You can fire me, but you can’t stop His work

On top of that, there were varied and sundry spiritual and emotional distresses, leaving this girl completely emptied and broken, all before touching Thai soil. Like a certain apostle who’d been to Asia before us and knew of that particular crushing. #paul

Then came the word in Chiang Mai (“The Lord is my Shepherd”), and I followed Him all the week long into slums and to temples. Into highways and bars, loving on prostitutes and others.

Crossing 11 time zones again, we arrived home, exhausted, and I wrote it all up for the paper. I shared it with our local community and, further, with the global one how the Lord had put people in our path; a fiery urchin named Arry, a monk named Charat, and some very precious souls in that one district, the place where the lights are called “red.”

Yeah. That one.

I cannot explain what happened to my heart, walking those streets in the night. Passing those prostitutes, ladyboys reaching out. Entering their world in the bars. Words, I’m afraid, are too small. So very weak…

I cannot forget what I saw. Who I saw. And when we returned, we began to ask questions…

Five days. Five days after the column was published, I was fired. Not from The Goshen News(they’ve been just great), but from a magazine. On an ordinary day in my ordinary life, the phone rang, and this was the message: “I’ve been looking at the kind of writing you do, and I just don’t think you’re a good fit any more.”

And like that, the largest platform I’ve had to date was gone. Never mind the fan mail. Never mind all the positive feedback I get when I’m out and about. “Unfortunately, I’m afraid I won’t change my mind.”

I cannot read human minds. As I was offered no further explanation, I really cannot say what the gentleman actually meant. He did not tell me. But here’s what I do know.

I believe in the sovereignty of God. I believe that He opens doors, that He allows them to close, and I believe that I’m following in obedience.

I believe that there’s nothing that can be taken from me that God cannot replace with something vastly greater and bigger and better. That’s Who He is.

Far from discouraging me, here’s what it makes me want to do: to press in. To bear down. To ask more pointed questions. And I think I might know where it starts…

In a town close to here where girls work late at night. Where Jesus just might go and hang out. He just might.

And where He goes, Christ, my Shepherd, I can and I must and will follow.

Stay tuned! Tomorrow, I hope to write expressly about our time in the red-light district. I want you to love them like I do.

In Him and through Him and for Him,

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