Precious in His Sight

(Note to Reader: This is another in our series of “River Crossings” blogs, written while we were in Thailand (2009-2011). Enjoy!) 

I met a couple of interesting people this week.

The first one had just had her very first ride in an air-conditioned bus in order to come and speak to a group of us ladies in Bangkok. Speaking through an interpreter, she introduced herself as ‘Mam’. She’s a second-year seminary student at a mission school in northern Thailand. She’s about four and a half feet tall, 90 pounds soaking wet, with long dark hair and a beautiful smile. She comes from a hill tribe called “H’Tin” and there are a very few of them, scattered through Laos, Thailand and Burma. She has a proper Thai name for the registry, as well as her H’Tin one, but either are probably 14 or 15 letters long, so even her family calls her ‘Mam”

She began by telling us of her life in a refugee camp where she was born. I’m not sure we westerners can really appreciate how terribly desperate a displaced people can be, where because of constant conflict with neighboring tribes, they are forced to flee for their lives. My family and I had experienced a taste of this    in an Ethiopian refugee camp a few years ago, and H’Tin’s story really brought back some memories. She described her life as “safe,” but we need to understand that her definition means simply that she has a shelter of some sort and a limited supply of food.

These people are so marginalized, and although the Thai government offered to help, the place they were given to live was far from livable, located deep and unreachable in what she calls a ‘forest’. There was no school, no infrastructure of any kind. She soon had nine brothers and sisters and so the saga of her life continued. Finally,  some missionaries came to her telling her and her family of a “Heavenly Father who loved them”. Many believed, including Mam. Then, one day, when she was about 14, someone offered her a better life in a dormitory where she could also attend school. A girl going to school was  unheard of (remember this would have been only about  five or ten years ago) but she was able to go. There she   excelled, because even though she’d never even ridden   a  bus or seen a two-story building, she really is a smart     little girl. Before long, she had finished five or six years of school and was able to pass a high school exam. (In a new language, Thai). Then, wonder of wonders, someone paid her tuition for SEMINARY! It only costs $600 a year including room and board, but with a family of 11, who at best probably only has an annual wage of a couple hundred dollars, that is beyond comprehension. Now she’s in her second year, and she has not been back to see her family in two years because she doesn’t have the five dollars for the bus ride. But she knows how proud of her they are, and that keeps her going. Her goal is to be a music evangelist, sharing with others like herself the love of Jesus.

The second man I met this week is a Japanese missionary to the Thai. He and his family have been in Thailand for 15 years, loving children in the slums and telling them what he wasn’t able to tell his friend when he was about ten yrs old. Apparently this friend had overheard his parents discussing his poor test scores and squabbling about whose fault it was. The words “worthless” and “I wish he’d never been born” fell on this little boy’s ears. A few days later this boy asked his best friend, (who would later become this pastor, “Do you think my life has value?” What could this guy say in return, what does any ten-year-old know about value? The friend answered, “I don’t know, but you’re my friend and that’s valuable to me!” Several days later the sad  little boy was hit on his bicycle and he died, knowing   only that his friend thought he was important. It wasn’t till years later when the pastor first found Christ and read ing Isaiah 43:4, “...you are precious and honored in my sight... I love you…,” that he could shout out to his long gone but not forgotten friend, “You are Loved by God! You truly had value!” Value……………Love…………..people who seemingly have no hope and no ‘value’ to others, are so very important and so loved by God. Our daily prayer is that all of those people get a chance to experience knowing their worth in God’s eyes.

Mam finished her talk to us with this quote. Later I asked her if it was a H’Tin saying or a famous proverb and she just smiled and said, “Oh no, I just thought of it.”

“Lord, let me never use my strengths to harm others or my weaknesses to harm myself.” Now THAT has VALUE, don’t you think?

Love you, 

Marsha