“Wow, this city is so nice!” I said to my wife after a few days in Chiang Mai.
We live in Nong Khai, a small city in the Thailand countryside where there’s not much to do. If we want food delivered, our one option is cheese pizza. If we want to buy quality technology, furniture, appliances or clothing, we need to travel at least an hour to reach a larger city.
Please, don’t misunderstand me. I enjoy our small city a lot; it has a peaceful and friendly lifestyle with lots of space for my son to play around. People know each other or they soon become friends once they start talking. That’s priceless and a lot more important to me than the comforts of the big city. But it is refreshing to be able to attend a large and very active church with lots of children for our son to interact with, to go to a nice restaurant once in a while, and to have plenty of options to shop for groceries, fruits, vegetables or whatever else is needed.
Nevertheless, our mission here is to start a church in Nong Khai, where there are yet no Adventists, so we went to Chiang Mai for 40 days of intensive language learning. Although we take classes online, the Thai language is tonal (actually, five different tones), and we miss a few things while learning via the Internet. We traveled to Chiang Mai to spend some time with our teacher so we could refine our language skills and practice more.
Between classes, studying and spending time with our son, life was pretty busy but enjoyable. It’s easy to get caught in the comforts sometimes, and we can even ‘forget’ our mission here. But that changed really fast and drastically when our son got very sick, and we had to run him to the emergency room. We stayed in the hospital with him for five days, at which time he was healthy enough to go back home. This was quite the wake-up call, reminding us that we didn’t belong in Chiang Mai; our home and our mission were in Nong Khai.
I began thinking about how easy it is to lose focus because of the things of this world. It’s not the big things that take away our focus but the small, simple pleasures of life that we don’t realize are distracting us, like going out to eat. We end up entwined in a web of small pleasures; the longer we are there, the harder it is to detangle ourselves. This seems to have become a lot more present and intense in our lives since entering the mission field.
Sometimes a life being faithful to God is not the easiest one, but it’s the only one that can protect us from falling. It’s the only life that will give us real and eternal pleasure and happiness.
Pray for missionaries. The enemy is trying everything he can to distract us from our mission.
