Today, Saturday, Sunday and our time in Pattaya comes to and end. It's a bit of a surreal thought and you can see the coming change in the team. Everyones been a little crazier as of late including myself, feeling up down and all around emotionally. This last week we've continued serving at the various ministries and each time it's been bittersweet as we had to acknowledge upon leaving that it was our last time serving there. Now after a week of endings we are coming head on to the knock-out round where we leave for good.

Packing begins today, as if we were going to be gone tomorrow, cleaning tomorrow and then church, final farewells and loose ends on Sunday. In the midst we've also been able to enjoy barbeques and the company of many of our new friends. Tonight we are going to mercy ministries, the orphanage for a barbeque. Every night at the crossing has been different lately also as each night is recoginzed by us and our friends as bring us closer to that final farwell.

When that farwell comes we are off to Chang Rai with a pastor named Booie to work with some people up there. He'll be taking us to a trading and elephant village where we will get involved shortly with some ministries and things going on up there. There is also the possiblity of going to a tribe where the gospel has not been heard in a long time if at all. Elephant treks, jungle preaching and a trading village where surrounding cultures come to sell there wares. Sounds to me to be the perfect ending to our mission as we will fly out two days after it ends. Back to all of my allies and enemies back home.

I want to write a little about Pattaya and the mission and some things I've been thinking about lately. This is the first of sorts I guess, I'll post more as time goes on. Feel free to reply if you have thoughts congruent or contradictory.

Pattaya is so raw, so primal in some ways that I find in it a sort of dark facination. In a place where there are no inhibitions and men act and do as they please you begin to see who we are as humans. It's an eye opener in a lot of ways, and in alot of ways Pattaya seems to be a sick, open concentration of what can be found in men everywhere.

I'm not proposing that every man is attracted to young boys and girls or travsvestites, if this was so we would be in alot more trouble. But I think that the lust that prevails here so strongly is a testament to something that runs through all of us. In Pattaya it's just not kept under the covers, hidden away and masked. In Pattaya it's all out and it's masqueraded around as something normal and good with real truth showing itself in the unconcious actions of the city. You see the results in the lonely, tired faces of the women you ride home beside, in the body language of the man walking from bar to bar looking a empty and lost, even as the neon flashes overhead and the 100th girl interesting in only his wallet calls out, "hey, sexy man".