Fears and Frustrations, or, What Do I Do Next?

One thing that has been difficult for me has been the strange sort of rigidity in my schedule. That seems like an odd thing to say, given the fact that I only really "work" about four or five hours a day four days a week; but the meaningful relationships that I want to develop with my students, especially the high school students, can only happen during certain hours, and those tend to be the hours that I'm working. Most of my days start on the late side, with lots of solitude as I get ready for life and school, though admittedly, most days, more solitude than is really necessary. And so my day ambles on until 4, when I start getting into school mode, and it seems that most of my reason for being here is then squeezed into five hours of ministry that is mostly just teaching. It would honestly be a dream schedule in any other situation, and it's really not that bad in the current one except that it makes it hard to invest time in the places I want to.

Weekends, though, are the glorious exception; or, at least, Saturdays are, and today I got to spend a solid eight hours with a few of my students, mostly high-schoolers. We met at 9 without much of a plan; we decided on the turn off a heel which direction we would head and made off for the dock behind The Mall. (One of the endearing things about Thailand is the way the Thai use English. The name of the mall in my district, Bang Kapi, is quite simply "The Mall.") We crowded onto the river taxi and made our way down the klong toward Wat Phrat Keaw, the Grand Palace, which I'd already been to once before.

Now, I am not the most decisive of people, as some of you may read with a chuckle, so it probably helped to establish our plans that a couple of my students had no trouble taking the proactive lead in deciding what to do. It probably also helped that about ten minutes before we got off the water taxi the ominous clouds up ahead turned into a torrential downpour. The Grand Palace, which is mostly outdoors, was pretty clearly out of the question, so instead we opted for a museum. We hopped in a regular-old taxi (you can, of course, hire a cab in Bangkok, but in a city with so many other options, it doesn't always look quite as attractive) and made it to the National Museum. Like just about everything in Bangkok, the foreigner price was about seven times the Thai price, but I'm pretty much used to that and have learned not to complain. When in Rome, and all that.

The museum was full of gorgeous old pieces--and, naturally, plenty of very very old pieces that were not quite as gorgeous as they crumbled to ashes, though the antiquities have their own kind of beauty. The thing that keeps striking me about Thailand, though, is the incredible level of spirituality; and sure enough, as we walked through the museum we found case after case of Buddha sculptures, spanning over a thousand years and thousands of miles of archeological digs. Buddhas and Vishnus and Krishnas, spirit houses and guardian angels and demon puppets, models of temple after temple after ancient, ruined temple. It filled almost the entire place, besides the one small building housing treasures of the Thai Kings and Queens of old.

And yet, spiritual conversation is so hard to come by. As we walked through the museum I made the off-comment about how something was similar or different to Christianity or how amazed I was at the spiritual atmosphere of the country, but the conversation never got off the ground. After we decided we were hungry enough to leave, we hired a tuk-tuk and somehow squeezed six people onto a two-to-three-person seat on our way to lunch. Again I asked about personal religion, and after finding out that three of my students are Buddhist and two of them Muslim, the conversation died again. So we ate, coerced the only other guy in our party, who is a little camera-shy, into some pictures, and took the bus back to The Mall, getting lost on the way. (It's not an adventure of you don't get lost at least once!) We got some ice cream at Swenson's and called it a day.

I'm beginning to feel the frustration that has probably been a part of mission work in this country for ages. There have been Christian missionaries here for hundreds of years, bit still less than one percent professes Christ. The same spirituality that seems to create so many in-roads to the gospel also puts up a wall that is nearly impenetrable. While I don't want to alienate a people that I have honestly come to love, I don't want to cheat them of hearing the Good News of Jesus, either. I just don't know how to share it when there seem to be so few open doors.

I am reminded again that it is only my job to plant seeds, that God will grow them in a way that bewilders and awes me. Maybe my task is simply to love my students, selflessly and genuinely, which I think I am legitimately learning how to do. Though it sounds to me like a cop-out on my part, maybe God is speaking the word to their hearts in a way that is deeper than I ever could. My fear is simply that they will leave this place with better English and pleasant feelings toward their teacher without ever hearing the truth that can change their lives and their hearts forever.