Lahu Wedding Valentines Day 2004

 

Deep ruts furrowed the road to the village where we held a meeting and spent the night. The last part of the road led straight up to this literal village-on-the-top-of-a-mountain. Each of our vehicles, one at a time, made a run at the hill and bounced up through the deep ruts to the top. Yawla brought a rented generator hauled in one of the trucks. This village had no electricity.

Our hosts in the village led the team to a nice house built of teak boards rather than split bamboo. Underneath the house sat a new-looking 4-wheel drive pickup. Beside the vehicle lay a tarp covered with fresh harvested bulbs of garlic. I climbed the stairs to the covered side-porch and leaned on the rail. I gazed at mountaintops beyond the one on which this village perched. But none looked higher.

I stepped inside into a spacious front room with two multi-paned windows. I reached out to touch one of the small square windowpanes, and my hand went right through the opening. Not a single pane of glass existed in all those small squares.

I laughed. “Windows but no glass.”

Ben and Sam slept out on the porch and the rest of us slept inside. It’d been a long, arduous day and a late night. We’d ministered in seven villages and held a service in village number eight.

At seven a.m. the next morning, all of us either still slept or were barely awake. We heard sudden shouting and honking from the road below blasting through our glassless windows.

“Time to go! Time to go!”

I groaned and moaned and grumbled as I piled out of bed. The other members of the team murmured and stumbled to their feet as well. We women used the second room in the house to dress while the men rolled up the sleeping gear.

“What’s the hurry?” Mike complained as he rolled up the queen size air mattress he and Grace shared.

I charged by him and down the stairs and out to stand in line by the outhouse. I intended to go potty before we left. I disliked being pushed and hurried and I refused to co-operate. They could just wait.

More honking and urging, “Come, we go now!”

I strolled from the toilet, which I’d used, and climbed into the truck. Soon we were all aboard and on our way, about fifteen minutes from the first honk, pretty good for stubborn Americans.

The trucks stopped along the road coming down from the mountaintop to load men, women and children dressed in black clothes decorated with bands of bright colors and embroidery. Soon every truck bed had filled with people around and on our luggage.

Arriving at our destination, the drivers parked the trucks near a poinsettia as tall as a tree covered with red blooms that botanists insist on calling leaves. The first poinsettia bush I’d seen of the many growing like trees in the villages of Northern Thailand. After I crossed the street, I stopped to take a picture.

It had now dawned on my sleepy brain that this village wedding took place early in the morning, so the people had the rest of the day to work. To our American minds, weddings happened in the afternoon or in the evening. We, who failed to get the message the night before and dawdled about getting ready, had held up the wedding while they waited for our team, the guests of honor, to arrive.

The Lahu seated the team in front row seats, the usual plastic chairs, and I humbly repented to God for my selfishness. A cloth overhead shaded the seated guests from the sun. We faced the wedding ceremony locale, a white canopy over the space.

Rose pink flowers with a few white blossoms and graceful green fronds covered the canopy poles from bottom to top. The bride and groom stood at the left against a backdrop of midnight blue cloth. Large words in Thai, colored red, green and blue surrounded by gold and edged in white, were fastened to the material.

The bride and groom wore traditional black trimmed with red embroidery, the groom attired in black pants with his black long-sleeved top, the bride in a long black skirt with her top. The bride’s ebony hair, pulled back and secured by a red embroidered white band, hung unveiled to her shoulders. She carried an armload of pale pink blooms and white blossoms tied and interlaced with light green and white ribbons.

During the ceremony, chickens and puppies and a small child ran around in the dirt space between the wedding tent and my front row seat. Two puppies snarled and wrestled on the ground in front of me until a lady from the choir under the wedding canopy rushed out yelling in Lahu and chased the pups off with a stick. During the two choir numbers, at the end of each phrase I heard a rooster punctuate it with “Cock-a-doodle-do.” To my delight, the video I recorded of the wedding caught the sound on tape.

It was Saturday, February 14, Valentine’s Day, a perfect day for a unique (to me) wedding. A Christian ceremony, the pastor, dressed identical to the groom, held a microphone in his hand and exhorted the couple, his voice ringing out over the loudspeaker.

During the vows, the demure bride giggled and the groom stared down at his polished black shoes. I eavesdropped on a Lahu attempting to interpret to Mike in halting English. I learned the vows included “You are my sister,” and “You are my brother.” I liked that acknowledgment of our relationship to each other in the Lord as part of the wedding.

The ceremony ended without the groom kissing the bride, as Thailand discouraged all public displays of affection. People threw rice as the bride and groom left the canopy to go to their reception table; cooked rice. The chickens and puppies quickly cleaned it off the ground.

A Lahu gentleman directed the team to a couple of round tables in front where we had our breakfast of rice and vegetables and bits of chicken in broth. Liters of soda sat on the table, but I abstained from drinking any. I ate a chocolate flavored soy protein bar and a handful of nuts, and drank some of my bottled water, taking my packet of vitamins.

I watched the guests at the wedding approach the table where the bride and groom sat. A basket placed on the table held money that people gave to the newly married couple. Each person received a key chain with a picture of the King of Thailand on it, a gift from the bride and groom

I nudged Ed with my elbow. “Let’s go get our gift.”

Ed pulled a 100 baht note worth about $2.50 American from his fanny pack and put it in the basket. We each got our key chain, our souvenir of the wedding. After the meal, the pastor announced over the sound system that healers were there to pray for the sick, and forty people lined up. I joined in praying for a lady; then I stepped back and videoed the proceedings as recorded Thai music played over a loudspeaker.

My throat thickened with emotion as I filmed. Just like Jesus did, wherever we were we healed the sick. I felt like my heart had come home.

“Here,” Ed said, “Let me have the camcorder. You go minister for a while.”

I gladly handed Ed the camera and jogged to join Sam and ministered healing to several Lahu ladies. Three were healed of painful knees, and a woman, her headache “better” but still some pain, after Jean joined us, received complete healing. The Holy Spirit showed Jean the woman had a stressful home situation causing the headache.

After the wedding, headed for Chiang Mai, we stopped to minister at several villages. By now, even Deborah, David’s wife, laid hands on the sick along with her husband.

While riding, I thought about Jesus saying it was better for us that He should go away so the Holy Spirit could come. I never understood what He meant until now. While Jesus lived here, only one like Him walked the earth. When He sent the Holy Spirit, the Father meant to replicate many people with the Spirit in them all over the earth.

No wonder the Bible says that if Satan knew the result he never would have crucified Christ. Now Jesus lived in millions of people all over the planet with authority over Satan. That included me, little old Mrs. Ordinary normal Christian, actually out there being like Jesus, and setting captives free in a land far from home.