This post is from our team serving in Thailand this week. They are working with Brook Hills' members and Long-Term missionaries The Martins. Follow this team as they teach English classes and engage Thai students with the gospel.

By: Elizabeth Comeaux

Wow! It is Wednesday afternoon, and this is our first chance to post on the blog! Rest assured, the team made it safely, and we have been going non-stop ever since we landed.

Thailand is an amazing country. There are so many sights, sounds and smells that are so very different from home. The commonality we’ve found, though, is the readiness with which the Thais share a smile. The country is even known as “The Land of Smiles”. Everyone we’ve met has returned one – just like the south.

There is one gentleman in particular whose returned smile got us access to a rare and special scene in our host country. We were taking a boat tour of the Chao Praya River in Bangkok when we stopped at a Buddhist temple to see what they look like. It was a visual cacophony of color, swirls, mirrored tiles, and gold details. The temple itself was locked, but then a middle-aged monk stopped to talk to us and let us in. We got to listen in as the monks prayed and chanted while we talked with the older monk.



This man had become a monk just a year or so ago in order to find peace in his life – something that had eluded him for years. In Buddhism, the object is to follow enough rules to earn enough merit to cover your sins. That’s the thing – the people here are aware they are sinful, but they have no assurance of salvation. They hope they can do it even though they know their efforts will never be enough. What’s more, they chant and pray in a dead language they don’t understand. They just hope there is someone or something out there is the cosmos that will hear their prayers and honor their requests. Millions of Thais believe the same thing.

The gentleman we spoke with was eager to talk about his faith, but he was reluctant to hear about the truth of the gospel. Please pray for him and ask that God would bring other believers into his life who will continue to drip the truth of Christ into his life. Pray that his search for peace would lead him to the One True God, that he would see only Christ can cover his sins, that he would repent and that he would come to saving faith in Christ.