Pammy and Laos

18 January 2015

Dear Phyllis,

Today was an ultra bad day. If I told-it-like-it-is you would have a pity party like you have never heard of. Rather than writing my heart, I decided not to write today. If I did, that would be the first time in 17 years that I haven't written you on Sunday. Then this evening I decided to write a couple of brief testimonies.

Pammy is like a pig hog heaven. I have never seen her so happy. At last she has got back to being a lady pastor. This is something I said I would never permit. But here we are. She has her own church, The Philadelphia House Church. She has her credentials and all the paraphernalia of being a proper church. At the moment it is running from 3 to 10 people. But she say she really doesn't care. She is not interested in numbers, but simply wants a gathering of those who are serious about serving Jesus. Pammy started out with five but one of her main converts has turned back and said she decided not to follow Jesus anymore. Then three weeks ago Pammy had contact with some minority people in the hills near here. Three families have been coming which is a great encourage to her. I flat don't like lady pastors, but she is doing better than I am., and I am reluctant to close it down. I asked her what she is teaching them Sunday by Sunday, and the material sounds as good as it is going to get. At this point I feel I would be more of anchor on the work than an engine driving it. So I am standing on the side lines.

Three weeks ago Pammy came home one Saturday with a new girl on the back of her bike. She said, “This is our new daughter.” I wasn't sure how long that was going to last, but it looked good for a while. After staying with us for one week, the girl had to go home for three or four days to help her father with the coffee harvest. That Saturday Pammy went up there to bring her back home. But she came back alone. Pammy said the girl decided she would rather be a boy than a girl and chose to stay there. You win some and you lose some.

The testimony I would like to share is a short one about Laos but interesting. I probably have written you this testimony before but it is so good I am not embarrassed to share it twice.

In 1980 a fellow escaped from Laos, and got across the Mekong River to Thailand. Like all refugees in Thailand, he got confined to a refugee camp that is little more than a lose prison. There is a high fence around all those refugee camps and no one is permitted outside. This fellow was a smoker, and he couldn't get any cigarettes inside the camp. But he did fall heir to a Bible that proved to be an excellent answer for his problem. Bible paper made very good cigarettes. In time he smoked up one entire Bible from Genesis to Revelation. But when he got to chapter 22 of Revelation he ran out of paper and was stuck again. He had a girl friend that he asked if she knew any place where he could get another Bible. The girl told him that there was a missionary working in that camp who would give him another Bible, but there was a restriction that he must go to a Bible study to get one. Simply for the sole purpose of getting some more cigarette paper he started attending that Bible study. The result was that he wound up swimming the Mekong River again to go back in to lead his parents to Christ. I met him ten years ago and he was a fantastic Christian. The last I heard he was the director of Campus Crusade for Christ in Vientiane.

Would to God that more people smoked Bibles if they would wind up with the fire of God in their hearts like this brother.

I hope next week is better. Gomen nasai for this brief note today.

With much love in Christ,

                                               bill

PS: After I wrote this letter, Pammy just told me that she led another man to Christ this morning. That is the way it is supposed to work.