The Power of a Tiny Seed

Some Thai Bible school students and I traveled to northeastern Thailand to do some outreach. We were handing out Christian literature to shoppers and shop owners in the market area of a city. We went into a beauty shop where the owner had a customer. Not wanting to bother them, we just laid the material on a counter and said, “God bless you.”

When we stepped out of the shop to continue down the street, the owner literally ran after us saying, “I’ve been waiting for someone to talk to about this since I was eight years old!”

When she was eight, someone had come through her town handing out portions from the Bible. When they handed a booklet to her father, he immediately threw it away saying, “We are Thai, we are Buddhists.” But for some reason this eight-year-old felt the book must be important and picked it out of the trash. She kept it and read it over the years. Incredibly, she still had the book! She pulled it out of her display case in the shop and showed it to us. It was the book of Ecclesiastes.

The beauty shop owner told us she has believed in God since that time but kept asking Him to send her someone who could explain Him to her more fully. Then, nearly 20 years later, we showed up and had the great privilege of leading her to begin a path of personally knowing and following this God she had been reading about for so long.

- from a cross-cultural worker in Thailand