Follow The Stars

I have been in Chiang Mai for a little over a week now and I love it. So far I have taught two English classes at a college, played with kids in the slums, met a family in the slums that invited a couple of us to their house, and I talked to a monk named Danny. Out of all those ministries so far, I feel most lead to the slums. We normally do one of these ministries during the day and three times a week we do bar outreach at night. 

To make sense of my story that I am about to tell you, I need to throw a little bit of information at you first. On days that we do bar ministry only half of our team goes out in the bars, while the other half stays back and intercedes for them. So the girls who are going out to the bars for the night, get up before breakfast and prayer walk the areas that we will be in at night. During the day, the other half of the team goes out and prayer walks the bar areas. Before we go out, we worship and pray over each other for an hour or so. 

Last night I went out with Adriana. During our worship time I kept looking up at the stars and thinking about the stars. While we were walking to the bars I noticed a sign that said Star Hotel. I kept right on walking and didn't think much of it. The first bar that we came up to was called Blue Star. We stopped and we talked to a couple of the girls for no more than ten minutes and moved on. We turned the corner and there was this huge strip club and I don't remember the name but it has a huge star on its sign. We stood outside of it and prayed over the strip club. Than I looked over and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a bar called Star Bar. Of course we both headed right for it! To paint a picture in your mind there was only three girls that worked there. One of them was busy talking to a customer at the bar table. There were tables with connect four and couple of pool tables. We walked into it and was greeted by one of the women that worked there. We ordered a coke and started playing connect four with her. I asked her if she would like to play a game of pool with me. I ended up losing but there was a lot of laughs and high fives. While I was playing pool the women talking with the Australian customer kept looking over at us and looked sad. You could tell that she wasn't interested him and didn't want to be there. Adriana jumped right in and started making friends with the bar tender who was genuinely happy to talk with her and play numerous games of connect four. Towards the end of my pool game, the Australian guy started talking to me. We talked about kangaroos, what he was doing in Chiang Mai, and that he was in a really bad car accident a few years ago. You could tell he was broken. We said bye to our new friends and kept on walking. 

We tried going talking to people at other bars but they weren't interested in us. Adriana was trying to talk to a couple of the girls that worked at a bar that just seemed darker than all the rest. As she was talking to them a big group of guys started jumping out of cars and the girls were immediately all over them. We decide to walk back home and as we were walking back past the first bar, Blue Star, one of the girls said hi to us and had a big smile on her face without us trying to have a conversation with her. She was interested in us and saw that we were different than most of the people that walk those streets. I can't explain to you how much joy this gives me. God is working and his light is shining in the dark places! 

I realized something right before we got home. 3 days ago I was teaching English in the college and we asked them to give us Thai names. My Thai name is Doa which means STAR!!!! 

Please keep us in your prayers and the people that we encounter! 

Lauren