Friday, August 13, 2010
9:10 am
Yesterday was Mother's Day in Thailand. It's a little different here, because it's actually the queen's birthday. However, for the most part, it's celebrated the same as in America. Everyone had yesterday and today off. However, we were going to go to a couple church plants and help the local communities. We wouldn't be leaving until the afternoon. I came to the office to wish my mom a happy mother's day on skype and check up on Facebook. When I returned to Pastor Doug's house, I saw him come down the stairs saying we needed to get a ladder. Apparently, Hannah had locked herself out of her room and couldn't find the keys. So, she and Josh tried to practice their lock-picking skills. They tried inserting a variety of different objects into the keyhole, the last of which was the end of a small wooden paintbrush, which had broken inside the doorknob. When Pastor Doug had gotten home, he had the key, but it was no use because there was a bunch of wooden splinters now blocking the keyhole. He tried to get them out, but he just couldn't get enough out to get the key through. To make matters worse, there was a cat trapped in Hannah's room.
The only other option was to go in through the window. The room is on the second floor, so we would need to get a ladder and climb onto the roof of the first floor. We borrowed a homemade bamboo ladder from a neighbor and Pastor Doug went up to try and get in through the window. First, though, he would need to remove the iron bars from the outside. He worked on it for at least an hour, until realizing that we would have to go visit the first church plant before he could make any further progress. We left, but by the time we arrived, they were just wrapping up. We hung around for the last few moments before they started packing things up, then returned to fix the window.
This time, I got up and tried to help. The biggest problem was that the iron bars were framed in a square shape that fit the entire piece into the window frame. The piece was also screwed in and the screws had been painted over. We had to break the seal of the paint, then work with the flathead screws, some of which didn't have much of a groove left in them, because they had probably been installed some twenty years ago. I'm not sure how long we worked on it, but we were now running late for our next appointment. Slowly but surely, every screw was removed and we began working at ripping out the entire piece. It was in there pretty good, even without the screws. We finally got the top right corner free! It would only be a matter of time. As we yanked on the piece and it was just about to give, we heard someone fiddling with the doorknob from inside. Suddenly, there was a click and we could hear the door swing open. Dawn came up to the window to greet us as we quickly pounded the metal back into the frame. "I tried the key. It didn't go all the way through, but it was enough to get in."
"Good!" said Pastor Doug begrudgingly, "We were just ready to pull the bars out."
At the end of the day-long project all we could do was laugh. "If I wasn't laughing, I would be crazy right now," said Pastor Doug. I had to admire his attitude, even though we finally got in, we were very late to the next church plant and again just caught the end of their community project. It was a big deal, because it involved the local non-Christian community leaders, who we don't want to upset. I know that there must have been some reason we had been kept from arriving on time. God was with us even though we weren't making progress on the window quickly. I know, because while I was trying to pry out a screw, I misplaced a strike with my hammer that landed directly on a piece of less than quarter-inch-thick glass, which miraculously didn't break. I also think the ability to laugh immediately at a frustrating situation, which had kept us from making appointments the entire day, was a gift of presence of the Holy Spirit.
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