The Marathon Continues

 Last Leg to Bangkok

HELLO ALL,

This morning we’re sending this out from Bangkok!  Tony got the opportunity to share his continuing vision for his discipleship course with some of our churches here, as well as recruiting students for the Hawaii-based seminary, , so of course that was like saying ‘sickim’ to a dog and here we are.

Before you think it’s all luxury and plush, remember that after Covid, Bangkok and several other Asian countries have rebounded with first world prices, so we had to knock a couple of stars off our usual accommodation, as well as flying as grateful squashed sardines in the last seats of the airplanes with my lovely daughter’s ‘staff travel’ airline status.

Nonetheless, we’re back in one of the cities we love so much. We can’t wait to start meeting friends, shopping and eating back those pounds we just lost!  Last night in the taxi for over an hour because of the traffic, we enjoyed remembering some of those impossible Thai words we learned after this blog from so many  years ago that I’ve posted below.

So much can happen in 14 years, but the truths remain the same.  Enjoy reading this and we’ll catch you next week!!  


July 2009

I heard an interesting story last week in Athens. Some of you may know it, so don’t give away the ending! 

It seems in 490 B.C. the Persians came to defeat the Greeks yet again in a small town south of Athens. However, this time, by some miraculous turn of events, the Greeks won handily, actually routing the Persians forever. 

A guy  named  Pheidyppides  was  so  excited he RAN to tell the good news to the people waiting in Athens. When he arrived, he shouted “Nenikekamen!” and proceeded to drop dead of exhaustion. You see, he had run 26 miles without a break from the battle ground town of... you guessed it, “Marathon”. “Nenikekamen” has since been shortened to “Nike” and the meaning is “Victory”. The rest of the story is history.

After so many months of being in limbo, we have finally laced up our shoes and begun the “marathon” of our great race to announce “Victory” to the people of Thailand. We arrived Monday night in Bangkok after about 20 hours of travelling and transferred directly to Chiang Mai in the north where we’ve had an exciting week of meetings with our mission and all our new co-workers.

Now, as you’re reading this, we’ll be  flying  back  to Bangkok to find our home which we’ve never seen, unpack the boxes that we’ve mailed from here and there and start language school next week. We feel that we’re already tired and we haven’t even passed the first mile marker. We’ve had a couple of bits of bad news over the last week, which make us want to turn away from the goal so that we can sit down and worry, and on top of that, we can’t seem to put a sentence together in English, much less Thai… but we have to remember the “Nike” message and the exciting race ahead. Thanks for praying for us, thanks for being in the race with us.

Paul, in the Bible, knew of Pheidyppides. In fact, it was an old story when he heard it 600 years after it happened. Maybe that’s why he wrote, “and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, and let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith. (Hebrews 12, 1 and 2)

May your running be enjoyable this week and we’ll see you next week at the water station!

Marsha and Tony

“Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize.” (1 Corinthians 9:24)

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