Make That 9 Schools

Yep. 9. That is the number of schools we have taught at since we have become “teachers” in Pua a little less than two months ago. Teachers is a loose term here as none of us have any real training on how to teach students. Yes, I do see myself as being a teacher some time in my life, but I have not received any official training to teach kids ranging from the ages of 3 to 18 on how to speak English.
 
I have lost the number of times we have taught the kids how to sing Head, Shoulders, Knees, & Toes; how many times we have sung Making Melodies; how many times we shared with kids that there are other ways to answer the question, ‘How are you?’ than with ‘I am fine’; how many times I corrected students on how to say my name. Really I can barely keep count of all the schools we have been to. It doesn’t help that we can’t even say their names due to our very limited Thai. We have given all of the schools nicknames to compensate like Orange School, Pink School, Mountain School, Hill Tribe School, etc.
 
At times it has seemed mundane to me, as we have repeated pretty much the same lessons over and over. For the whole month of December, we taught students all over the Pua area about the true meaning of Christmas. Then our other main lesson is pretty much the same thing but without having to make disclaimers about the commercial side of Christmas with presents, Santa, and Christmas trees.
 
But last week something that had never happened before happened – We were able to pray over some of the students.
 
It was our fourth time doing the same lesson we were doing a total of six times that day. We only taught at that school for that one day so we pretty much took the whole teaching English part out of the lesson plan. Well, other than having them copy down the words in 1 Corinthians 13 used to describe love, and that was only done in a few of the classes. The lesson plan consisted of doing the Everything Skit (it is a skit about God’s grace…you can look it up on YouTube) for them, explaining the Everything skit, teaching them about God’s love, testimonies, and a question activity. That was our rough outline for each hour, and of course, we had to go with the flow a lot as any true missionary would. At the end of our class, our translator, Oy, said we should ask the students if anyone wanted to know more about Jesus. My first reaction was hesitancy…I mean I barely felt like the kids paid attention to what we were saying and I don’t want to create this awkward alter-call moment…“do we really want to do this” was what I asked myself.  But I also knew in that moment I was acting out of my flesh so I am extremely glad I have teammates that instantly responded with enthusiastic agreement. After we asked them the question if any of them wanted to know anymore about Jesus, there was not any noticeable response from my perspective, which you have to keep in mind is pretty much all from observations and tiny bits of translated information. Oy shared with us that some of them sounded interested from their shy murmurs in the crowd, and she encouraged them to visit the church near their school with the handful of Christian students from the school.
 
After that, we went about wrapping up class in the same way we had done with all the other classes. I said goodbye, thanked them, and sent them waves. But this group of students seemed to linger in the classroom. They started taking pictures with us, which is not an unusual occurrence as we are probably on tons of kids’ facebooks all around Pua. There seemed to be a group forming primary around Kyle and Oy, and they were actually talking to them rather than just awkwardly taking pictures. As I ventured over, I learned the kids were actually asking questions about God and Jesus. Wow! That is a first…they actually acted upon their questions. Then before I knew it, Kyle told us that we were going to pray for them.
 
We prayed over about 15 students. Teenagers that probably have never been prayed over in the name of Jesus. Yes, I think some of them might have gotten swept into the motions and kind of went along with their friends. But honestly I don’t care. I know that some of them truly did want to get prayed for. They wanted to have more of what we were talking about. They wanted to know more about this Jesus guy that came to save them. The fact that we were able to pray over these kids was just incredibly encouraging to me.
 
I will honestly accept this with heavenly joy as the only physical fruit that we see while teaching at all these schools! In fact it is extremely incredible to see how God even opened the doors for us to teach at all of these schools. Nonetheless, I take hold of the hope Jesus gives to us that He is our anchor, and He is the anchor of hope for every single student we taught. He desires to be there all in all, and I will joyfully accept whatever role I played on their way to the foot of my Heavenly Father’s throne.

Here is a picture that shows about a third of the students we performed the Everything Skit for at one school.

These are the little pre-schoolers we taught for two days.

The daily grind of the classroom.