Family Retreat

Written by Steven - Serving in Thailand

I got to experience a very neat mix of my two ministry experiences at Family Retreat! If you are familiar with Joni & Friends, you may have heard about it before, but essentially, it is a week-long camp meant to serve families with children with disabilities. My friend, Jasmine, is the person who runs it for Thailand/southeast Asia. She is the wife of Wheelchair Project’s leader, Joey, and several of our mutual coworkers or friends in the mission field in Thailand get to help serve at this event regularly. The one I attended is catered to missionaries with kids with disabilities. Oftentimes, families have to leave the mission field because they were unable to provide the right services to their disabled child while abroad, and  Family Retreat aims to meet at least one of the needs these families have to be able to stay in their overseas ministry work.

Each of the volunteers is matched with a child, and  by extension, that family. Every child gets to experience the kind of formative “summer camps” most kids and teens growing up in church in the west are familiar with. For many of these kids, they may not have had the chance to experience something like this before, even the “typical” or non-disabled siblings of a kid with a disability. I was paired with N, a Cambodian adopted child of a missionary family who has adopted five kids, all with some varying level of neurodivergency, and one with a more obviously presenting disability. N is finishing up middle school this year, and he started out not wanting to come at all, but in the end loved his time there.

Most of the volunteers are directly helping the kids, but in the end, it greatly serves the parents as well. In fact, one of the main goals is for the volunteers to take such good care of the kids the entire time, that the parents can have one week of rest and be poured into without needing to worry about or check in on their kids. They were able to attend their portion of retreat, sit in on informative sessions (think Christian conferences), and be given some relaxation and fun activities (like massages, and a theme party!).

There was so much maturity in that room. We partnered with churches and teams that came in from the States just to serve here. And even in the siblings, I could see how well these missionary families were raising their kids to take care of the kids with disabilities. Everyone was super patient, very caring and inclusive, and just full of love for these kids. I was reminded of Luke 14:12-14, which says, “When you give a dinner or a banquet…invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.” This group of people really understood this. All the volunteers came to serve (and for most of them even paid quite a lot of money to be here), and they know the kids, and sometimes even the families, cannot give anything back. But this is the kind of work that our Lord calls good and faithful, and it sends a beautiful message to the world that everyone is worthy of being loved, being taken care of, not because they did anything or that they might eventually do something, but because our Creator Father already loved us, and already loved them.

As much as this was a sweet chance to serve, I really felt blessed and poured into by it as well. My buddy N and I really bonded with a bunch of the other guys around N’s age and their volunteers. Our group became inseparable throughout the week, and we got to have lots of fun, make sweet memories, and challenge and encourage each other to step out of our comfort zones and grow. All the friends I made this week have all been telling each other we need to all come back again next year to see each other again (since we all live in different places).