I was talking this evening with our neighbor across the street and he asked if I could thank my wife for praying for him because he felt that those prayers had helped him win the lottery. Lest that you think that we prayed for a winning lottery ticket, I'll provide a little background here. About a week ago, we sat with him for a number of hours in front of his home chatting about this and that. Sun wanted to ask him some questions for an cultural research assignment from our language school but we also talked a lot about various topics, including spiritual ones.

Our neighbor's perspective on religion is not that uncommon among Thais, namely that all religions are good and in order to be a good person, you basically need to set your mind to it and you can be a good person, which is the end goal of religion. All Thai people are familiar with the Buddhist saying, "The only thing that you can depend upon is yourself." He is not into amulets or going to the temple because he says that he counts those as sacred in his heart, so he doesn't need to buy something to hang around his neck or go to a certain place. I've had many conversations with him over the months that we've been here and I often stop and chat with him at his roadside fruit cart when I pass by on the way to the market. Whenever I talk about the Gospel, he always has

Both of us are still plugging along at the language school, making plans to finish up the current units we are working on before moving to our new ministry location in the next month or two. We still are not quite sure where that will be but hopefully will know soon.

In the meantime though, I (Karl) am working on a module where I develop interview questions on a particular topic (in this case, I picked the violence in Southern Thailand) and then go out and interview some people. I record the conversations and then transcribe them in order to learn about on-the-street conversational Thai and see

In my last entry about the heat here, I neglected to mention exactly how hot it has been in degrees. Lest anyone think we are exagerrating or just wimping out, at one point it hit a high of 113 F (45 C) but there were many days when it was somewhere around 110 F (43 C). They do it in celesius here so initially it took some backwards conversion to figure out how hot it was in numbers that we can feel the emotional weight of. Praise God that it has started to rain more this past week and with that some cooler temperatures. It is still in the 80s and 90s with lots of humidity but it sure feels better than 110.