Thailand on Tuesday

Good evening.
Look, two days in a row! Okay, sorry over it.

Tuesday's here at APSAI mean early mornings, and lectures. We have a Prayer/ Worship Chapel at 8 am; then Alan asked us to sit in with the APSAI students for his lecture with him at 9. That went until 10:30; it was kind of a brief recap for the three of us, which was nice, since we're wrapping up this section of lecture. School here isn't anything like school in the States. Here's a brief rundown. The three of us Northwest girls are taking 17 credits, all through Alan, which will then be recorded by NU. We are taking three credits of each: Missiology, SE Asian History and Context, Buddhism, and Practicum credits. Our Thai class counts for 5 credits. So we are taking Thai for the length of the semester; ending about the middle of November. We have done about 7 weeks of Missiology tutorials, where we meet once a week for four hours. For each subject, we have to read 800 pages of relevant texts; books and journal articles on the subject. We also write about a paper a week, while editing the paper from the week before. On October 6th, we are going to Cambodia to renew our Visa's and while we're there, we are going to have our first SE Asian History lesson. Our Practicum credit comes from a journal that we're supposed to be keeping, as well as keeping track of our finances, and ministry that we do. It's not so much assignment driven as action driven. The Buddhism class will be a 3 day Seminar with everybody, which should be interesting. Long days, but it will be nice to learn more about it.

So in trying to find text for my 800 pages, I ended up reading a book called Unveiling Islam by Ergun Mehmet, and Emir Fethi Caner, two brothers who were raised in a Sunni Muslim home. It was written right after September 11th, 2001, so it is very focused on explaining jihad and the main beliefs surrounding that. But it was a really good, informative book, which I would gladly suggest to anybody. I also plan on bringing a copy home, if anyone wants to borrow it. Anyway, this stirred up tons of questions in my brain, so I've been trying to find stuff on it. No, I'm not converting to Islam. But one of the main points that the author makes is that you can't reach out and effectively minister to people who you don't have some understanding. Islam teaches its followers that Christians are evil, wrong, and must be killed. There is no grace. So as a Christian, how should we interact with Muslim's? How can we build strong relationships with people who are disobeying Allah by interacting on a friendly level with us? I'm not saying that we should be scared of Muslims. But we need to learn their traditions, and how to respect them, so that we can minister effectively, and not be totally rude.

Anyway. This is what has been rolling through my head for the past couple of days, among other things. I've been trying to find an English Qu'ran, and Hadith but haven't had much luck in Thailand, go figure :)

Oh yeah, I was telling you what we did today. After lunch, we sat in Alan's office for a few hours, and went over finances that finally came in, thank you Jesus! It was getting tight there! So we figured that out, and got a little bit of money so we can eat this week, and then headed to the Bamboo Coffee shop to study for a while. I think we are going to watch the 3rd Lord of the Rings tonight (we're all a bunch of geeks :) ), think this will be okay, got lots of reading in today.

Anywho. Good night!