This past week....

Where to begin...I don't really know....this past week has been an emotional, life altering, and one of the most spiritually challenging weeks I have been through on my trip thus far. This is going to be a rather long blog.....and I have no other way of expressing this week, but telling you exactly what happened. So I'll start from the beginning of this week. We arrived in Mae Sai, Thailand on Monday simply thinking that we would meet our next contacts and work with some street kids for the up coming week. The first day we met the kids, and I absolutely loved this ministry. Basically just a little background, Mae Sai is right on the border of Burma....so the majority of the kids we were working with were Burmese children, who come over to the Thai side to beg, and more than likely get in trouble. So this drop in center provides a place for these kids to stay, eat, sleep, and honestly just be children, until they have to go back to Burma to worry about things that a nine year old shouldn't have to worry about. This area is also known for a high rate of child prostitution because of their vulnerability being street kids with no home. So our job this week was to love on these kids, play games, and sing songs with them. The few days we did have with the children....I was reminded of how much I love teaching. My passion for the impressionable mind of a child was beginning to grow on me again.
So Thursday night rolled around and I felt like I was getting sick, so I decided to try to go to bed early to see if that would help my sickness. What I didn't know was that I would be waking up to something I never would have imagined. Mae Sai is a city filled with older buildings...that seemed to have had their good years way back when. And we were staying at the drop in center, which was a four story concrete building. I was sleeping on the third floor, while everyone else was having worship time on the second. I wish I could explain in words what happened next, but every time I try...it never comes out, how it really happened. But basically, I woke up to my teammates screaming my name, and the entire building shaking and swaying as if it was a piece of paper.  I ran for the stairs and was trying to process what was actually happening. I finally realized that I was not in a dream and that I needed to get out of the building. So I began running down the stairs trying to step on the unsteady floor, being tossed against the stair walls. Skipping steps trying to hurry and run as fast as a could...I finally made it to the bottom level. I ran for my shoes because my thought was....if I'm going to have to run out of this city while buildings are collapsing....I'm gonna do it with my shoes on. At that point....the Earthquake had stopped, and my team ran outside. We didn't know how to react......some cried, others sang, and my reaction was pure silence, because my heartbeat felt like it was outside of my body. At this point everyone in the city was outside on the streets, scared not knowing what to do. We began trying to call people but phone lines were busy...so we waited, and waited. There were after shock tremors and the panic that I felt running out of the building rushed back in.....and people didn't know what to do. We were sitting on the street, when another tremor came, and people got up and started running down the street trying to find an opening amongst all the concrete buildings. And there we were..... running down the streets of Mae Sai, looking up to watch out for power lines and falling things. Some parts of the night felt like we were in a movie, and we were all waiting for the Director to say cut......but no one ever did.
We waited on the streets for three hours....and our leaders decided that tremors were going to keep coming, and we couldn't enter back in the building....and we very well couldn't spend the night on the streets surrounded with brothels. So contact was made and we were evacuated out of the city and slept or should I say sat on a cafeteria floor that night.
There are so many things that happened within a small amount of time....and I will be sharing some things I learned in my later blogs through all this....but I wanted everyone to know, that I am alive and well. This past week was something I never expected, and I learned things that I never would have....if I didn't go through this.  Stay tuned for stories about the quake....and the goodness of God's character that was revealed through it all. I am safe and sound, and by the prayers of people all around and by the grace of God....I have survived. God is good!