Dreams, Visions and Provision

Hi all, hope you are ready for our final installment of how we came to be in Thailand and how God brought us here…

Between coming back from Thailand and Dave talking to me, I had been getting fed up of things at work.

I was a manager and the stress was starting to outweigh the enjoyment of the job, so I had been looking at applying for a similar job in the church.

I was the manager of several neighbourhood centres in Leicester and the church wanted someone to run a Jesus Centre up in Sheffield.

I spoke to Dave, and he said, “Well, if you want to go and work there, how are we going to do it? “

“I work in Leicester and if you go up to Sheffield, that’s 2 hours drive there and back every day, you’d have to stay up there all week and come back at weekends, I’d never see you!”

So that was the end of that idea.

“But”, said Dave, “If you really want to leave work, wait, just see and they’ll pay you to leave.”

It wasn’t long before they were asking for voluntary redundancies at work and so, I volunteered, little did they know that I would be going to Thailand to be a missionary and getting paid by work to go!

Dave has always said, “Where God leads, God provides,” and this was the first part of His provision.

In the meantime, I had been praying and asking God about Thailand and I wasn’t long before He answered!

Over the next 2 to 3 months God spoke to me and showed me beyond any doubt that this was what He wanted.

In February 2011 I had a dream that our friends, Joe and Mae in Thailand were praying in the Spirit, asking for our help.

In the dream, we went to Thailand in response to their cry for help.

When we got there, they were having a prayer meeting and speaking in tongues and we asked if they were okay and they said that they were praying for us.

One Sunday morning we were at church, worshipping when I had an open vision of a map of the world as a jigsaw puzzle.

God was moving the pieces around and lifted two of the pieces and from Leicester to Thailand and filling the gap in Leicester.

Through the whole thing I had an overwhelming sense of the sovereignty of God, it was like He was playing chess with us and running things, in charge completely.

From that day I had no doubt at all, that this was God’s will for us, His calling on our lives.

My scripture for that time was, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.”

I had complete peace from that day on.

On Friday 15^th April 2011 at 6am, I had a dream that I was talking to a church leader from Sheffield, who was the leader covering our region.

We were talking in the car and he was asking how our decision-making process was going.

I told him that I had just applied for voluntary redundancy at work, which he was surprised about.

He then gave me a copy of the church newsletter, which had an article on the back, saying, “Pattaya News”.

It talked about 6,990 members in Pattaya, people were in Pattaya, waiting to be saved.

Later on, we had a visit from this leader and he asked us if we would be interested in going to Africa as they had a mission work there, but he couldn’t support us if we went to Thailand as the church didn’t have anything happening there.

Dave told him that it was a good opportunity, but God had called us to Thailand, and we had to go where He called us.

I got my application for redundancy accepted in May that year and left my job, after 26 years, at the end of July, about the same time I had started, when I was 17 years old, loose ends tied up, we prepared to go to Thailand.

In September we went to Thailand for a month to meet Pastors Fred and Dianne Doell and explain that God was calling us and to ask how we could help.

On our second Sunday visiting Victory church, September 11^th 2011, I asked God to clarify our place in Thailand and His plan for us.

He showed me a plant being cut away from the main clump and replanted in the river in Thailand, where His blessings and anointing were flowing strongly.

Back in the UK… Don’t Drag Your Feet!

When we got back to England, a week later Dave had a pain in his leg.

That week we went to a March in Liverpool with the church, so that evening Dave went up for prayer.

Big Kev from Birmingham knelt down and prayed for his leg and told him that God had told Dave to do something, but he had been dragging his feet and he had to get on with it.

Dave explained to Kev, that the church did not support us going, so he had been delaying things, but Kev told him, “Well, I’m not surprised, you’re a good guy, if you were a leader in my region I wouldn’t want to let you go either, but you have to do what God tells you to.” As soon as Dave made up his mind, the pain in his leg went. 

Our Six Month Trial – No Room at the Inn!

After this, we decided to go Thailand in November 2011, for a six month tryout.

My mum had been suffering with cancer for the last 12 years, and we spoke to our parents before we went.

We knew that there was the possibility that she might die while we were away, but my parents had also been missionaries in the Bahamas, where I was born, and told us that we had to go and do what God had told us to do.

We turned up in Pattaya in November, on the bus from Suhvarnabhumi airport, with 2 suitcases each and lugged out cases over the overpass bridge going over Sukhumvit Road.

We were supposed to be booked into Eve’s Place, a room rental place next to the church office, but we got there and no-one had booked the room for us, so there was no room at the inn!    

“Are you sure we’re really supposed to be here?” I asked Dave.

He replied, “Well, there wasn’t any room for Jesus either, but it didn’t stop Him!”

So, we called the church administrator, Zhonghy and asked her to come and help us.

After a few minutes, she booked us into CK Residence, serviced rooms.

They had just a small room available, with no outside window, or kitchen, only a microwave and a kettle, so we spent our next six months there.

In the evenings we read “Mango Rains” together, a book about a girl who came to Pattaya and became a famous singer, but lost her daughter in the process, a tale of the sadness of Pattaya.

In the daytime we volunteered for the church, doing whatever needed to be done.

We took our clothes to be washed every week in a small suitcase, around the corner to a shop with washing machines on Pattaya Tai, and then hung them out on the roof of CK Residence on the 5^th floor.

During this time we met Dton, whose proper name was Prasert (most Thai people go by their nickname, or chuu-len.)

We met Dton, who was later to become the pastor of Baan Reum Jai Church, when we went to visit him in hospital in Sri-Racha, with Ajarn (Pastor) Arisa.

We were told that Dton had a bacterial infection, or fungus on the brain, which we understood to be meningitis, so we went with Pastor Arisa to pray for him.

Thankfully, he recovered, but a few years later, when we were great friends with him, he contracted fungus on the brain again, and sadly passed away from it.

He was to become one the of our closest friends and a respected man of God.

He had a true heart for God and taught me a lot about the authority of God.

I think of him as one of my brothers and sisters waiting for me in heaven, I look forward to seeing him and others again one day.

As missionaries, we can go into a place, in obedience to God, but we can still learn from the people we meet.

 In late December, just before Christmas, we got a message from my sister, that she thought my mum might not last much longer and in February she passed away.

It was an emotional time, and the church offered to pay for us to fly back to the UK, but we decided to stay.

We went back to the UK in May 2012 and reconnected with our church.

It’s Important to Stay Connected

At the end of May we met another missionary couple, at an open day at my sister’s work.

They were not really connected to any church.

At church we were asked to share about two pictures on the screen, one a rock on an island and another a tropical island, and how we saw where we were in God.

I shared with my friend Annie, that I saw the promise of God’s calling in the tropical island, but that I didn’t want to be a disconnected Christian. I cried about that as it grieved my spirit that we might be disconnected from the Body, but I saw the pain involved in getting to God’s promised land for us, but I knew that we always had to be connected to a local body, wherever we were.     

Renting our House – God Gives us Christians

After our initial 6 month tryout in Thailand, we came back to the UK, to sort everything out to go to Thailand permanently.

We were back in the UK for 3 months over the summer to rent our house with an agency.

I prayed for Christian non-smokers, as I didn’t want the house to smell of smoke and asked God for people who would understand what we were doing.

In the 10 days that we had our house on the market with the agency, we had only 1 applicant.

When they came to visit, it turned out that they were Christian missionaries who had not long come back from Morocco!

They lived on the opposite side of Welford Road to us and went to another church, so we didn’t know each other.

They had also prayed for Christian landlords!

When we met them we had the most amazing rapport with them, they totally understood what we were doing!

They told us, “It’s like paying rent for supporting ministry!”

The Estate Agent had never seen anything like it, people getting on so well, so quickly!

I was so surprised how quickly God answered this prayer, I went into the garden and thought, “I never expected you to answer like this, so quick and direct!”

But He did, He saw us and put us both together. Our tenants stayed in our house for about 6 years while we were in Thailand, until we sold our house.

Well, that’s how we came to be in Thailand and we made many friends and had many more adventures there.

Thailand will always have been the greatest calling in our lives and have a big place in our heart.