New House – Lance & Ruth

Dry season forest fire just outside of town! A lot of people have needed medical treatment due to the terrible air quality.

Happy spring to you all!

We’d like to update you about an exciting change in our housing situation. After a little over three years in our current house in Chiang Mai, we’ve started to really outgrow it (we have two teenagers now!), and have found it difficult to host the various groups we want to host on a regular basis. Also, we found ourselves torn between the idea of moving closer to the international church we attend across town so we can invest more there, and the desire to continue building the relationships here in our neighborhood which we’ve really seen developing recently. So we started praying.

A few weeks later, we met up with a missionary family we knew from our previous country of service who were now living in our current neighborhood. They were moving, and needed someone to take over their lease. Their house met basically every requirement we had for hosting groups, as well as having overnight visitors (which we’re also unable to do very effectively in our current house). At that same time, our church said they were looking for volunteers to host a weekly small group on our side of town to bring the church body together mid-week in a way that wouldn’t require everybody so much driving! We felt that all this was a clear direction from God, and a confirming answer to prayer. So we met the landlady, signed the lease, and are moving as we speak! We have until April 15th when our current lease ends to be totally moved out of our current place, so we’ve got a bit of overlap which is a nice added blessing.

Bathroom construction. You always take your shoes off before entering a house, and this even carries through to construction workers busting out bricks while barefoot!

The house we’re moving out of was mostly furnished by the landlady, but the one we’re moving into is mostly unfurnished, so we’ve had to buy a number of furniture items to get the place functional, and also do a bit of renovation in the upstairs bathroom. Another expense we’re looking at is how best to set up the big downstairs room for hosting. We want to host a weekly “Life Group” of church members, so we’ll need child-friendly activities so the younger kids can play while we lead an intentional time of sharing with the adults for that. We also would like to host kids from the neighborhood here as well as the boys’ youth group, so we want to provide some activities like maybe building a corn hole set, or finding a used pool table or ping pong table that older kids would enjoy. And then we need dining and living room areas that will accommodate 15 people or more for our holiday meal celebrations, Ruth’s monthly women’s nights, and my impromptu men’s gatherings that I have. There is an outdoor area at our new place too which might open up some new options – I’m considering inviting the Thai guys that I play soccer with over for a BBQ-type gathering. They’re in the “young professional” stage of life, and it would provide a way to interact with them off the field in a different context. Also I’ve gotten to know some of the dads in our neighborhood and might do a similar thing with them. Anyway, setting all this up involves quite a few one-time costs on the front end, so if you feel led to jump in and help with any of these up front costs, we’d be most appreciative!

Blessings,
-Lance, for the Baker family