Year in Review 2020 – Lance & Ruth

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! This is our December summary-of-the-year post. If you want an overview of our journey, you can read all of our past December posts for a quick summary of each year since 2015. The posts from our time in a closed country are password protected, so contact us for the password if you want to read those ones.

Our Thai friend, Lek, wanted to bring the boys Pad Thai for lunch as a Christmas present. When she showed up she had all the ingredients and told me she’d need my help making it. I had a fun and informative afternoon with her making traditional Thai food.

Compared to most of you in the States, I think our year went more to plan than most. We left for Thailand in March to start language learning in Chiang Mai. Three days after our arrival the borders closed and we have continually praised God that He got us here before then. We stayed at a missionary guest house while getting our belongings shipped up from storage in Bangkok (that we had shipped over from our last country) and setting up our house. We were so thankful that God had convicted us to pack/ship most of our belongings instead of trying to replace them in Thailand since the stores were only allowed to sell food and cleaning supplies for our first three months here due to the Covid lockdown.

This year has been focused on learning Thai and acclimating to the culture and life here. Most things were closed when we first arrived, so we had a slow start to meeting people and developing a network of friends for the kids, but we’ve been able to work on developing relationships with Westerners, Thais and other Asian nationalities now that most things are open here again.

One area we’ve had setbacks in is with our language learning. We had planned to have a homeschool helper (Amanda) for a year to help us teach the kids while we learned Thai, but since she had planned to come two weeks after us, she wasn’t able to get into the country. We eventually switched the boys to an online curriculum instead of using the textbooks I had for them, so we didn’t have to prepare lesson plans for 3 boys while trying to study. Hopefully we’ll be able to return to some physical textbooks if we get a homeschool helper to come, but I’m thankful to have the online resources so I can keep up with Lance in language learning. Also, our language teacher has had a rough year due to health and lack of new students since the borders have been closed. Because of this, it has been a struggle for us to maintain a steady learning environment with her. Her desire to teach is no longer there and she plans to close her school completely soon, so we are looking for a new solution to language for this coming year.

The finished dish minus the scrambled eggs. I would’ve never guessed most of the ingredients. Some of the more interesting ones include diced sweet pickled radish, tamarind pulp, coconut sugar paste, cubed tofu and peanuts with scorch marks from being roasted for her at the market before she came.

Getting a visa for Amanda has been an ongoing project this year as we keep up with the changing situations for entering Thailand. Along with this, Lance is now also working on a permanent visa solution for us, since our student visa expires this March. In both areas, God has directed us to the people we need to help us and we hope to have a solution for both of us soon. Please pray for both situations as we work on this over the next few months.

Although this year’s focus was on language, we have also been able to do quite a bit of ministry as well. When we first arrived, the directors of the missionary guest house we stayed at began doing a Sunday service on the premises since all local churches were closed. We led the music for that service as well as a mid-week worship service each week for a number of months. It was a unique and wonderful way to serve during the months of lockdown that many others didn’t get to experience. This ministry is suspended right now since the guest house is closed due to lack of guests, but they and we hope to continue it in the future once they reopen. We’ve also had a ministry develop by hosting multiple holiday celebrations for people who don’t have anyone to celebrate with. We were blessed to host a birthday celebration for a Thai lady and her daughter, suppers with a number of missionary families and singles, and Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s celebrations with groups of single missionaries, missionary families and new friends we’ve met hailing from Malaysia, China, Thailand, New Zealand and the States

Lek’s Pad Thai with lime and sprouts. Yum.

Through this whole year, we’ve continually praised God that we were able to make it here before the travel lockdown last March. Our family has been so blessed to be back in Asia, out of the temporary housing situation in the States, able to invest in our long-term ministry and relationships, and to have our own place to call home again. Micah’s health is doing really well here when he doesn’t inadvertently eat MSG, and we can see all the boys are blessed by being reunited with their toys/belongings, having a specific homeschool curriculum to follow again (instead of cobbling it together for a year since our books were all in Asia) and a home that’s theirs again. Lance and I are similarly excited and blessed to be here for the same reasons and to be back doing the ministry we were created for. We thank God continually for bringing us here and giving us this ministry. Thank you for your prayers and support for and with us.

– Ruth, for the Baker family.