It’s Time to Worship!

Becca Schafer serves people with disabilities and their families in the Chiang Mai, Thailand, area. She works with Hope Home, a foster home for children with disabilities, providing daily care, love and guidance in a family setting. Here she shares a glimpse of how she integrates spiritual principles into the lives of the children she serves.

It's 2:35pm, Nong Ae* is getting in his stander and with what has become an incredibly predictable joy, he throws his left arm out and announces, "Mae Becca it's time to worship!" This is followed quickly by an adorable rendition of a couple of lines from the Thai version of “Waymaker.”

It's more of a question than an announcement as he's not yet mastered the art of asking and answering questions and he wants to know what the activity is for the afternoon. What we both know is that he's really asking: "Is it discipleship day when we start by singing worship songs together? What are we doing today?"

While we are, of course, still teaching how to ask questions and giving him the information he's seeking, I'm also telling him that we're not having worship through song time today, but we can worship God in all we do. Today we're going to worship God while we________ (read books, cook, play games, etc.).

I find this is becoming a daily reminder, a daily challenge not only to him but to me, to us all. How to practically do this is not always so straight forward. It's easy to put on worship music while doing physical therapy or during a challenging caregiving moment; it's often a lot harder to know how to worship through teaching, worship through learning, and of course especially difficult to know how to worship through disappointment or difficulty.

This month we've been exploring gratitude as one way to worship. From YouTube to health care, from snacks to each other, church, home, school, friends, yummy food for lunch, the list goes on, we've been calling out what we're grateful for each day, acknowledging its source and trying to grow our own mindsets to find thankfulness in all things big and small.

Whether that's the obvious thanksgiving for a joyous moment, the daily thanksgiving before a meal, or the more complicated one outside a doctor's room door, we're practicing together and enjoying the hope we're finding in these grateful moments.

*Named changed for privacy