October 2015

Dear Friends,

I haven’t written in a while so please excuse the very long email! 

Gavin and I have been enjoying a break from school.  In Thailand, the schools take a 3 week break after the first term.  It was nice to rest and focus on other things after a very busy, sometimes stressful first term.   We start back on Monday. 

Rani has been brilliant at school.  She finished the term in the top 5 in my English class.  She won the best actress award, voted in by the other students, for her role as Helena in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.  The duplication of information frustrates her because she is so desperate to learn, and desperate to be able to go to a good school in the future.  For this reason, we have decided that next year she will study at Ridgefield Christian School in Jonesboro, Arkansas.  She interviewed and was accepted by the school and we picked up her student visa on Monday.    She will go end of February and we will go with her.  Lisa, will go to a local Christian college here in Chaing Ma to study to be a teacher.

So our time in Thailand is ending and I can’t help but look back at the last time we left Thailand.  I was so sick and depressed that I literally wanted to die.  I left in a mess of failure and broken dreams.  I had no idea even who I was if I wasn’t a professional missionary.  Now I know that being a missionary is not who I am but what I do.  I know that my work goes on, wherever I live, to live out my faith for others to see, to die to myself and follow Him every day.  Caring for the poor, widows and orphans is not the job only of missionaries but of the church.  It is not bound to geography or profession but the mandate of every one of us who will stand before Christ someday and hope to hear Him say “Well done”.

We are going home and while so many things did not work out the way we thought they would, I think they worked out the way He wanted them to.  Gavin and I think we came here for two girls and we wonder, would we have come if we would have known it was for just two?   We are thankful for all God has done in these last two years.  The children’s home in Mae Chaem is growing closer and closer to being self-supporting.  We mentored 5 other children who have lived with us at various times and we hope we have had an impact on their lives.  We saw three of our girls baptized and one saved.        

I got an update from our director of our children’s home in Mae Chaem and she gave me list of our graduates from the last ten years and what they are doing now.  Six of our children, who grew up with us, are teachers now.  One young woman runs her own children’s home, serving over a hundred children.  We have eight young men and women who have graduated Bible school and all but one is actively working in ministry.  There will be more.  Two of our graduates last year went to study to be teachers and our Lisa who is with us now, just realized her calling to teach.  I could see it on her for a while and I kept trying to steer her that way and this break gave her a chance to help her aunt in the village school and she fell in love with teaching.  She is the most loving, nurturing, gentle girl you could ever meet.  Her English is so good and she is what her Karen people desperately need.   All of you wonderful sponsors who have helped us for so many years, thank you!  This is your work, and your sacrifice that helped these young people to be able to achieve their dreams.

Attached are some pictures.

Love you all!

Candace

 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’ “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’  Matthew 25:45-46