July 2024 Newsletter

Dear Brethren,

June was a fantastic month. It started with a young lady putting on Christ in baptism!! Her name is Namida Suabancha. She worships with the congregation that has just been established in Thasongyang. We will continue to sow the seeds of the Kingdom and God will continue to give the increase. We are thankful for this young lady and her desire to obey Christ.

Namida Suabancha’s baptism.

We could not do this work without your help! So many help in so many ways. We have received a lot of help this month to help care for the young people going to school and building the place of worship at Maethawah. We have started the building!! We hope to have it done before the end of July. I am sending a picture of me with Gritsada. He is the young man who is giving us this land to use. He is not yet a Christian, but we hope before long he will be.

We took one of our students, Biu, to her new university. She will be studying to become a nurse. It took a lot of doing, because technically we are her guardians. On Friday we drove 4 and a half hours to the village where she lives, then another 6 hours to the town where the university is located. On Saturday, I left her and Kung there and drove another 7 hours back to Maesariang. On Sunday I drove six hours and led services in three different villages. On Monday, I drove 7 hours back to Phitsanulok. On Tuesday we drove 5 hours back to Chiang Mai. She was so happy that we took her. She said very shyly… this is the first time in my life that anyone has ever taken me to school and helped to get me settled in.

We took one of our students, Biu, to her new university where she will be studying to become a nurse.

The university nearest to us is Maejo university. Each year they have a day where they welcome the new students. They do this by walking 16 kilometers. They walk 8 kilometers from the school to the Government buildings. They have a ceremony there and then some food, snacks and drinks. Then they walk 8 kilometers back to the university. This year about 6,000 people took part in this activity. The government emailed us and asked if we would help this year. We made 400 food boxes and took and passed them out. We only did 400 because we did not have a lot of notice. We plan to do more next year. The young people in our dorm prepared the food boxes and helped to pass them out. Each box had a sandwich, some cookies, and a drink. In addition to helping with this event, it gets us a lot of goodwill from the community. There is a picture of the mayor of our community and me in front of our stand.

We have great news: We are getting closer to printing the new Bibles. The PDF of the Bible is now at the publisher. We are waiting for them to give us prices on printing 3,000, 4,000, and 5,000 copies. After that, we will just be waiting on the printing!! I am excited. I can’t wait to start passing them out. I want to give a special thanks to Kyle Butt who has been a tremendous help in getting this all organized.

May God bless us all as we work together for Him,
Michael