A Very Special Thank You

As I post this blog, Highview is in the happy throes of our annual Haiti Dinner and Silent Auction.  This has been an 11 year effort, raising funds for badly needed building projects to support the amazing people of Haiti and our partners there.  I find it ironic that there is something of a bookend thing happening here.   I was not at the very first Haiti Dinner because I was here, in Thailand, leading that now historic first trip to Southeast Asia.  

It is hard to express how overwhelming it is to watch God do this kind of stuff!!!!!!!
Oh the richness of what has happened in hearts at Highview, at Hot Springs and in Haiti over this past decade.  I can hardly wait to see what He's going to do next!

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We marked an important moment at Hot Springs today.  All the official documents and releases have now been signed, transferring the care of the children here from our previous umbrella agency,  Asia’s Hope, to the newly formed New Family Foundation.

This is the result of a long and careful process that included a sincere desire to end our time with Asia’s Hope well.  That could not happen without a proper acknowledgement of the support and care we have been provided over the past ten years, and all that we have learned from Thailand’s National Director, Tutu.

I could write pages about the work and legacy of this woman.  She has literally helped to change the lives of thousands of children in locations all around this country, in various circumstances and through different, creative means.  She’s been dubbed the “Mother Teresa” of Thailand, and it fits her well.

She was the one who connected Hot Springs with Asia’s Hope, and with then Highview in the first place some 11 years ago.  So we wanted to say thank you in the best of ways possible.

We’ve been planning since I arrived (and before), but today was the flurry of activity to make sure all the details were in place.  Flowers and fronds and magnificent archways decorated the church sanctuary.  More flowers were gathered into bouquets for presentation later on.   Food was specially purchased and prepared. 

Tutu, her son David and his wife, and a friend from France, were our honoured guests who arrived around 4:30 p.m. and we enjoyed an early supper together.   We then moved over to the church for our time of thanks.

Songs and thank yous and presentations.

 

For my own tribute, I could not think of a better way to acknowledge this remarkable woman than by recounting something that happened the first time I came to Thailand.

I struggled a lot that first trip.   The heat, the jet lag, the lack of control over when things happened, the crazy way all I thought I was ‘bringing’ to these people ended up in a heap of debilitating culture shock and slippery ego.  The day we went up to Wang Pa Pao to set up a clinic for the villagers there, I was still licking my wounds from the fiasco that was our supposedly sensational children’s program that had bombed the night before. 

I wasn’t expecting to take blood pressures.  I was a pastor and a leader and a preacher, not a nurse.  I felt useless in my areas of competence already.  And now they wanted me to pretend to be a medic?  My comfort zone was way back there somewhere, and as simple as it sounds to me now, at that moment I felt pushed to my limits.

But after the first few attempts, and once I got the hang of what I was doing, the afternoon settled into a gentler rhythm of greeting each person with a wai and a smile, wrapping the cuff around a thin brown arm, writing down the numbers and sending each person to the next line for treatment.   My heart began to settle somewhat into the physicality of it all.  These beautiful strangers and I were, for a brief moment, connected by touch and proximity.  Their blood coursed past the stethoscope and their heartbeat  echoed in my ears.

But it was Tutu that truly anchored me that afternoon. 

At one point she came to just sit with me as I took the blood pressures.   Quietly, unassumingly, as is her entire life and demeanour.    And at one point she said to me simply, “Thank you for loving my people.”

Oh.  Yes.  That.

I cannot tell you how much I needed to be reminded in that moment that love was the most important thing.  That love does not need language.  Love does not need to know everything about culture.  Love does not need to have a fancy program that goes well.  It doesn’t even need to be particularly competent in the ways I like to be competent.  Love is just sitting quietly all afternoon with beautiful people and showing them that you care.

This I learned from Tutu that long and gentle afternoon.

We move into a new era now.  But we do not forget what we have learned from astonishing people along the way.  How grateful I am to have been taught by such a woman, from the depths of her spiritual wealth.

So many pictures and hugs later, our time together was over and Tutu and our guest left.  Because it was still so early, the children asked if please could we still have our normal time of worship together.  So that’s what we did.  And with the last 30 minutes of the day we celebrated again with an impromptu dance party. 

We kind of couldn’t help it.

It had been that kind of amazing day.