We fly out to Singapore for a month of training this coming Tuesday 10/31 (LAX, 11:25am Cathay Pacific) and then on to Thailand on Dec 4th. We are busy finishing up last minute details - packing, selling the car, buying last minute items, turning in apartment keys, meeting with family and friends one last time, and so forth. Look like we can pick up our visas at Thai embassy in Sinapore. Praise God! We are finally here and it is time to go.

My ordination service is set for this coming Sunday evening. My parents are able to make it out for the weekend so it will be good to see them again before we head off to Thailand for about four years. Praise God that our financial support has come together sufficiently for us to leave at the end of this month. We gave notice to our landlord and are looking for plane tickets now. In the few weeks that we have left we are trying to not get everything packed up but also see as many people as we can before we leave. My brother recently came out to visit and we all headed out to Joshua Tree National Park for a few days. Here is one of the many pics that we took. I have posted more on Joshua's blog (yes, we have a blog for our baby, and no, he does not write his own entries)

It looks as if the coup in Thailand is going to be a bloodless overthrow of an unpopular prime minister. I went to pick up some Thai food tonight from our favorite little Thai place down the street and asked the folks there what they thought about all that's going on in Bangkok. There consensus was that it is good for Prime Minister Taksin to be out of power. I don't know enough of Thai politics to give a definitive opinion about whether this is a good thing for the nation or not but I do know that despite his repeated electoral victories, he was quickly becoming a heavy handed, and thus unpopular figure in the country. As a related side note, when I was in Thailand in July 2004, I was told that Taksin's unofficial policy to deal with the illegal drug problem was this: Hire off duty policemen to covertly assasinate drug dealers.

In any case, Sun and I are hoping and praying that things will settle down in Thailand and return to relative normalcy (and democracy as well), and that God will use this coup to speak to Thai hearts about the lack of peace and security in this world, and drive them to seek the peace that only Christ can give. And since there

Today I went before the South Coast Presbytery (PCA) for my ordination exam and passed. Last week, I had a challenging three hour pre-exam with the Candidates & Credentials committee and therefore I was somewhat nervous going into the meeting today. But praise God that all went well. The ordination ceremony should occur within the next few weeks or so.

When I was first in Thailand during the early 2000s, I encountered numerous foreign guys looking for Thai wives or Thai women dreaming of finding foreign husbands. Granted that some of these Thai/foreign couples have wonderful and happy marriages, it was my observation that the majority of these marriage fell far short of what a marriage could and should be. First of all, the foreign guy usally speaks little to no Thai and the Thai women has little to no English. How can you know that you want to marry someone if you can hardly talk with them on a deep level? The answer is that you have low expectations for what you want out of marriage. As you can see from the article below (from "The Nation", one of Bangkok's English language newspapers), many Thai women see foreign husbands as an opportunity for financial security, greater social status. And the foreign guys are often seeking out a beautiful submissive Asian woman to cook, clean, and take care of their other "physical needs" (if you know what I mean).

On the plus side, foreign guys have a greater reputation for marital fidelity and not abusing their wives to their wives than do Thai men. This is a generalization, I know. I have known many Thai men who by all outward appearances love their wives very much, been faithful, and treatly them wonderfully. However, many Thai women have had the exact opposite experience and seek out foreign husbands in hopes of avoiding the abuse and heartache of their previous relationship(s).