Leading Bible Studies...on my own

Last week not only did i have my first experience of sharing from the Bible at the school cell group, but on the Sunday afternoon, i got to lead the sunday school teachers through a study on Acts 16-19, on my own...in Thai. Well, thankfully my sister had returned and so was there as my backup translator. But i was pretty amazed that i didn't really need to fully call on her help until pretty near the end of the study :) And at the end, Pi Soong told me that she was able to understand everything that i was trying to say - so i was pretty stoked about that. Praise God!!! It seems that Denise also didn't think that i did so badly either, that she's entrusted me to take the next two weeks of studies too - just to finish off the series. Am pretty daunted by the prospect of having to it. We're going to go through Acts 21-26. Today it took me about an hour to read through 1 chapter in Thai!! Thankfully i've got the study out now, so it's just a matter of trying to get the language down as well, but if the rest of the chapters are going to take an hour to read, prep time for this study is going to easily be around the 20hr mark if not more. But it's been an awesome time getting stuck into Acts - and also trying to get the language.

Another really exciting ministry opportunity that has just popped out of the blue is to be discipling a girl called Tangmore. She's a uni student at my church who actually came up to me and asked me if i could be her 'mentor', and someone who she could read the bible and pray with, as well as be accountable to. We met up for the first time last week where we chatted to get to know each other more, shared out testimonies, and also tried to work out what we could do in our time together. We've decided to go through the Back to Basic's studies (7 basic bible studies/Just for starters). At the time, i was thinking it would be fairly easy to prepare the studies and take her through them, as we could do them in part thai, part english (she's trying to get her english up to scratch too as she wants to do an english major at uni), however, yesterday as i started to look through the study, i realised all the really hard concepts that need explaining - like justification, God's wrath etc, are things she's not going to understand in english. So, what i thought was going to be fairly straight forward prep, has turned into another major language cram session which i need to get down pat before friday lunch. At the moment, the current plan is to meet up each friday after lunch.

Anyway, lots of time is now being spent in preparation, so less time for 'play' now. But it's been awesome! Please pray for these opportunities to be sharing from the Bible and for language so that i can be teaching the bible truthfully with no miscommunications.