Growing Pains

Without oxen a stable stays clean,
    but you need a strong ox for a large harvest.

Rusty got a call one Sunday morning from a lady who was a friend of one of the new teachers at one of the schools where he teaches. She was interested in Rusty teaching her daughter on Sunday afternoons. He told her that he didn't think we could add anything else to our week since we had just agreed to teach on Saturdays at the coffee shop where we like to go when we have an hour off from teaching. We needed Sunday afternoons so we could continue our Bible studies in the afternoons and have the evenings free to prepare for another work week.

Then I got involved. I brought up that we could move our Bible studies to Saturday mornings since the class at the coffee shop hadn't started yet, and we could still have Sunday evenings for preparing for the rest of the week. We decided to go and meet with the mom after church that day.

By the time we found the house, Aon's mom had rounded up two of her friends and their children for this meeting. Apparently it was only Aon who couldn't study any other day than Sunday, but the other kids agreed to start during our normal nightly class. Aon ended up studying some when her other special studies were canceled so we still haven't taught on a Sunday afternoon.

From that one meeting we've added about eight new students to our nightly class plus the coffee shop lady's son ended up coming to study at our house rather than on Saturdays. It all worked out! We kept the class going during the semester fall break because we thought we were going to do a fall camp in Issan, but that ended up getting canceled. Some of our regular students stopped studying during the break, but if everybody showed up we would have about twenty students. That has created a new kind of problem!

We really could split the group up into three levels. If my two older students can't study at a later hour, we'll be able to split up into two groups only, but even two groups will be better than one big group. We've been praying specifically for more boys to study, but adding so many boys who are brothers (we have four sets of brothers) has made it difficult when they all show up on the same night. In addition to adding the boys, have you noticed how many parents stay for the class as well? We had quite a bit of excitement from the men about the Bingo game, parents taking pictures of our flowers, parents walking barefoot through our grass, and most importantly parents participating with their children in our class.

You might be wondering why I chose the verse from Proverbs. It has become the joke between Rusty and me about our downstairs bathroom. We have so much traffic in and out of that particular room that Pawn has to clean it just about every day. If we didn't have so many students, it would stay clean since none of use that particular one. So we're thankful for the bathroom and for Pawn having to clean it because we know it means our house is a happening place with a lot of traffic.