We have been involved in missions work in Southeast Asia since 2016 when we embarked on our first mission trip to a small village near Chiang Kham, about 60 miles south of the nearest large city of Chiang Rai. Read more about our journey below using the navigation menu above, and check out our Frequently Asked Questions page if you have additional questions. Click here to learn how you can financially support our mission.
Background:
In 2013, Dr. Al Henson of Compassionate Hope Foundation (CHF) visited Cypress Point Church where we are members to speak about the plight of orphans and the persecuted church in Southeast Asia. His words stirred our hearts and we knew immediately that we wanted to become involved, so we continued attending private gatherings with Al and his wife Susan as the opportunities came up afterwards to continue hearing the stories and wait for our opportunity to serve.
In 2014 our church’s lead pastor accompanied a small team to Southeast Asia along with Dr. Henson to go and see the reality of the situation firsthand. A year later another larger team traveled to northern Thailand to visit children living in homes overseen and funded by Compassionate Hope Foundation but operated by Thai nationals.
We soon after joined the church’s third trip in April 2016 as they traveled to CHF’s Village Of Hope (VOH) in the small village of Phu Sang. The VOH was envisioned as a template for a self-reliant compound for CHF’s rescued children, including dorms, a cafeteria and church building, and a complete K-12 Christian private school. At that time ground had only recently been broken and just the dorms had been completed, but the first wing of school was about to open and government officials even visited during our program to inspect the school ahead of its grand opening.
That trip was transformational for us, not only as our first missionary experience but also our introduction to the rescued kids who immediately captured our hearts. The children living at the VOH and others from nearby CHF homes joined us in our week-long summer camp, during which we led them in music, games, and crafts, taught Bible lessons, and on our the last night threw a big party with ice cream and other special treats. We returned home from that trip as convinced as ever that we needed to continue to be involved in missions work.
The following October 2017 our church sent its fourth team to conduct a new program, not with the children but with adult Christians from surrounding areas. Around 20 missionaries worked with over 50 pastors and wives whose travel, food, documentation and lodging were funded by our church. Our group was subdivided into smaller teams that each worked to instruct the pastors in their designated subjects like construction, agriculture, and medicine. The VOH was again our base of operations so we were returning to a sense a familiarity and comfort, and the sense that we were at home while abroad.
A Year Abroad:
Returning home from that trip weeks before Thanksgiving 2017, we began earnestly praying whether we should interrupt our lives and go serve for a longer stay. In January we announced our decision to our friends, family, employers, and church that we were committing to moving to Thailand for a year. Cypress Point was sending its fifth team back to in October 2018 and we planned our move for the week prior so we could be part of that mission as well.
We spent 2018 fundraising while researching all of the requirements we needed to fulfill. We worked with the office for CHF Thailand to receive our charity worker documentation and used it to apply for our 90-day non-immigrant volunteer visas from the Thai consulate in Washington, D.C. We booked one-way tickets to Chiang Rai, arranged to be picked up at the airport there by the pastor and wife that run the VOH, sold or donated most of our possessions, put the rest in shared storage, and re-homed our four pets before stepping on a plane early one morning and setting off for the unknown.
We arrived at the VOH on a Friday the weekend before school started, the school now having already expanded to include grades K-8 as construction projects completed and as the kids living onsite continued to grow up. We were given desks in the English teacher’s lounge and started getting to know the other missionaries onsite. Two were college-aged Americans that had been there for about three months with three more to go, the others were Filipino Bible school students and a Filipino pastor couple that were our age and who’d we met on our first trip in 2016. Part of everyone’s missionary job was to teach English in the school since we were all native or fluent speakers, Christian taught 4th and 5th grade while Georgia taught 1st grade.
We lived in a guest house on the bottom floor of one of the girls’ homes and were given the option to remain there to become houseparents of several young girls who were struggling with not having their parents around, or move to the boys homes and assist there instead. We chose the former and adopted seven girls from ages 5-9 who moved into our spare room. We moved in mattresses and closets for them, and were suddenly parents!
We were responsible for most everything a normal parent would be. Each day we woke the girls up pre-dawn so they could get showered and dressed for school, walked them to the canteen building for devotion and breakfast, gathered them as school ended in the afternoon before they scattered around the sprawling campus, ensured they made it back to the canteen in time for dinner, and then finally got home in time to brush their teeth and play a bit before we tucked them into bed and prayed with them before lights out.
That year was our “missionary internship” when we did most anything that had been asked. We wrote and led morning devotionals with all kids before school every day; we drove staff, kids and students to markets, hospitals, their homes, or wherever; we fostered kittens and baby birds brought to our door by kids or staff; we taught English, art and computers in the school from 1st graders up to high schoolers; we served food to the kids and teachers at every meal; we led worship in church on Sundays together, Georgia singing and Christian playing guitar; and we built close relationships with the kids, both younger and older, many of them we’d now watched grow over the prior three years.
Cypress Point came for its sixth trip as we were wrapping up our year in October 2019, and to see familiar faces from home after all that time was a great comfort. As we journeyed back home we prayed for direction on how next to proceed. We’d told the kids we would see them no later than a year from when we left, knowing our church would be returning for its seventh trip then and that even if we hadn’t decided to move back by then we would at least return as part of that team. Then the pandemic came.
The Pandemic:
We returned to Tampa in late October 2019 after first staying for a few nights in Tokyo and then a week in Indiana. We found an apartment and signed a one-year lease within days of getting back, reunited with all of our pets, and prepared to settle in and recover for at least the next year. Our apartment was small and lacked a lot of amenities but was still nicer than our guest house at the VOH, and so we were content for a bit.
Within a few months the news began talking about a new viral outbreak that was causing alarms, and by March 2020 the world was beginning to shut down due to COVID-19. Plans we had been finalizing for a return trip back to Thailand in April or October were dropped, and for the first time since 2013 our church was not traveling there at all. With no signs of the lockdown ending anytime soon we renewed our lease in October 2020.
A few weeks later on the day before Thanksgiving, barely a year since we’d returned home, Georgia’s brother Kevin passed away which completely devastated us. Soon after that, one our dogs began a slow decline in health and Georgia’s foot which became injured in Thailand became too painful to ignore. By the summer of 2021 our dog Atlas passed and Georgia was forced to leave her job while healing from foot surgery and beginning her recovery process.
We were exhausted emotionally, mentally and physically, but not ever spiritually. We continued to keep up with the daily events in Thailand and the VOH through Facebook, and attended several online meetings with CHF’s “Go TEAM” of young potential missionaries as veteran missionaries that could be a source of information and guidance. We were also connected with a new CHF missionary from our area and met with her a few times before she set off on her own missionary journey. We continued to meet with the Henson’s when they were visiting our area and continued to faithfully wait for our next chance to serve.
Our Return:
By the start of 2022 the pandemic lockdown was nearing an end and our church was eager to return after being kept away for so long. Plans developed for the church’s seventh mission trip back to the VOH and there was nothing that was going to stop us from going!
Our girls who were 5-9 when we first took them in were now 9-13, and the last they had seen or heard from us we told them we would be coming back no later than late 2020. We weren’t sure how they had coped with our absence, if they understood why we hadn;t been able to visit, or if they were upset with us for breaking our promise. We finally returned to Thailand in October 2022 as part of the larger church team, but also with our own specific mission to reconnect with all the kids we missed so much. For our seven girls we purchased identical gold locket necklaces with pictures of ourselves and our dog Indy (who we told them about all the time), and a group picture we all took together in 2019 on our last day living under the same roof.
Returning after so long was strange and surreal, familiar but different, starting with how much all the kids had grown up. They were all the same kids we’d gotten to know so well and yet they had changed as growing kids do after years pass. We worked diligently all week to find moments with as many of the kids as possible where we could reconnect and bond. We relived fond memories of our times together and looked back through pictures and video from throughout our six years of coming to them. Towards the end of the week we gathered our seven girls together and gifted them the necklaces and took an updated picture of us all together, in the same style and pose as the one from our last day together in 2019 inside the lockets.
Coming back home afterwards we felt such overwhelming relief that it had gone well. The kids were older but they had not forgotten us, and they weren’t upset with us either. Our years spent in suspense and desperation had finally been resolved, and we promised them again (barring another global lockdown!) that we would return for a visit soon.
The Present:
All of that leads us to the present. The pandemic is over, and we have spent the last 4 years mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually preparing for the next phase of our missionary journey. We have joined Compassionate Hope Foundation in an official capacity and will be closely partnering with them as we transition back into life abroad.
We appreciate that if we are to be effective at living in and shining light on Thailand then we must become able to speak the language fluently. We have a head start on this given our prior time spent there, but will soon be moving to Chiang Rai to be students at a Thai language school which will also allow us to stay for six months on student visas. We’ll be spending our day in class and the rest of our time visiting children at various Homes Of Hope and enjoying Thailand.
We are fundraising for our schooling costs and monthly donations that we could draw on during an extended period in-country. While we are on staff with two organizations we do not earn a normal salary, instead we rely 100% on donor support for our everyday needs. Aside from specific costs for things like school tuition and airfare, there are other necessities like groceries, rent, and benevolence. To learn more about how to give, click this link to visit our Donation page.
Please pray for us as we continue this missionary journey and work towards our return to Thailand. To read up-to-date specifics on our needs and other info, click this link to visit our mission FAQ page.