Keeping You Up to Speed

Well, it's been a little while since the last post. Let's see, that was elephant roundup, eh? Well, much has been happening since then. Our cat is putting on a little more weight, that's good. I'm always afraid I'll step on him and put him in intensive care or something. We've had some opportunities come up with my 3rd year English Majors at SRU. Apparently, they are supposed to put on a Christmas program at SRU, and asked myself and Leah if we would help them with the songs. So we agreed, I will be playing the piano, and Leah helped them learn parts for five out of the nine songs we are performing. They caught on really fast, even with the parts. Most of the group are girls, but there is one guy who has braved the rigors of all this choral stuff! We are praying we can be an influence for Christ with them. The one girl in the class, May, is the one heading this up. Which makes sense, because she goes to Surin Baptist. So basically, we were able to introduce a whole class of college kids to the church every day this week, as we practiced in the evenings. Later in December, we will help them with their performance at SRU, and then go out caroling with them. (They go around to faculty houses and sing the carols, so they wanted me to accompany with the mandolin)


In other news, our music CD is almost done. Some of you may or may not have heard about this, but we have put together a collection of recordings from the ladies here at Surin Baptist. It's a bit different. Most of them are songs from America, translated into Thai. They are some of the favorite songs of the people here. There are a couple that are purely Thai hymns or spiritual songs. However, as I was in charge of instrumentation, it is mostly Appalachian style. Well, there is one song we do with the Thai instruments, but the others are all guitar, banjo, mandolin, you get the drift. So... what do you call this new style of music? Hence, we created a term "Thaippalachia". I will post the cover we designed here. The title is "Living for Christ", which is one of the Thai songs they sing. It's a beautiful song about the new life found in Jesus Christ. Something that almost has new meaning, living in a culture that is so much Buddhist. To find a Christian usually means they have put up with some level of being ostracized, or experiencing some kind of setback for following Christ. I don't know whether we can actually sell this thing, what with copyrights and such, but we are looking into how we can get it out. Either way, it's been a lot of what we've been doing recently, and I think what we have in the end now is well worth the time and energy!

Pray for us as we are traveling back to the States for a week. My Grandfather, Colonel Brown (affectionately known as Pop-pop by the grandsons), passed away a couple months ago, and as he is being buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors and so on, the funeral itself was scheduled to take place much later. Hence, we travel now. But God has worked this out perfectly, so we are excited about the opportunity to say hello to everybody again. I will probably write again after that, I know it will be a very thought provoking ceremony. So pray as we travel. We have an 8 hour train ride to Bangkok. Then waiting for 10 hours until our plane leaves, then flying for about 20 hours until we arrive in DC. Ugh. Not the most fun in the world, but it's better than swimming!

Till next time!

Andrew