For Men Only

Well, my class here in Malaysia is almost over tomorrow. I still have
yet to finish my paper on William Carey. Hopefully next week. I will be
traveling by bus tomorrow to KL with my bro, Josh Caldwell. Then flying
up to Bangkok for a meeting with the SEANET steering committee. SEANET
is a group of missionaries who are studying the best ways to share Jesus
with their Buddhist friends. After that I have doctors appointments to
figure out what in the world is wrong with my stomach.

Dr. Thomas has me on a different anti-biotic now. I hope to get a SD
card for my camera and a card reader so I can post more pics of my
travels. I may be staying in northern Bangkok with my friends next
week. Brother Artit (Sunday) and Sister Meow (Cat in Thai) and I have
been friends for the past year or two. I meet with them when I come to
Bangkok.Artit is one of the very very few Thai Christians who not only
has a vision for working outside of the traditional church planting
mindset but is actually DOING it! He has started ten house churches
already!! This is like a very rare thing in Thailand, Trust me! So
please pray that I could hang out with him and that we can learn from
each other. After that if my health is okay then I am going to go beat
the bushes for an English teaching job along the border of MY country.


I feel that it is time to distance myself from the new church
leadership that I have been coaching for the past five years. They have
sooo many human needs projects that they need and I feel like I could
really mess up what the Lord has started plus they really need to
depend on him and each other now. We have estimated that there are now
160 new House Churches since Feb 2004. They havefiiiinally translated a
more contextualize Bible into the national language and have started to
pass that around. It is a real answer to prayer. Please pray that they
will continue to develop and translate more with as much accuracy to
the original meaning but with as much cultural relevance as possible.
Last week when I was with the leaders we hammered out their method as
much as possible to refine their methods for continued leadership
training, Bible Translation, and evangelistic story sets. We drew out a
map or the worldview of Buddhist. I will post that later.

What does Jay talk about when I am not yapping about missions????
I am reading "For Men Only" right now. Have skimmed it and made copious
notes. All of the chapters don't really apply to single folks but three
or four are helpful.It is written by Shaunti and Jeff Feldhahn and is
about the "inner world" of women. Yeah, scary I know! But hey, I am
trying. It is a follow up to a book called, "For Women Only: What You
need to know about the Inner Lives of Men" It's apparently a best seller.
I have been out of touch with the US book world. When I open the book all
the words are upside down. I thought that was hilarious. The First chapter
is called "Rethinking Random; Why you need a new map of the female universe."
It is basically trying to draw a map of a woman's worldview. I wish I had
more time to read it before my friend Don takes it back to his home.
I don't have the funds for new books.


Another chapter on "her emotions" gives a good illustration about how
women's emotions are like having numerous windows open on a computer
desktop. They have all kinds of pop up windows happening all the time.
Men just tend to have one emotional window open. I would agree with
that. I can't really focus on more than one thing at a time. But the
author is really talking about how women are always dealing with past
and present emotions all the time, all at the same time--and all these
can't be easily dismissed. Guys just tend to cut through emotions and
move on to the next project. We can "move on"to the next project faster
ad emotionally easier. On the chapter on her security I was shocked to
find out that women do not place a high value on financial security as
much as they do on emotional security and emotional closeness.


If their guys aren't happy earning a living to support them then women
aren't happy. Most men thin that they are showing their support by
earning a lot of money but women just want their guys to be available
for them. Financial security is definitely on the list but it isn't
as high on the list as I thought. Women don't want guys to fix
their problems (unless technical). They just want someone to listen
to them talk out their feelings. Guys go into "fix it" mode to quickly.