3 August 2014
Dear Phyllis,
Before I get onto the body of today's letter. Allow me to get my physical condition out of the way first. Last Wednesday I had my second and last visit to the doctor. He seemed pleased and everything is progressing nicely except he told me that it will take six months for a complete recovery. Last week I said I was at about 40% normal power. This week I am up to 50%, but there is a lot of 50% that isn't there yet. Life has been little different from what it would be like in a nursing home. I do go to school on my motor bike to teach the children every morning for 30 minutes, but the rest of the day is spent either sleeping or sitting in my chase lounge chair on the balcony looking at Fox News or You Tube. This is killing me. But there is much I can do today that was impossible a week ago.
Now today's letter. As I have said many times, I wonder if there has ever been anyone more privileged to live as varied life as me. But, unquestionably, the greatest privilege is what the Lord has allowed me to do for the past 16 years here in Thailand. I can't imagine any ministry that is more packed with all the elements than there is in the ministry of Bible logistics. There is a great deal of faith in trusting the Lord to make seeing eyes blind (2 Kng. 6:18), and make the iron swim up stream (2 Kng. 6:6). Without the Lord's help this ministry would be impossible. And yet there is a measure of professionalism involved. There are highly trained, intelligent, people in communist countries whose job it is to see that illegal Bibles do not get in. Amateurs are extremely dangerous. You have to know what to do and what not to do. There certainly is a significant portion of daring, plus adventure that few people ever experience. It takes all of it.
One of the most exciting run I was ever on was the Xieng Kuang run in 2000. Six months before then the Lord had opened up the greatest artery for supplying Bibles to northern Laos through my losing my backpack on a bus in the middle of nowhere in northern Laos. I told you that story. But then we set out to make the first run through that channel. We had about a dozen boys from a Bible school in the states, and Mark and myself. I was the only one who knew that route, and the first jolt was when I got pulled out of line at immigration in the Chiang Mai airport for an irregular passport. My passport had been stolen two years before then and it was not unusual to raise a question going through immigration. But this one was panic time. Fortunately everything was cleared up and I took my seat beside a breathless Mark.
In Bible run it is imperative that you do all your home work first, and lay everything out before you leave. But we had not been able to do that, and were going out blind hoping we could make contact with our man in Xieng Kuang . Without that everything would be impossible. That was a terrific risk.
Customs going into Laos was not difficult and we had no problems carrying our load of Bibles into Vientiane. We took a tour bus to Luang Prabang and then hired two vans to take us to Xieng Kuang. It was a grueling two day ride until we got within 30 km of our destination. The road was a sea of mud. Our drivers flat refused to venture through that mud that obviously was impossible for a van. We did see large trucks wading through it. Finally in desperation we asked the drivers if they would negotiate with a truck driver to take us the rest of the way. There was a large flat bed steel truck that agreed to do so. So for the last 30 km we sat on the back of this truck on steel girders. We were exhausted but grateful to get checked in at a guest house.
The next problem was I had a hard time finding the tour office where our man, Sang, worked. Phonsavan is a very small town. This was my second time there, and I couldn't find the office. But towards the evening of the second day I spotted a shack down a side street that looked like it. We stopped there, and sure enough, that was where Sang worked. But his boss told us that he was up in the mountains planting rice for three weeks. BIG PROBLEM!!! We had to act like tourist, so we hired a tour guide to take us around the Plain of Jars the next day,.
That was very interesting, and well worth while, but as the afternoon wore on it was obvious that we were up against a stone wall. I said to Mark, “We have got to stick our necks out a long ways, or we are dead.” Up until then it was a common story that all tour guides were communist spy agents and extremely dangerous to tell them anything. We violated all the rules by telling our guide who we were and what we had come for. That was an ultra no-no, but it was that or nothing. I asked our guide if he would take us to the church in the Hmong village so we could deliver our load of Bibles. It doesn't get much dumber than that. Our guide was a terrific fellow, but what we were asking him was virtual suicide.
He did take us to the Hmong village, but going to the church was just too risky. So he took us to a man he knew who was a marginal Christian. That guy was a character and about 40% saved. He knew enough about the Gospel to use all the vocabulary and showed us letters he had from other Christians, but he was not about to stick his neck out to help us complete our mission. NO WAY!! We asked if he would contact the pastor for us. NO! Could we leave our Bible at his house? NOOOO!!!! We spent a fruitless hour talking to him and there was no way he was going to endanger himself. And, of course, our guide had already gone well past the line in taking us to his house.
What happened in the next five minutes was one of the weirdest miracles of my life. We were about to leave when the Lord impressed upon my heart that perhaps we could have a word of prayer. When we suggested that, the most dramatic transformation I had ever seen happened. Up until then our 40% saved Christian had been adamant. Suddenly he became desperate for us to pray for him. His wife was going to have a baby in two weeks, and he was desperate for the Lord's blessing on his home. When we finished praying we had a fanatical Christian on our hands. Yes, he would help us, but could we please come back the next morning to have breakfast with him?
That night, we had no idea what was going to happen, but obviously the Lord had opened something up. The next morning we decided to have our team eat at a restaurant, and Mark and I would go to our friends house for breakfast. While we were sitting in the restaurant as our boys were eating, in walks Sang. Our friend had driven all night to get him from the mountains so he could help us with the transfer. Man howdy, you talk about a miracle!
Sang said he would get the tour van from the office to take us to the airport for our flight that morning. And we could leave our bags in the van. Perfect! Our flight to Vientiane was at 10:00 AM and it was now 8:00. Sang took Mark and I to our friends house for breakfast and said he would be back in an hour with the boys and our bags full of Bibles. I can't remember much about the food as my mind was totally upon Sang getting back with the boys and getting us to the airport on time.
As 9:00 o'clock came, and no Sang, we began to get worried. Mark said he would take a taxi into town to see what was wrong, and be back as soon as possible. At 9:30 I went out to stand beside the road to wait for Sang and the boys. 10:00 o'clock came and I was almost out of my mind. Then, praise God, Sang showed up. There had been a problem. Sang could not get the van from the office, but he wisely went to a back up plan to ask a Christian with a truck to take us to the airport. You should have seen 14 of us with a 1000 lbs of Bibles loaded in the back of that Toyota pickup truck.
It was 10:20 when we pulled in at the airport, but the Lord was wonderful in providing fog so the incoming flight could not land, making our flight two hours late.
What a tremendous relief to realize the unbelievable miracles the Lord had provided to make this run a brilliant success, and getting out of Phonsavan on time. But the excitement wasn't over yet. I thought our Christian driver would simply drop us off at the airport, and go on with the Bibles. But no such luck. For some totally inexplicable reason, he decided to stay to see us off. Unbelievable!!! But the biggest concern was, I had never seen so many soldiers in one spot in my life. It seemed that there as a military maneuver and every Lao soldier in northern Laos was in that airport. And I couldn't imagine a more dangerous scenario. It was obvious that this pickup was loaded with 14 stuffed backpacks. Of course, someone would come out from the airport to carry them inside. I have never seen a pickup truck sitting in a small airport loaded with obvious bags begging for an explanation for we didn't take them with us.
But that was only half the problem. Our 40% saved Christian, ever since the prayer, had become a howling Pentecostal. We forgot his real name, but he was walking around the airport like he was at a Pentecostal camp meeting shouting “hallelujah”. From that time on we just called him Hal. All the adrenaline we had experienced up until then was just the warm up for the last 30 minutes. Here we were, 14 tourist, with no backpacks, but obviously our backpacks were left in the truck sitting outside in the parking lot. One soldier would have been enough to get my heart in my mouth, but there must have been 20 or 30 soldiers milling around in that airport, and our Pentecostal friend was waking around waving his arms shouting “hallelujah”. Would someone please stop the world and let me off?
But an eternity passed. Eventually we boarded our Lao Air flight to Vientiane. My heart never stopped pounding until the wheels were in the air, and it was obvious that an indescribable miracle had happened in a successful delivery of a huge consignment of precious Bibles desperately needed for northern Laos.
It had been a year before then, that I had seen the pastor in northern Vietnam lying on the ground weeping because the Lord had sent him desperately needed Bibles. There had been a significant moving of the Holy Spirit among the Hmong people. Tens of thousands had been saved, but there was no way that they had access to God's Word except by radio. Now were at a place about 400 km south of there in one of the most difficult places in SEA with a large supply of the Word of God. This would be our main artery for the next several years in supplying that section of the world.
When we got back to Chiang Mai three days later it all seemed like a dream. What we had experienced was totally unorthodox, but clearly led of the Lord in providing the connections that would have been humanly impossible. This was not the way that Bible runs were supposed to be handled, but what we were unable to do the Lord had miraculously done for us.
Much has changed since then. The situation is China, Vietnam, and Laos has eased somewhat. There are still some teams doing Bible runs but not like before. Last year was the last one I was on, and that will probably be it for this life. But as I look back over the years, what the Lord has privileged me to do here in Thailand is something for which eternity will be too short to adequately thank Him.
May God bless you in following Jesus this coming week,
bill
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