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Prayer requests – health concerns
Children’s handprints decorating the orphanage wall Our end-of-month post for April is mostly a request for prayer for Ruth and Alex. The good news is that we’re in our new house! Unfortunately, about three weeks ago (the night we were scheduled to spend our first night in the new house), Ruth had a bicycle crash and besides being all bruised and scraped up, she also suffered a concussion. We assumed she’d recover in a couple week’s time, but it has now been a full three weeks, and she still gets headaches, dizziness, blurred vision, and nausea, which the doctors have said could take two to three months to fully resolve. The treatment includes vertigo medication, and instructions to rest and not do problem solving or critical thinking. Of course moving into a new house is almost constant problem solving and decision making about where things should go and how the house will operate, so that’s been really challenging.At the same time, Alex has been weak and struggling with fatigue for the last couple months. We took him to a doctor before the move, but didn’t get a real clear picture of what was wrong, so in April we took him to a different doctor to get a second opinion and discovered he is anemic. He had an iron infusion (IV), and is following up with a regime of iron and other supplements, but just like Ruth, the process can take two to three months to resolve.
As if all that weren’t enough, the hot season in northern Thailand is also the “burning” season, when all the local farmers burn off their rice and sugar cane fields, which has made the air quality really bad for the past couple months. Micah has historically not done well with poor air quality, and that has been true this time around too (he’s had headache, cough, and very low energy for the past couple months). Thankfully, burning season is ending right now, and the air is already much better, and Micah has been really perking up.In other news, since Josiah and I have been up and functional, he and I had the opportunity to volunteer at another orphanage in April. This one was a believer-run girls orphanage with girls ranging from age 5 to 18. We did games, taught some English, brought lunch, and just generally hung out and spent time with them. We’re both looking forward to going back again next month. I’ve put some photos here – though for the children’s safety and anonymity I’ve used photos where they’re wearing masks or I’ve blurred their faces.
Blessings,
-Lance, for the Baker family -
New House
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 -
Visitors!
So, we’ve successfully hosted our first visitors in Thailand! Back to back no less. First to arrive were the Gregorys, a couple from Barnabas International who serve as our missionary mentors/sounding board/accountability came to visit for a week. They wanted to see and experience our life here. We were able to show them some of the more interesting places and restaurants, visit our church fellowship, and introduce them to a number of people we’ve worked with and who have impacted our life here. Also, since one of our interests is to put on missionary retreats in the future (perhaps even in conjunction with Barnabas) we visited one potential location where we could hold such an event. We actually had the privilege of attending a Barnabas event in Michigan in 2019, and were greatly blessed by it. In the end, this was a whirlwind of a week, and went off pretty smoothly overall.If you’re interested in learning more about Barnabas International’s vision of supporting global workers, visit their site here – www.barnabas.org
The day after they left we immediately had our second-ever visitors, my parents! The pace of events was a bit slower with them since they stayed longer (one month). They got to see our everyday life, and the boys had a list of things they were hoping to show them, and we were able to do almost everything we set out to do while they were here. There is something truly unique about having someone from your home culture show up and experience daily life in Thailand. You realize how many things seem normal now because you’ve gotten used to them, and you see things from a fresh perspective. My parents had visited us in our previous country as well, so they’re really becoming world travelers in their older years here!Signing off for now,
-Lance, for the Baker family
Barber shop in a van – the boys got their first ever haircut done by someone other than myself…
Barber shop van showed up outside our local market one day. -
Neighborhood Gatherings
This month I’d like to share about our outreach to our immediate community which is a group of about 200 homes. Normally, we have large gatherings of single missionaries and/or families at our home during the holidays, but this year we had just gotten back to our house in Thailand in November, and the majority of the missionaries we know were in their home countries since the world had finally opened back up to travel post-Covid. So our focus shifted a bit to our neighborhood, which is probably 75% Thai, and 25% expat and mixed nationality families. Most of them don’t celebrate Christmas, but despite having their own Lunar Buddhist calendar, pretty much everybody does celebrate the Jan. 1st New Year’s Day, so we had a neighborhood-wide get together. Three of us planned it, and it just so happens that the one fella’s niece runs the office, so we were able to close one of the roads and commandeer the whole park! I organized a series of 15-min. football matches (soccer), with different age groups, and we all brought food, and had tents put up for shade. It went from 4pm to about 11pm. We met a lot of new people, and shared stories, and were able to initiate what I think will be some good long-term new relationships.Then about two weeks later was Thailand’s National Children’s Day. This one I didn’t do as much planning/prepping for, but Ruth set up a whole “build your own puppet” station, which was a huge hit! And since our boys are getting older, they brainstormed and decided to each create and operate a fair-style game for the younger kids, complete with a system of awarding tickets which could then be turned in for prizes. Ruth found wonderful prizes online to order, and I manned that area while the kids ran their respective games. We got to meet a lot of the parents, which were a different group of neighbors, and it was a very successful day.
Then, at the end of January, the Chinese members of our community put on a Chinese Lunar New Year celebration, which brought back wonderful memories of years past for us! We joined their celebration there in the same neighborhood park, and they asked us to bring some Western food to have alongside the traditional Chinese fare (including pork tongue, squid, and pig ear), so Ruth baked almost 100 mini cheesecakes. Multiple ladies asked her to teach them how to make them, so we’re interested to see where that leads. In the end, January probably marked the most positive interactions we’ve had with neighbors since moving here!
-Lance, for the Baker family -
Year in Review 2022
We volunteered as a family to help a local orphanage put on a Christmas party with/for the surrounding village. Happy New Year! Our December post each year is a summary of what transpired that year. If you are new to our blog, you can get a fairly quick overview by just reading through previous December posts in the “Year in Review” category. (Though 2015-18 are password protected due to our host country at the time, so email us directly if you’d like the password.)FYI – I’m taking over writing the blog going forward so Ruth can focus on homeschool and other tasks. She has a gift for writing that I don’t possess, but I’ll do my best!
The first part of 2022 saw quite a few changes for us:
Church gatherings resumed after having been frequently shut down from Covid restrictions, so the home church we had been helping lead drew to a close, and we were all able to start attending an international church here in town. Our service with the set up of Frontier Ventures’ Asian Hub office drew to a close. We transitioned from our first homeschool helper (Amanda) to our second (Sarah). They were about as different in personality as is possible, so we feel like God was showing us the full spectrum of who could come in the future, and we learned a great deal about aligning expectations, emotional support, boundaries, the effect of culture shock, etc.
We (Ruth) offered to bake cookies for the orphanage Christmas party. We asked how many people would be coming, and were told “the whole village.” So we took a guess and made about 200 cookies! Then mid-way through 2022 we left for the States for our first trip back since our arrival in Feb. 2020. This was really our first time trying to intentionally plan a circuit of speaking and updating churches and supporters, and we could have done a better job of planning/scheduling, so hopefully next time around it will be a bit less haphazard. It was really wonderful to connect with family, friends, and supporters! We were also able to increase our support level a bit, which is very helpful now that we’re back in Thailand.We returned to Chiang Mai in November. Our friend Lek and her daughter had lived in our house and watched our cats while we were gone, which was a huge blessing. If we had left it vacant, our house would have most likely been overrun by mold, cockroaches, and other critters. Even with her helping in that way, it took about a month to get our home and life back up and running. Visa documentation and getting my motorcycle driver’s license required hours of waiting at government offices over the course of about two weeks.
We all lit candles outside for the final songs at the missionary guest house.
In December Ruth and I were asked to lead a Christmas celebration evening with carols at the missionary guest house like we did last year. It was a bit larger this year, with about 50 or 60 people in attendance. There were folks hailing from ten different countries, and it was a unique, eclectic, and wonderful time of fellowship!Blessings,
– Lance, for the Baker family -
God’s Connections For Us – Part 2
These are our neighbors on a platform leading to the water about to float candles & incense to celebrate the Loi Kratong holiday. Happy American Thanksgiving Month! We are still settling into being here. Getting our visas in order after reentry, our vehicle registration/insurance valid again, and taking paperwork to various offices that need them all take hours and hours (read, days and days) of organization, communication and waiting at the government buildings. Often only to have to start the process again because someone decided you need another form of ID that you’ve never seen or heard of before, but they’re sure you know what they’re talking about because they’re showing you the Google translation of the Thai list of official documents that you need… this happened at the latest attempt (of several) to get me (Ruth) a Thai bank account. We continue to run into problems (after multiple attempts at multiple banks), and this last one had us stymied. I needed some sort of ID paper stating my nationality, but apparently my passport didn’t count since that was also on the list. Such is life overseas. Silly me, I forgot about all this and expected things to just go smoothly and communication to be effective since we’ve been living in Asia for years now. Just that much more encouragement to learn to speak more Thai!Anyway, beyond all that, we are very glad to be back and reconnecting with everyone here and meeting the new neighbors who’ve moved in since we’ve been gone. The boys are slowly connecting with their friends from the neighborhood again, though some of them have still been elusive. Pray that these things will sort themselves out with time.
Super cute neighbor girl posing with her candle/incense ready to be lit.
Last post I promised to write more about the connections God made for us to join with new partners in the States. So exciting. Before we left for the States, we sent out a request asking those on our mailing list if they had any group/church/organization to whom they could commend us, to help us raise more monthly support. My sister forwarded the information about our financial need and the homeschool helper internship (Inspire) to be included in her homeschool co-op (Heart’s) newsletter. A lady who read the newsletter printed it out because of our need but wasn’t sure what to do with it. Then in a meeting at her church she heard that they were looking for a new missionary family to support. Turns out, this church in Olmsted, OH also currently supports a couple who live down the road from us here in Chiang Mai. This church “just happens” to have a heart for homeschool families and missionaries, and the couple down the road are nearing the end of more than 30 years on the field, and told that church they should give their support to us! They invited us to Olmsted to speak one Sunday, and are now supporting us monthly. While we do feel we need to make our needs known, we’ve also found that after that, relying on prayer is the best (although sometimes also the hardest) way for us to raise support. When things get difficult on the field it is such a comfort knowing that God moved in unique ways to get us here, and we can feel confident that we’re right where He wants us to be.Two other churches that we connected with each have an interesting story of how God moved as well. One senior pastor reached out to us because of our interactions with him three years earlier before he even was a pastor. In fact he and his family had served in missions for years in Thailand, so we have a wonderful connection with them. The second church had asked my brother, Luke, to fill in for the pastor for two weekends. They wanted his messages to center around missions, and he offered to do one better by having us come and speak one weekend. Through that they decided to start supporting us, and again it was obviously the handiwork of God, not us.
The floating lights are beautiful, but also sad because it’s a Buddhist worship ceremony whose roots trace back to the Indian goddess Vishnu.
In other more recent news, shortly after returning, we found out that Josiah may needed another follow-up surgical procedure, and the appointment determining that was scheduled for just a couple days before Thanksgiving. We were blindsided because while we knew he may have to go in annually for check-ups and possibly out-patient procedures as he grew, we thought he was healed from his most recent surgery and was in the clear until next year. In light of this timing, we decided not to have a large group to our house for Thanksgiving since we weren’t sure if we’d be in the hospital for that week, and instead had a family day of celebration. Thankfully, Josiah didn’t end up needing an immediate procedure, but he does now have another follow up appointment in January, so please pray that he’ll continue to heal.Since he’s in the clear for the upcoming holiday season, we’ve scheduled a neighborhood football (soccer) match and BBQ for Boxing Day (Dec. 26th), and we’re going to attempt our first ever open house invitation to all of our neighbors on New Year’s Eve. Our house isn’t large, but we’re going to give it a shot anyway.
– For the Baker family, Ruth and Lance
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God’s Connections For Us
The god-guardians in the Bangkok airport are still wearing masks as are most of the Thai population out of choice. Hello from Thailand! We are back and getting acclimated to Thai culture again. We are so glad to be back – our family fits well here in this country.We had the privilege of speaking at four new churches while we were in the States, two of which plan to have future meetings about supporting us and one has already committed to supporting us long-term. All four came about through God’s arrangement in surprising ways.
The first weekend we were back we attended my dad’s family reunion. As he is one of eight kids, and some of his siblings already have great-grandkids, it is a large event for which they rented a college campus and planned a weekend full of fellowship. My brother was supposed to give the message Sunday morning but ended up loosing his voice, so Lance was asked Saturday night if he’d be able to briefly share what we’ve been doing in Asia the next morning. It was such a blessing to be able to share with my family about the ministries we’ve been involved with here. From that event, we have connected with a few cousins who were interested in supporting us monthly, and someone who may be interested in joining our homeschool helper internship. Also, because of that morning, one of my cousins was able to connect us with her church leadership and we were able to share at their church a month later. I’m not glad my brother had to suffer the weekend with a sore throat, but am so thankful God used it to bless us in multiple ways.
Three other churches near us in PA and Ohio also connected us through God’s arrangements (instead of ours) but this post will be long enough as it is without those stories so I will cover those next month. These three new churches are local country churches near my sister and parents’ houses.
The boys are glad to able to get fresh coconut from the market again.
Concerning support level, two of the above mentioned churches still need to meet with their members to vote about supporting us. Assuming we can add them in with the other new church and new individuals who have committed to monthly support, we will be at 70% of our goal budget. The good news is, our monthly living expenses are fully covered so we aren’t in danger of having to leave because of lack of funds. (Praise God!) So while our current support level hampers our ability for some ministry involvement, it does keep us on the field and doing ministry long term.Thankfully, coming back to the States always results in a net gain for us financially through money given to us from the people and churches we interact with while there. This means, our flights back, travel in the States and other expenses there were more than covered, pulling nothing from our monthly support, and allowing us to save while we were there. Secondly, we were included in a missions fundraising event this year called REACH which will cover the ministry expenses of starting our homeschool helper internship, Inspire, so that also won’t have to come out of our monthly financial budget this year. We are not guaranteed this money every year however, so please continue praying with us that our financial support will increase over this next year so we can continue with the ministries we’ve started.
Thank you so much for your prayers and involvement in this ministry. If you are a supporter and would ever like to come and see our life and the work we’re involved with here, or would like to plan an outreach to support the missionaries we work with, please let us know, and we’ll work together with you to make that happen.
It was so great to connect with those of you we could while we were in the States. This was the first time we’ve had a short stay but with many, many places to visit, so our planning didn’t work out perfectly a few times. Hopefully the next time will be smoother from what we learned this time around. We hope you’ll give us grace where we messed up, and we look forward to spending more time with everyone the next time we’re visiting.
Thank you again for your prayers,
– Ruth, for the Baker family
Homeschool is going full-steam ahead now that we’re back. The boys did a fun project of research while learning the practical lesson of how videos can make things look super easy when in reality they take a bit of talent. However, they had a lot of fun making watermelon baskets and did an amazing job! We were able to share two of the baskets with our neighbor who leads a bible study for collage kids from the Karen people group of the Myanmar-Thai border.
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Three Sundays Left
Lance and I celebrated our 20th anniversary this month! We were able to get away and spend a beautiful day at Letchworth State Park in NY. This update will be brief as we are down to the last two weeks in the States and incredibly busy getting ready to leave. We’ll be speaking at two new churches the next two Sundays and then we speak at our final church in Houston, PA who has been a long-time supporter, two days before we leave on October 18. Once we get back to Thailand and we hear back from the new churches we’ve visited, we can evaluate where we’re at financially and then give you an update about that and what God did on this trip. Praise God we did raise more support while we were in the States! However, we know we didn’t hit the 100% mark so far, so please continue to pray for additional monthly supporters as people consider what they’ve heard about our ministry. We pray God moves in the hearts of those He wants to join us in this ministry and they follow Him in His leading to support His work. We have had such a wonderful time connecting with everyone and sharing what God is doing around us in Thailand. Pray for us as the last few weeks are a colossal effort in organization and packing. Thank you for your continued prayers and support!
– Ruth, for the Baker family. -
Quick Speaking Overview
We were so blessed in NC to have a great time of catching up with one of my cousins and to tour the USS North Carolina battleship. We’re over halfway through our trip here and have every Sunday scheduled until we leave! For the month of August we’ve been at a church in a different state each Sunday – Indiana, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, then back to Pennsylvania. Last Sunday we were at our sending church, Community Bible Church in Pennsylvania. This coming Sunday we’ll be in Akron, Ohio at Lakeside Christian Church’s REACH, a picnic to raise funds for missions, and Lance is giving a short update and the sermon that morning. Then we’re back in Pennsylvania the next Sunday at the Federated Church for their Sunday morning service and have an update evening for our supporters in the Erie area on the 16th at my brother Mark’s house in Edinboro, PA. After that we are headed down to the DC area for that weekend, then back to PA for the next Sunday. If you’re interested in hearing our update or catching up with us, join us at one of these events or contact us to find out a more detailed schedule.We were blessed to speak at a new church in North Carolina this past month and hope we will gain new supporters from that morning. It was the first church that we set up a table with things from Thailand to show people, like money and hand-made items, along with pictures from our last country and current pictures from Thailand. It was a great way to connect with people after the service and for people to learn more about Thailand and our ministry when they came to get a prayer card.
Please continue to pray for us as we finish out our time here with one more month of speaking and travel. We are praying for more monthly supporters from individuals to supplement the churches that support us and to get us to where we need to be in our budget.
Thank you for your continued prayers and support!
– Ruth, for the Baker family.
The boys sharing stories with someone at our table.
Lance speaking at our sending church. -
Travel Overview
There are so many things to adjust to culturally, our heads are spinning trying to reorient ourselves. From being able to see everyone’s face (masks were still mandatory everywhere when we left Thailand), to understanding what everyone’s saying around us, to the small things like knowing you can ask anyone for information and they’ll understand you, it can be pretty overwhelming! The first day here one of our sons asked for water to drink, passing on the other options, “because you can drink it from the tap!” He thought that was so cool, he couldn’t pass up the opportunity. Lance and I even forget and find ourselves looking for a water bottle so we can brush our teeth.
Part of our photo presentation – soccer with the neighborhood kids in our last country. We have been busy seeing family, reconnecting with supporters, updating our supporting churches and making connections with other churches. We are so excited to have new churches to speak at and the possibility of a few more to add to our support network. Thank you so much to those of you who were able to connect us with a new church or group to talk to and to our new supporters. We really need those connections and new support.It has been great, as we’ve put together the presentation about our ministry, to remember all the different areas of ministry we’ve been involved in over the past 2+ years we’ve been in Thailand. During the initial covid shut-downs we were still able to lead a praise and worship evening at a missionary guest house as well as the Sunday morning worship there. We’ve hosted multiple gatherings during major (and some minor) U.S. holidays for single missionaries or couples who had no one to celebrate the day with. We’ve had kids events and ongoing interactions, soccer games and holiday parties for the youth in our neighborhood. We’ve hosted and walked with missionary families, couples, and singles going through hard times, planned events for them and walked with them through their struggles. One summer was spent helping two missions organizations set up guest house quarters for their training needs in Asia and short-term housing and welcoming in the first team to use the facilities. Lance has been involved with a young Thai men’s soccer outreach group and the local community through our visa organization the Future Foundation doing charity work that they’ve organized for a local orphanage, refugees and other’s in our city in need. And, of course, our latest focus of setting up and developing a homeschool helper internship program called Inspire (which has yet to become official – but that’s going to be the name).
Soccer with the neighborhood kids in our current country.
This weekend we head to a summer camp for a few days in Indiana and then on to Tremont, IL to see supporters at both places. The next weekend we’re back at two churches in Pennsylvania to give our update and then to North Carolina and the D.C. area the next weekend and following week after that. We’ll be in Akron, OH for presentations September 4th (Lakeside) and the 25th (an afternoon event) if you’re in that area and would like to hear us. (If you attend a church in the Akron area that would be interested in hearing our presentation, Sunday morning of the 25th we’re still available to speak.) We’re scheduled to speak somewhere almost every Sunday until we leave mid-October, so if you’re interested in hearing our presentation, contact us and we can let you know where we’ll be when. We have yet to nail down a date for our supporters in the Erie, PA area who don’t attend a supporting church but if you support us financially and are in that area we will contact you directly once that’s scheduled. If you know of a church or group who would like to hear what we did when we were in Ch-na and our ministry now in Thailand, we do have one or two Sundays left open and we definitely have many weekdays, Friday evenings or Saturday afternoons or evenings when we can schedule something for a church or small group. Please contact us (lanceandruth@psmail.net or Lance: 814-737-3262) and we can make plans.Thank you for all of you who have so warmly welcomed us and have joined us in the ministry through prayer and financial support. We so appreciate your partnership.
– Ruth, for the Baker family.