Welcome to PlaaPlaaPlaa!

So you may be wondering why PlaaPlaaPlaa? What are those strange fish symbols above? What is ปลา and what does it mean? In short, this is a blog site, so surely there's going to be plenty of rambling. Unfortunately BlahBlahBlah was already taken, so I had to settle for the 'Plaa'. But there's actually more to it then just ramblings. The first fish symbol is actually a Christian symbol meaning ICTHUS - a greek acronymn which means "Jesus Christ is God's Son, the Saviour". The other strange letters you see in the last fish is actually the thai word for fish which funnily enough is pronounced "Plaa". So when you put it all together, this site is going to be my ramblings in telling people about how Jesus Christ is God's Son, the Saviour in Thailand (with plenty of good stories about food in between). Happy reading.

Friday, February 22, 2008

Khruu Kwan

Khruu Kwan is my teacher at school. She's AWESOME fun! i love going to my lessons, i love the fact that she's a cack. that she's really flexible with how she teaches and is happy to let me learn stuff that's not necessarily in the lessons to the extent that we often end up talking about how we became christians, or talking about reading the bible, church or prayer. A couple weeks ago, she asked whether or not i'd be interested in coming over to her place once a week for a 'cell group' that she wanted to start. It sounded like a great idea at the time - getting a group of various people she knows together to sing, pray, share and read the Bible. We're currently trying to find a night that we everyone is free to make at the moment, but hopefully when we do, we'll be able to meet together.

But there was one other unexpected thing that happened earlier this week during one lesson. i had to compare different items and ask questions like - which pencil is longer, or what flower is prettier, or what fruit is sweeter etc. I was looking around the room for inspiration on what to ask when i saw a couple books. i knew one was a dictionary, but had no idea what the other was. So i asked - 'which book is more boring?' She then answered that both were. So intrigued, i asked what the other book was, and discovered it was a New Testament! I then asked her if she really thought it was boring or not? Then she said that she didn't really know, cos she hasn't really ever read the bible. Mainly cos she doesn't know where to start or even know how to read it. It was a great opportunity to spend the next 'chunk' of the lesson talking about the Bible and showing her some simple ways to read the Bible and to start in Mark and hopefully getting her a bit excited about reading it.

As i've been speaking with my teacher and some other christians over here, it seems to be that the thing that excites them about being a christian is not necessarily God or learning about him and Jesus, but the 'music/worship' side of church. The sermon, prayer and bible reading are really just boring, but things that you kind of 'have to do'.

For those of you who are praying:
- please pray for Khruu Kwan, that she might have the desire to start reading the Bible and that as she does, she will start to learn great truths about who Jesus is and start to understand who God is more
- for other christians here, that being a christian won't just be about 'music/worship'
- for me as i try to encourage them to want to know God more and be a good example to them