The First Step

Our Thailand journey began many years ago in England, when we rented our house out to students, we met a young man called Joe.

We met Joe through a friend, a Chinese girl called Yan Jing (Sophia).

We had some Jordanian helicopter pilots staying with us at the time and Dave got invited to a party.

They were Muslim and they loved to put us Christians to the test, asking for halal food etc, when actually they did eat non-halal.

I even learned to make some Jordanian dishes for them, mansaaf (Jordanian lamb) and loubia (green beans in tomato sauce), with books I found in the library, which was fun.

The pilots were invited to a party at the university and invited Dave, “Sorry, no ladies allowed they said.”

But this was where Dave met Yan Jing, a Chinese girl who ended up becoming a Christian and getting baptized at our church!

One day Yan Jing told us that a friend of hers, Joe from Thailand, wanted to come to church.

“He only wants to learn English,” she said.

“That’s fine with us, bring him along” we said.

Joe came to the church for a few months and eventually ended up moving in with us.

Our house was pretty full at that time and there was another girl, Kat, also living with us, who was very on fire for God.

Soon the time came for Joe to go back to Thailand, to work for his dad’s business, in the Thai record industry.

Joe decided that he wanted to get baptized before he went back to Thailand, but it was January, so it presented a challenge.

“Well,” said Dave, “We can baptize you in the local river, but it might be a bit cold, or in a swimming pool?”

In the mean-time another person also decided to get baptized too, a girl who had been homeless and living on the streets.

She wanted to get baptized in the river!

“Okay,” said Joe, “let’s do it in the river.”

Dave had thought of offering him a baptism in the local swimming baths, but knew that Joe was going back to his Buddhist family in a Buddhist country, so he needed to know that his faith was real.

In Thailand he would be on his own and his parents might not be happy, especially as his dad had told him not to talk to any Christians while he was in England!

Now Dave wasn’t exactly looking forward to a baptism in the river in January, it was pretty cold and the water was high, but they got on with it.

Jan nearly got swept downstream and you could see Joe shivering as he came out of the water, hugging Dave!

We didn’t realise at the time just how cold this was for a Thai person, where it never really gets that cold, ever!

We had never been to Thailand, but we would find out later! 

Kaz, the other person who got baptized was so excited that after getting baptized she jumped back into the water, hitting her head on a rock, but fortunately she was okay.

Before Joe went back home, he asked Dave if he would come and help him find a church.

“No,” Dave said, “I’ve prayed about it and there’s a church waiting for you, you’ll find it. But I’ll come when you get married.”

Joe didn’t have a girlfriend at this time, so off he went, back to Thailand.

We didn’t hear from Joe for about 7 or 8 years, apart from the occasional phone call when we could catch him, as we didn’t have a computer at that time for email, only a phone which did texts!

Really old fashioned back in the day!    

In January 2010, David emailed our friend Joe in Thailand, and said, “No promises, but I think God’s saying that we might be coming to Thailand in November, but no promises.”

“Too late, you already promised!” Joe replied, “I’m getting married in November and you promised to come to my wedding!”

About a month before we went to Thailand for Joe’s wedding, we were at a church conference at the Wembley Conference Centre.

On the video screen they showed a film of Walking Street in Pattaya, which was full of prostitutes and Go-Go bars.

Dave turned around to me and said, “That’s where we’re going””

I said, “Really?!” and remember being really horrified about what sort of place we might be going to.

I remember being really wary of going into town from our hotel, little knowing that God would call us to full-time ministry there just a few months after we went there for the first time.

Now, we had never been to Thailand before and didn’t know anything about it!

Our holidays had only been as far as Turkey or the Bahamas in the other direction, but never to anywhere in Asia!

Dave booked a hotel in Bangkok and it turned out to be about 100 metres away from where the wedding reception was going to be!

At the wedding, Joe’s family sat us on the front row!

His wife’s family were all Christian, but his dad didn’t really speak to us at all!

In Buddhism it is the eldest son’s responsibility to pray for their parents after they die, and Joe was not going to do this for his dad anymore as he had become a Christian! 

We spent one week with Joe in Bangkok and he and his new wife, Mae, showed us around and also took us out for a break in the countryside.

Dave had booked a week in a hotel in Pattaya for the second week, as it wasn’t too far from Bangkok.

While we were there, we got in touch with the local church, who did work with street-kids and Dave was interested in that, so Pastor Fred came and picked us up.

He took us to their children’s home and then to the church. A couple of months later, in January 2011, Dave said that God had spoken to him on the way home from Thailand and said that He wanted us to go back and serve Him there.

He had been mulling it over for a couple of months before he said anything to me and my immediate response was, “You’ll never do it!”

Dave has always been a “big picture” person, floating ideas and then looking at them from every angle.

He sees all the possibilities, but also everything that could go wrong, so over the years he had proposed a few things as ideas, but never done them, so I was convinced this would be the same.

“Well, I said, if you want to go, God will have to speak to me as well!” I told him and that’s exactly what He did!

But you’ll have to wait for the next blog to see just how He did that….