Sharing the "Bread of Life"

Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life; he who comes to Me will not hunger, and he who believes in Me will never thirst." John 6:35

Having been a part of ZOE for 2 1/2 years now, we have seen the many important programs and comprehensive services that ZOE provides. We still have yet to learn all of them. One unique partnership we have is with Children's Hunger Fund (CHF) located in Southern CA. For years, they have been helping ZOE meet both the physical and spiritual needs of local villages and communities by distributing much needed food and supplies while sharing the love of Christ with them.

It's actually through CHF that our family first learned about ZOE. Our sending church, Immanuel Bible Church, has been volunteering for years at CHF to pack food boxes that CHF then distributes to communities locally and internationally. As we had been looking for a long-term missions opportunity for our family since we married in 2002, David met with CHF who introduced us to various international organizations they partner with. ZOE stood out to us right away, so we tagged along on a CHF trip to scout ZOE in October 2010, leaving Ian and Eli behind with my sister's family. We fell in love with ZOE's leadership, missionaries, staff, children, and all that ZOE was doing in Thailand. So we returned to the States, presented what we learned about ZOE to our elder board, prayed for a few months with them about the possibility of returning as long-term missionaries, and received our church's blessing and support to go. We arrived in September 2011, and the rest is history. =)

Here we are introducing ourselves at a village outreach back in 2010:

David has been enjoying managing ZOE's Food Distribution Program, as it allows him the opportunity to visit with local village pastors, check in on them to see how they're doing, pray with them, and even provide training in partnership with CHF. These opportunities also allow for networking as some of these communities are targeted for child trafficking. David travels regularly throughout the year with Thai staff members to distribute these food and supplies. These supplies are an important means for pastors to connect with those in their communities. CHF and ZOE also host conferences for partnering pastors to provide training, fellowship, support, and encouragement. Some of the traveling, training, and networking also involve empowering the pastors and communities to become self-sustaining and income-producing.

David spends time researching best practices for agricultural methods:

Visiting with families in the villages:

 Meeting with and delivering supplies to partnering pastors:

Machinery that can help produce income for some of these communities:

Churches we partner with:

As David meets these pastors and builds relationships with them, even though they have little in material resources, it's been encouraging to see how much they want to give in the abundance of what Christ has given to them. Please pray that God would provide for the needs of the pastors and their communities and sustain them so they can persevere in the midst of hardship.

Preventing & De-Escalating a Conflict...

One area of ministry at ZOE that I've really been enjoying is parent support. ZOE already has such an amazing support system for the parents through missionaries and Thai staff who work directly with the parents and children, providing trainings, encouragement, prayers, administration, and much more.

Alongside ZOE's Child Rescue team, ZOE's staff parents are really on the "front lines" with our children. ZOE's unique model of placing orphaned and rescued children in family units is one area that makes the greatest impact upon the lives and hearts of our children. It's one thing for us to train and encourage the parents through challenges, but it's another thing for the parents to walk alongside our children day and night.

I currently work with ZOE's Think Tank Team to help develop assessment forms, manuals, protocols and procedures, treatment and counseling plans for individual children, trainings for parents, and anything else related to child care and counseling.

When children are receiving group or individual counseling, mostly by a gifted fellow missionary social worker, when appropriate, we can involve the parents in the counseling process, keeping them updated on how we're supporting the children. Our hope is that the parents will continue to be equipped to counsel their own children, and we can provide support as needed.

I've been looking forward to give a training to the parents at their weekly meeting, but it's been hard to make the schedule work while managing our own household. I have so much respect for the parents. Their dedication, wisdom, and love are inspiring and telling of how our children remain healthy and happy.

In January, I had the privilege of going in to share about Preventing and De-Escalating a Conflict, drawing upon my experience of working as a teacher at juvenile hall in Santa Clara County. Due to recent poor air quality, my allergies got worse and I started to lose my voice. But thank you for your prayers, because it held up for the training.

To give the parents my perspective, I shared how I worked with children who were incarcerated for minor offenses like stealing or drugs to children who were accused of kidnapping, rape, and murder. In the San Jose area, there was a lot of gang activity, so we often had rival gang members in one class together. Each class had no more than 15 children, so at the end of each class, we had to count 15 pencils with 15 pencil leads intact. If one pencil or broken lead was missing, we had to look on the floor and couldn't excuse the class until we found it. Children would turn their leads and pencils into weapons or writing utensils. I had heard that before I arrived, classrooms had buttons on the walls to alert security of an emergency, usually a fight. But when I started, we had wristbands with buttons on them. They explained that an incident had occurred where boys hid exercise weights under their clothes and started a fight. When the teacher ran to push the alert button, the boys pulled her hair and attacked her.

What became essential for the teachers in this high-risk environment was to pick up on signs of a conflict before something serious occurred. Safety was our number one concern. We had to know when to intervene to diffuse a tension and know how to intervene so we didn't provoke a conflict and make a situation worse.

I shared how every teacher developed their own style in dealing with this ever-present stress. Some teachers believed we had to treat and talk to the children the way they're used to being talked to, yelling at them in their face, trying to scare them into submission. Other teachers tried to use humor to lighten the mood. Still others tried to befriend them, removing the tension of authority. And then some teachers who didn't want to escalate a situation and really didn't know how to deal with the conflict chose to ignore whatever they could.

At first, I didn't know how to respond to the verbal attacks of the students and the ways they'd try to embarrass me and make me uncomfortable. As I prayed for strength and wisdom each day though, I really experienced the peace of God, as I knew that their attacks had nothing to do with me and I knew that they could also take nothing away from me. My style was firm, but flexible. And I felt that my most important role was to show love and teach respect by earning their respect. The most violent girls who gave me the most attitude, pointing their fingers and shaking their heads in my face were the ones who wrote me the nicest cards when I left.

I shared tips that helped me to maintain safety and harmony in my classroom, like...

• Not taking their insults personally. I learned that their insults weren't about me, but it was about the pain, hurt, dysfunction, frustration, and anger that many of them come from. When I could show that their hurtful words and actions didn't break me, it gave me opportunities to try to respond to them with care and respect so that I could share where my peace comes from. This opened the door to gaining their respect and being able to exercise my authority.
• Or when a child refused to comply, it was always helpful to remove the conflict from the public group and speak to the child privately. Once a conflict begins in front of other children, there are so many more issues to have to deal with (i.e., pride, saving face, rival gang members in the same class, etc.) that I could remove some of those other elements just by moving the conflict to a private discussion if possible. We don't always have that luxury though...
• And if I took into consideration all the other factors that may be going on around them, it helped me to know which battles to fight and how to speak to them. They were often facing court dates, waiting to hear if they would be transferred to the CA Youth Authority for youth and young adults, awaiting their trials, returning to a dysfunctional home, unable to socialize in a health manner, etc. Sometimes just understanding that they're having a bad day or extremely stressed helped to know how to respond to their negative behaviors and avoid unnecessary conflicts.

But I also shared that the environment I worked in and the children with whom I worked were different than at ZOE. The most obvious difference is that the children in juvenile hall were offenders. But many of them came from similar environments, families, and struggles that the children at ZOE do. Many at juvenile hall, not all, didn't receive proper love and care from their parents; didn't learn how to communicate in a healthy way; didn't experience healthy relationships with peers; didn't learn how to cope with stress, trauma, and so much more. Several of them came from group homes. In fact, a few of them hadn't done anything wrong, but were placed there because there were no homes available for them. All of this, among other stressors, created a volatile environment.

But most of the children I worked with didn't have a place like ZOE to intervene in their lives. As I shared with the parents and looked into their eyes, I was more assured of the great hope for a healthy future and a life of peace and joy for our children because Jesus reached out to them through ZOE. I told them that the children at ZOE should be more angry, more violent, more depressed, more withdrawn, more lonely, but they're not. They're not free from struggles, but there is hope. There is peace. There is joy. There is love.

After the training, I ended up staying after for 45 minutes of Q&A. I was so encouraged for their desire to learn and love our children. ZOE is blessed with an amazing team who can literally love our children to health. It's a privilege to learn from them. They are heroes. Please pray for their strength, patience, health, and wisdom.

Here are the mothers being honored on Thai Mother's Day: