Today we visited Ford, the son of our Doi Saket 2 parents, Dong and Ying, at McCormick Children's Hospital. 

You might remember this little guy, who was thus named because he was born in the back of a pickup truck.

Well, he has suffered from a recurring condition since birth wherein he gets a kink in his small intestine and has to go to the hospital for treatment. As you might imagine, this is painful for him and both scary and frustrating for his parents.

He's been in the hospital for three days now and is expected to be released tomorrow. Thankfully, the doctors were once again able to treat him successfully, and he is no longer in any pain. When he is older, he may be able to have surgery to correct the problem, but for now, all we can do is deal with it each time the problem flares up.

Please join me in praying for complete and immediate healing for Ford. 

Ford with his Dad, Dong, and his mom, Ying.

Pictured left to right: Yupin, Jinda and Sukyuna

Today I had the privilege of congratulating three girls Yupin (Doi Saket 1C Children's Home), Jinda and Sukunya (Doi Saket 1B Children's Home), who were recently awarded four-year scholarships by the Thai government and ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) to study Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan after they graduate high school in 2014.

Fluent in Thai and in their native tribal languages (Yupin is from the Hmong tribe; Jinda and Sukunya are Skaw Karen), these girls are already incredibly accomplished young women compared to the vast majority of their peers, and would be almost guaranteed a good job and a bright future even without this chance to study abroad. With their completion of their course of study in Taiwan, their opportunities will be truly unlimited.

We are all proud of these hardworking young women, and we are also thankful for our staff in Thailand who have raised them and for our friends in Canada and the U.S. who have provided generous and consistent financial support for the girls since they came to Asia's Hope as young children.

Please continue to pray for Yupin, Jinda and Sukunya and all of the students graduating from Asia's Hope in Thailand, Cambodia and India. And please consider making a donation to our Scholarship Fund, which will help make university or vocational training a possibility for all of our 700 kids.

Sunday is for rest, right? Well, Tutu did take Kori, Xiu Dan and I to get Thai Massages after lunch (imagine chiropractic-meets-Brazilian-jiu-jitsu). But aside from that, it's been non-stop activity all day long.

We started the morning with church at our main campus in Doi Saket -- all of the kids and staff from our seven homes in town, as well as neighbors and a contingent from another organization's orphan homes joining their voices in worship. Pretty amazing.  

After lunch, my sons went out with Tutu's son and nephew and played video games at a local internet café while Kori, Xiu Dan and I endured/enjoyed the aforementioned massages. We then returned to Doi Saket 1 and spent the remaining sunlight hours playing cricket and soccer.  

At dusk, we said goodbye to the Doi Saket 1 kids and headed into the city for the Sunday walking market. We ate some great street food and wandered around with a multitude of others, mostly tourists, looking at but not buying the handicrafts and souvenirs.

It's 11pm now, and I'm feeling weary but blessed. It feels like we've crammed a week's worth of activities into a single day. Tomorrow we'll exhaust ourselves all over again. Maybe Tuesday we'll get some rest. Or maybe not... 

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A couple of years ago, one of our staff members had some shirts made for an Asia's Hope soccer team and misspelled ever so slightly the name. Hey, his English is a lot better than my Thai. 

At any rate, these pics are from our evening at the wonderful Doi Saket 3 and Doi Saket 4 children's homes. I'm so grateful for Grace Community Church in Fremont, Ohio, sponsors of both of these homes. Thank God for the staff and congregation under the leadership of Pastor Kevin Pinkerton. Without their help, these orphaned kids would have languished in extreme poverty, at high risk of sexual and economic exploitation.

We spent about six hours today in transit, and only about one hour of that was in the air. The flight from Bangkok to Chiang Mai is short and uneventful; it's the getting in and out of airports that takes so long.

After a long, long day, however, we're finally settling in at our house in Chiang Mai, graciously loaned to us for a couple weeks by a Thai friend of Tutu Bee, our country director.

After arriving at the Chiang Mai airport at about 4:30pm, we dropped our bags off at the house and headed to a wonderful little roadside restaurant in Doi Saket before joining the team from Goshen, Indiana for the evening at our DS1 campus. (The mediocre lunch at the Bangkok airport cost 8 times as much as our delicious dinner; truly the best meals can be found at the least impressive eateries.)

The kids and staff from 8 of our 10 Thailand homes joined together for a service of thanksgiving and dedication of the home that had burned down in December, and which was rebuilt quickly by the generosity of a number of our churches, Grace Community, Goshen Indiana, included. It was a treat to have Pastor Jim Brown and a team from the church present for the occasion.

Unfortunately, the service lasted longer than our energy, so I had Khun Cho, one of our staff, drive us home. The kids and Kori are in bed and I'm waiting for Tutu to arrive with some supplies for our week -- the house we're in came without towels and linens. 

I'm completely beat. Everyone's in relatively good spirits. Kori and Xiu Dan are fighting their strep bravely. I count all of these as blessings. Soon, I hope, I'll also be counting sheep. 

We arrived in Bangkok around 11:45pm, and after a half hour or so of scrambling around to find misplaced-but-thankfully-not-lost-luggage, we got onto the shuttle bus to our transit hotel, a non-descript little joint about five minutes from the airport. Xiu Dan turned 8 years old on the bus ride, and we sang "Happy Birthday" to her amid the tolerant, but barely amused, half-smiles of the other weary travelers.

Despite a brief argument with the hotel manager about our reservations, we got settled into our two rooms (boys in one, Kori, Xiu Dan and in the other), and attempted to sleep off a little of the 33 hour journey. I slept pretty well, aided by pharmaceuticals. Kori and Xiu Dan tossed and turned, but caught a few winks. I think the boys stayed up most of the night watching TV. Jet lag's a bit challenging. 

We woke up and showered, and I walked around the neighborhood to check out the dining options. I returned to the rooms, gathered the family and headed out to a place that I correctly assumed would have decent, standard-fare Thai food. As Anthony Bourdain has observed, some of the best food in the world is eaten outside on plastic stools.

We had fried flat noodles with pork in soy, mixed seafood curry, fried rice with pork and a fiery crispy pork and vegetable stir fry. It was all delicious. Cheap and delicious. Beats to heck a coffee shop muffin or breakfast burrito from McD's.

We're all still a little buzzy from the travel, and I feel like I've got a migraine brewing. But we're glad to be back. This just feels right. The weather is unbearably hot, no one can understand a word we say, and within a few hours, we'll be mobbed by a couple hundred sweaty Asia's Hope kids in Chiang Mai. We leave Bangkok at 3pm and we should be "home" by dinner time.

In four weeks, I'll be headed back to Asia with my family. As usual, we're scrambling to get everything finished. We'll start out in Thailand, then India, and we'll end up in Cambodia.

Each of these places holds dear family and friends and a very special place in my heart. I'm especially excited this year to return to Cambodia to see what God has done in just about a year.​

​On June 27, 2012, I stood in a large and unremarkable field just outside of Phnom Penh with members of our staff and a group of visionary men and women led by Pastor Tim Armstrong of Crossroads Church in Mansfield, Ohio, and we prayed that God would give us the land, and would give us the money needed to build five new homes, a church and a school.

In faith, we kicked of the "Strength for Today, Hope for Tomorrow" campaign.​

​The Prek Eng Campus on June 27, 2012

Less than one year later, that piece of land has been transformed, and is well on its way to becoming a beautiful, neighborhood-style campus, home to 125 orphaned children now in our care and countless more over future generations!

By August 2013, we expect to have completed the church, the school and four of the five homes. We pray that God will provide the funding for the fifth before we cut the ribbon for the campus on August 3!​

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Will you join me in this journey? Bookmark this blog. Join us on Facebook or Twitter.​ Share these links with your friends! I promise lots of great pictures and stories and exciting reports of God's faithfulness.

​And perhaps most importantly, will you prayerfully consider making a generous contribution to this campaign or to one of our other initiatives?

We still need to raise more than $100,000 to complete construction and outfit this campus. We need you to participate with us.

​​​This is going to be one of the most exciting journeys we've ever taken. Join us!

About two hours into the loud and lively service at Trinity Grace Church, it was time for me to preach the sermon. Due to the lengthy of the proceedings, I inflicted upon the congregants only a very short homily on the prophet Jonah.

A year ago, when I first visited the church, the congregation was about 20% smaller. Thanks to the addition of the kids from our Kalimpong 2 home, the already-cramped church is now packed to beyond what I would consider capacity. When Kalimpong 3 comes online, they will either have to stack the kids like firewood or find a bigger space.

After church we walked about half a mile down to a small municipal playground for a few hours of rough-and-tumble fun and a very simple picnic lunch of jam sandwiches and cookies. It’s amazing to see the kids playing together, helping each other and just soaking in the benefits of a real, loving family.

All the kids enjoyed the playground in Kalimpong

There’s a clear difference between the two homes. The kids from Kalimpong 1 are older, more confident, better adjusted and more completely individuated than those at KP2. The new kids are smaller, less-well nourished and a lot squirrelier. It’s hard to tell them apart from each other, as they all share a certain shell shock that I’ve seen many times before in Cambodia and Thailand, and that will fade over the next few months as they settle in.

Watching the newest kids – especially the “provisional” ones who will eventually call Kalimpong 3 home – you can get a bit of a sense of the struggle these children had and the poverty and hunger they experienced until very recently. When it’s time to play, they don’t really know what to do. But when it’s time to eat, they pack it away like it’s their last meal on the planet. Up to a few weeks ago, a good meal never came with a promise for more tonight, tomorrow and the next day.

The Kalimpong 2 kids know how to put away the food.

This morning we packed the kids into a bus and drove down the mountain into the valley, where we had been promised a river-side field trip and picnic. Technically, we were at a river, but the entire site was a construction zone. There were no picnic tables, but there were huge, garishly decorated trucks rumbling in empty and out with loads of rocks. There was also a lot of heavy construction equipment – excavators, bulldozers, rock crushers. Not exactly the most serene setting for picnic, but we made do. There was a large swimming pool, but it was empty. No problem, though, as many of the kids used it for Simon Says and Red-Light-Green-Light.

A beautiful, but rugged picnic site.

The staff set up a mobile kitchen and began cooking a delicious meal over campfires, and a bunch of the kids headed down to the river to swim. All of the kids below the age of five stripped down to their birthday suits and jumped right in. We all concluded quickly that this was better left un-photographed, and we left the kids to their skinny dipping.

We spent the better part of the day with the kids, which is good. Tomorrow we’re leaving for three days to visit other parts of the country and another undisclosed location, and I’m going to miss all of them terribly. I have lots of good pictures, but not lots of good internet, so the photos will have to wait.

Please pray for our safety and health as we continue to do our best to encourage the kids and staff of Asia’s Hope and our brothers and sisters in North India and beyond.