Ever have that feeling that life is moving so fast, all you can do is fight for a breath of air and try not to drown in the sea of activity?  We have been busy these past few weeks!  We completed our first Echo Asia Agricultural / Community Development conference.  200 attendees from 24 different nations gathered together to share information and ideas for small scale agricultural development.  It was inspiring, and the greatest resource we took from the conference were the contacts we made with so many like-minded people.  It is the question (and vision) I personally am especially interested in.  How can we work with nature (the provision God has already made) to shepherd and steward---cultivating land, raising animals, discipling people, and helping those in need?  Our own mini farm here at Faithful Heart is growing!  We now are host to almost 700 tilapia, our first small batch of chickens is almost ready to eat and just yesterday I picked up another 100 baby chicks (Thank You Mill City Church in Fort Collins, for sponsoring the new chicken tractor and chicks!).  Some new friends from the Philippines came for a visit and taught us to make cheese from raw milk we got from a nearby dairy.  Audrey makes some good cheese!  The challenge remains to see if we can convert it into cheesecake (my idea).  We will let you know how it goes. 

Before I could chew on all the information from the conference, I had a visit from some wonderful folks from the US who had come to visit our Foundation and help build a new kitchen for one of our homes.  We had a great group and if I may say so, we did some good work!  This was my first concrete job (sorry pics coming soon!).  Our house father Ajan Yay led the concrete crew and did a great job.  If you have never laid a large slab by bucket (one in each hand), you don’t know what you are missing!  I really miss the satisfaction that comes from a group of people working and sweating together to get a job done.  It is a powerful sense of camaraderie and accomplishment.  A special thanks to Jean and Cassandra (and those who gave money for the project!).  If everyone in Texas is as kind and helpful as you guys, it must be a great place!      

Life continued to take us for a ride and the next stop was at the a dorm way up in the mountains.  It was a beautiful area and the children were wonderful.  We are proud to support the work of this local pastor and his wife.  For all our Colorado friends, this brought back some homesickness.  The mountains were beautiful and the air clear. 

We continue to meet with our college students every Tuesday night for time to look at the Bible together, learn English, and just hang out.  Their English is getting better all the time (hopefully the same is true for our Thai).  We have a new contest where each of our orphan homes submits photos at the end of the month and we vote on the best picture.  The cowgirls helping in the rice fields won for October and it was too good not to share.

Thank you!  We know many of you are building and loving and serving right along with us, in many different places, in many different ways.  Great things are not done by great individuals, but by many faithful people working together.  It is an honor to serve with you! 

Blessings in Hope,

Matt & Audrey

A group of men who encourage me every week!

The title is from Mother Teresa, who insisted that it was not the size of our action that counted, but the love which we put into it.  What happens after any major life change or event?  The letdown.  The return to humdrum, normal life.  You get a big promotion at work, then a a few weeks later realize it is still work.  You have a baby and rejoice in this precious new life, only to discover it has an incredible capacity to cry and poop.  You get married and then discover that marriage is more than passionate romance and Instagram worthy moments—you argue and nag, forgive and laugh.  It is the same with us here in Thailand.  ‘Wow, we left our country and culture and moved across the world!’  Everything is new and exciting!  But then the routine starts settling in.  We have good days and bad days, exciting moments and a whole lot more rather dull, ordinary moments---sound familiar?  We see beautiful things and we see ugly things.  As a recovering adrenaline junkie, I am often challenged when life doesn’t always present me with grand adventures.  But adrenaline is not the essence of life; love is.  I still enjoy a little adrenaline in my life and thank God for it (as I do every good gift He has given us to enjoy).  But it is the joy of loving and being loved that is slowly challenging me to rethink how I live each day.  Love is an incredibly risky thing.  One of my favorite authors, Henri Nouwen, has some powerful words about the risk of love:

“Every time we make the decision to love someone, we open ourselves to great suffering, because those we most love cause us not only great joy but also great pain. The greatest pain comes from leaving. When the child leaves home, when the husband or wife leaves for a long period of time or for good, when the beloved friend departs to another country or dies … the pain of the leaving can tear us apart. Still, if we want to avoid the suffering of leaving, we will never experience the joy of loving. And love is stronger than fear, life stronger than death, hope stronger than despair. We have to trust that the risk of loving is always worth taking.”

Thank goodness it’s not ‘hot’ season

My boss, mentor, and friend, Dave Callahan, reminded us this morning that the challenge before us is not to come up with, or produce great things---but to be faithful in many small things, especially in loving the people God has brought to our attention (I won’t say in front of us, lest we think love limited by geography, culture, or ethnicity).  And also in doing our daily work well, whatever it is.  It may not make for a very exciting movie, but it makes for a rich life.  I am always falling into two opposite errors, then struggling to come back to where I ought to be:

Either I am longing for something ‘great’ and miss the greatness of a smile to a neighbor, a note to a friend, giving money to help refugees, or just a conversation with some lonely person.  Greatness all around me and I can’t see it because I am only thinking in terms of size, not love. 

Or I am burying my head in the sand like an ostrich, so focused on my own little world, my own little family, my own little work or church, that I never take the time to look at my larger world, my more distant brothers and sisters and ask the Father of us all: ‘Am I where you want me to be?  If not, how can I change my course and direction now to get there?’ 

The challenge before all of us right now, right where we are, is to take the risk of love.  It might mean a dramatic reorganizing, reprioritizing, change of your present life.  Maybe you have settled when you shouldn’t have and you haven’t opened your heart to giving your life to others.  Or it might mean finding the sacred moments in your present life.  Maybe you are running ahead when you ought to be looking around.  If you are like me, it is probably some of both.  God afflicts the comfortable (are you feeling comfortable these days?) and God comforts the afflicted (is life wearing you out these days?). 

Christianity isn’t about giving up things, it is about giving up in order to gain.  Paul said that “all things are ours”---after all God is our Father. It is the reordering of our world, not the denying of it.  That is the secret of God’s way; give your life away and you will gain it.  Give and it will be given to you.  Forgive and you will be forgiven.  And the frightening opposite: gain everything but lose your self, hoard your money and lose it all, don’t forgive and you won’t be forgiven. 

From our Thai Workbook:  See Elephant Poo, Poo like Elephant

Audrey and I feel thankful these days.  We get to work for an organization we love and believe in, we are adapting little by little to Thai culture and language, we are mostly healthy, and though our days are often filled with small things, we are trying to invest more love in them even as we continue to look ahead for what God has down the road.

Thank you for taking the risk to love us!  Where is love leading you now? 

Audrey on the hog, she is a great driver! 

It is very easy (and very common) to see what we would like to “fix” or change in others.  It is much harder to see what ought to change in ourselves.  It is harder still to do the actual hard work of changing.  When it comes to entering a new culture, I have been on both sides of the fence.  I remember thinking that my own country was obviously the best.  We are highly developed, prosperous, and hold to high ethical standards.  I experienced the very common sense of nationalism---being proud of one’s home country, people, and culture.  But I have also had the opposite feeling.  There are times we are frustrated to learn that our home country is not the ‘saint’ we thought it was; it does not always work for justice so much as for financial advantage.  We can be selfish, indifferent, arrogant, and oblivious of our impact.  As a woman from East Africa once commented; “working with Americans is like a mouse dancing with an elephant; sometimes you get squished.” America is not the devil, nor are we angels.  We are a nation of people, of individuals, and as the individual, so the sum of them. 

I believe the first and most important priority for anyone who desires to address the evils in the world, is to address the evils in yourself.  Easy for me to say, so hard for me to do!  Isn’t it odd how easy it is to feel patriotic and believe in our own inherent goodness?  And isn’t it odd how easy it is to sit on the sideline and criticize the state of your nation while taking no responsibility for it yourself?  There is a story in the Bible where God comes to a man who has just murdered his own brother and says to him:

“Where is your brother?”

The man replies: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”  (in other words, I am not responsible for him.)

He thinks the answer is “no,” but he is terribly wrong.  Not only because he murdered his own brother, but because he assumed he wasn’t responsible for his fellow man.  It is good and right that we should desire to change people.  We just need to have the desire for ourselves as well as our neighbor.  Otherwise, we will only bring people up (or down!) to our own level.  But if we can swallow the big pill of pride and approach different people and different cultures, not as something to be “fixed” so they become like “us,” nor as an angel or a demon, but simply as an opportunity for us to grow and become better, as well as an opportunity to help another, then we may just accomplish some real good in our world.  This is what I think it means to take responsibility for our fellow man. 

Most of us are probably used to a vertical relationship in our charity, where we, as the great benefactor and helper, reach down to those “below” us to help them (money often gives that illusion).  And there is truth in that idea, but also pride.  The truth we need to keep, for everyone one of us has something to offer to each other in the way of help (and we need to believe that or we won’t even bother to try to help anyone).  But we need to get rid of the pride so we can strive and grow together towards something better than either of us: to love, to justice, to peace, and goodness---in a word: to God. 

What sparked my thinking about all this was two cultural exchanges that happened just the other day here in Thailand. 

First, Audrey and I were buying lunch at a local food court.  Our Thai is getting better, but it is still clunky.  A Thai woman who was also ordering, offered to help order my food for me.  She wouldn’t really take no for an answer and before I knew it I was thanking her and taking my food.  I turned to thank the man behind the counter who had prepared the food and served me.  The woman caught me as I turned and said:

“You don’t need to thank these people, they are from Burma”

Without thinking I responded: “But they are still people.”

She was not a bad person.  She offered to help me, after all.  I really do love the Thai people.  They have their faults just as I do, though they may be different from mine, but they are in my experience so far, a kind, diligent, and helpful people.  Here was an opportunity for me to help, to question a cultural prejudice and point to something better.  To help people see all people as what they truly are: brothers and sisters---part of one human family—God’s family, is part of the change we seek. 

The second experience was with our small group with the college students here.  One of the girls was excited and nervous.  This was the first time she had shared her life story and the story of how she came to know God with a group. She has know hardship and loss that I can only imagine.  She lost both of her parents when she was very young and has lived where there was room, with very little to call her own, virtually her whole life.  It is a miracle that she found her way to a small dorm in a rural city about two hours from Chiang Mai where she was able to attend school.  It is another miracle that that dorm is connected to Faithful Heart (the one we recently repainted and provided new bedding for) which allowed her an opportunity to now attend college.  Here was an opportunity for me, not to help change others, but to be changed myself.  This young woman’s faith had something to teach me.  I think in America we have a lot of people with very informed faith (lots of information and details) but not very strong faith (trust unaffected by change).  And I am no different.  It is easier to trust God because He has provided, than to trust that He will provide.  I am humbled to see someone with so little, trusting so much.

What is the change we seek?  As another man once said: “To become the change we wish to see in the world.”  A far more costly and far more effective way of teaching is to demonstrate, rather than to merely articulate.  We are teachers and students, helpers and those in need of help. 

If you are missing Audrey’s thoughts here, she has been working on the online presence of Faithful Heart Foundation (check it out here: http://faithfulheartministry.com/ and on Facebook and Instagram), so her creative juices are needed elsewhere for the time being.  She is also starting a project to bring Thai purses and bags to shops in Fort Collins, Colorado to help support our orphan work here (pretty cool!---Coming soon to Walnut Creek and Vines Vintage in FC)! 

Thank you for remembering us.  It means so much to get a message on Facebook or an email or a Skype message (Skyler, Chris!). You know you’ll always have a place to stay in Asia. If you’re coming our way, our door is always open! 

Thank you for praying for us and with us! 

In hope,

Matt & Audrey Pound