Bringing Back the Blog

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to." – Bilbo Baggins

When I originally began this blog almost four years ago, the idea was to keep a running commentary on our preparations for going overseas. We had recently joined Pioneers and were anticipating launching into Southeast “SoFarAwAsia” pretty soon after that. That’s not how things have worked out. Over the past three-and-a-half-plus years, we’ve learned that God’s timing is not always our timing. And quite honestly, we were beginning to wonder if it was ever really going to happen.

Slowly, over the months, the blog become more of a commentary not of our preparations, but of our attempts at self-encouragement. It became a tally of the ways we were telling ourselves that it surely had to be happening soon. But as time wore on, that became more and more difficult. And so, eventually, I stopped updating it entirely.

Here we go again.

Our tickets have been purchased. Our visas have been activated. We’re now (finally!) scheduled to land in Bangkok in the early morning hours of 28 June 2015, and then to Ubon on 3 July. The first few weeks of July will be orientation to the Team, then a Team Retreat, then back to Ubon to begin language and cultural training.

It’s time to bring back the blog.

“Tongue-Thai’d” was intended to be a play on words: exploring the joys and pitfalls of learning a language and culture that are so vastly different from what we’re used to. We chose that because we were going to begin learning language prior to departure. Yeah… that didn’t happen. But it’s about to begin, so we’re keeping the title.

I’m hoping over the next few weeks to share some of the processes we have gone through recently; getting our visas (a great story of the hand of God), saying final goodbyes, condensing our belongings into just a few suitcases. And then once we land in Thailand it will become a more of a tally of lessons learned (both in and out of the classroom), and the joys and trials of following God to a vastly different side of the world.

"I think I’m quite ready for another adventure!" – Bilbo Baggins