Year in Review 2019

It’s time for my summary-of-the-year post. If you want an overview of our ministry, you can get a synopsis of each year in our December posts starting in 2015.

This year we’ve been home raising support to head back to Asia, specifically Thailand. We had planned to be here for 3 months but obviously we underestimated how long it would take to raise support and iron out partnerships and logistics. Thankfully we’ve had missionary housing to stay in rent and utilities free for the whole year, allowing us to save most of our support for when we return to the field. While we’re disappointed to not have been able to go back sooner, we’re resting in the fact that God had a different plan. We’ve been blessed to see old friends and make new ones and we’ve been able to talk to many different groups including new and ongoing supporting churches, Sunday school classes, small groups and people’s homes.

​In January we attended a missionary debriefing seminar called Interlude by Barnabas International. This was a phenomenal few days of encouragement, processing, and fellowship with others from similar backgrounds. We highly recommend it for any missionary needing to process whether on home leave, in transition, or coming back to the States to live. 

​In March and April we were back in Asia to move our home from our previous country to storage in Thailand for when we return. We were glad to be able to sell our furniture and many other things to a family we know from New Zealand who are returning from support raising to continue their work in our previous country. Moving was a lot of work with a lot of glitches (as usual) but thankfully everything worked out in the end and our belongings are safely in storage at Bangkok. We (sadly) said good-bye to our community and church family there and hope we’ll see a few of them again when they visit Thailand for medical care, counseling or respite. Once our belongings were safely out of our previous country, we switched our posts to be password free.

​While in Asia we were also able to speak to an organization we had hoped to partner with and see their language school. Unfortunately this opportunity has fallen through, but we still hope to leave within the next month to start language at a school our friends in Thailand recommended to us where they live. (More details in January – this is a summary of 2019 after all.)

​One of our big prayer requests this year has been to find someone to help us homeschool our boys while we’re learning language. Homeschool and language learning are both full-time jobs and doing both prolongs the time it takes for both. By God’s grace we were connected with a young lady, Amanda King, from Northfield Christian Fellowship who is excited to come and work with our kids for a year. This was such an answer to prayer and we look forward to spending the year with her.

We have full funding for the first year at language school. During this upcoming year, we will be able to get a better feel for the cost of living and how much support we’ll need in subsequent years. We also look forward to interacting with the various ministries to missionaries in Thailand to see how God would have us minister. We’d appreciate your prayer support for all of this.

Lance wrote a blog post detailing the vision for our work in Thailand. You can read his post from July 2019 here: Supporting Missionaries

– Ruth, for the Baker family