use of the humour key, repeating the words of a television ad.

Sister Tammy taught me to use the language key by saying ‘subai subai’, which is the Thai equivalent of ‘slacking’. I saw a person warm up to her because she spoke Thai like we speak Singlish. I wore the culture key, an Isaan traditional men’s skirt, and people actually said I was handsome.

I am sure I was not that handsome and anyone who wore that skirt would be complimented the same. The saying that ‘people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care’ is really true. We are to become like Thai people that we might save some, as apostle Paul says.

We did many radical things like worshipping God in a temple, pretending to be a medical team and praying against the annual Naga Fireball phenomenon. Brother Jeff brought us to villages and daringly introduced us as doctors and asked if any people are sick and want to be healed. He poured oil, representing the Holy Spirit, into the Mekong River while we prayed to and worshipped God. The Thais worship the Naga, a mystical dragon that supposedly lived in the River. Every year in October, the Thais would crowd to Nong Khai just to see the scientifically unexplained lights in the sky, supposedly emitted by the Naga. We were amazed that our intercession reached God’s ears and the deceiving lights failed to appear. Brother Jeff had done the same last year with the same results.

The missionary couple kept us in awe with their amazing testimonies about their love story, daring methods of evangelism, past mission trips.

Their love story is simply wonderful. Sister Tammy was a university graduate while Brother Jeff was an ITE graduate. Sister Tammy’s parents did not take a liking to Jeff much. In fact, they themselves did not expect to fall in love with one another. But after they prayed, they both knew that God had chosen them to be man and wife though they seemed to have so many differences. They really walked by faith, not by sight in making such an important decision. Sister Tammy told us that she saw the wisdom of God’s plan as the synergy of their giftings make them a mighty couple for Christ to use.

The miracles in their lives were powerful. Brother Jeff had little money from his job but he decided to save money for the ring first. Then, a brother called him and said God had put in his heart for a long time to bless him with a thousand dollars and he thinks now is the time. Love offerings started coming in, in the thousands, from other friends. They even got Pastor Mark to preach on Jesus during the wedding night, with many of Sister Tammy’s aunties and uncles saved.

The things Brother Jeff did in the past in Singapore were even more daring and inspiring. He went to a Chinese temple and set up a fortune telling table. Then he would pretend to be a fortune teller and hand out red slips of paper with verses from the book of Proverbs. God used him to prophesy to many people. Once, the Holy Spirit prompted him about the situation of a woman having bad relations with her father. He asked her if it was so and she was shocked that he knew. He advised the woman never to come back to the temple again. He would also put tracts, bible verses and a little money in red packets and hand them out during Chinese New Year.

Brother Jeff and Brother Hubert has had a long history of working together on missions. They once travelled through eight Asian nations for three and a half months with very little money-two or three thousand dollars, taking public transport. They even took buses from Thailand to Singapore. They were also under the tutelage of Pastor Mark Geppert, a great man of God who was with Youth Impact for a few years but now has gone on to hard mission fields to make it soft for us, the army of God carrying the Gospel of life, to tread.

Pastor Mark has also written Attack Lambs, a book about prayerwalking in mission fields. The book is filled with many amazing testimonies about how prayer could change things. It deeply impacted my life. Pastor Mark told Brother Jeff who told us about Tibetan monks casting curses into Mekong river, which starts at Tibet. It brought the curse to whichever country it flowed through. The people living on the coastlines in contact with the Mekong river suffered many things. So what he did was to go to the head of Mekong River in Tibet and prayed, worshipped and poured water or oil, I cannot remember which, into the river. The next few months, he noticed a significant and positive change in the affected areas.