Posted by Ric and Sharon on Monday, October 25th, 2010
We’re now officially in “stage one” culture and language acquisition here in Thailand. Up to this point we’ve been in a “warm-up” phase which basically entails getting our ear attuned to the new sounds and our minds and hearts used to our new way of life. This new stage looks quite a bit different. There are no trips to “the office” for orientation. There are no structured, dictated outings to go on.
Our schedule is completely up to us and our language learning can pretty much be tailored to fit our needs…. as long as we put in at least 40-50 hours per week. So what do we do? Well, there are three basic elements:
“Exposure” time involves observation and participation in our larger context: getting into the community. This can be anything, but it needs to be consistent, varied and purposeful. We need goals – in fact we plan exactly what we want to observe, learn and participate in to maximize our time.
“Language Helper” time is intense. We sit down with our language helper in front of a picture book we created in planning the week before. Our goal is to have him tell us what is happening in the pictures we show him. After he tells what is happening in each picture a few times we begin quizzing on this new material.
“Processing” time is supposed to be minimal. We try to spend as little time as possible putting data into the computer, planning for our upcoming days and doing rote memorization.
Please pray we’ll find a healthy balance of all three elements and also find plenty of time for reviewing our older material. Here is a sample of Thai we’re learning by rote memorization. Not our ideal, but you need a few key survival phrases:
Posted by Ric and Sharon on Monday, October 4th, 2010
We’re in Bangkok and waiting for our flight to Chiang Mai! We were able to sleep a lot on our seven hour flight into the country, which is what we were praying for! Continue praying the rest of our flight goes well and that we’ll get all our luggage to the next leg okay. A few of our plastic totes were pretty beat up but the luggage straps and the locks kept our stuff from exploding all over the place. Here are some photos of our trip over:
Posted by Ric and Sharon on Saturday, September 25th, 2010
Yesterday we took a second four+ hour trip down to Chicago to pick up our completed visas and made the four hour trip home a few hours later. While we were there we saw a lot of the city. Check out our pictures from Chicago:
Posted by Ric and Sharon on Sunday, August 22nd, 2010
We spent a few days this past week saying goodbye to Sharon’s relatives in New York state and visiting my sister Sarah and her new husband Stephen in their apartment in Cleavland. Here are a few shots of Sharon enjoying our time with family:
Posted by Ric and Sharon on Tuesday, July 6th, 2010
Sarah and Stephen had a wonderful wedding! My good friend Brett Maxwell and I took the photos at the wedding. I wanted to share a few of my favorites with you. Below you’ll find a sampling. These previews are not intended for printing or for commercial use.
Posted by Ric and Sharon on Saturday, July 3rd, 2010
It’s amazing how God works. Our May update included a list of special gifts that would be a blessing as we move to Thailand this fall. One important item was a work computer to house our many recordings, pictures, and video we’ll be taking during language learning.
A great friend and supporter answered the call giving us her old computer, a docking station, and a wonderful laptop case. The computer is a Dell Latitude D610 with a 1.88 Ghz processor, 1 Gb of RAM, an 80 Gb hard drive and the very latest Windows and Office suite installed on it. For those who don’t speak computer: it’s a great work horse. We’ll use it until it falls apart.
Posted by Ric and Sharon on Monday, June 28th, 2010
Every day NTM.org rolls out new articles about tribal missions around the world. Today, the work God accomplished at the Big Ticket Festival is on display on the main page! Take the jump on over to http://www.ntm.org/news/11064 to check out the article, which was partly based on my blog posts from last week. Thanks guys!
Posted by Ric and Sharon on Tuesday, June 1st, 2010
That title looks like something you’d find on a missionary’s website, right? This Sunday Sharon and I had the unique opportunity to share our ministry with about 200 kids at our home church in Lansing. It was a lot of fun to show them some authentic artifacts, video clips, and pictures from our journey up until this point. But honestly they blessed us far more than we could have blessed them. They prayed for us, asked great questions and thought about where God might be leading them on their journey.
I love their little prayers: “Dear Jesus please keep Ric and Sharon safe as they drive… or… fly…. to…” Other kids, “Thailand! Thailand!” Kid: “Thailand.”
Precious. Please pray some of the kids would be touched by our presentation and that a seed for missions would be planted in their lives. Thanks.
Posted by Ric and Sharon on Friday, April 9th, 2010
One thing that’s always fun is getting to hang out with my Dad. Today we did a bit of drywall work in the garage. Here’s some pictures of the process for those who have no idea what that entails:
Posted by Ric and Sharon on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010
Here’s the formula:
plus
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Equals
We gathered up all the change we had in our house and deposited it to a brand new EMERGENCY FUND. 27% to our first goal of one thousand dollars. Find out how you can help here.
Posted by Ric and Sharon on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
Here is our latest newsletter featuring highlights from our recent trip to Thailand. For the best viewing experience I recommend you click the “fullscreen” button that appears when your mouse hovers over the publication.
Posted by Ric and Sharon on Monday, February 15th, 2010
The past few days we’ve been spending time with my family down in Jackson. Sam and Kari are here visiting from Virginia and our latest family addition, Stephen, is up from Cleaveland. Here are some photos from the past few days:
Posted by Ric and Sharon on Saturday, January 23rd, 2010
We’ve been running non-stop since we arrived in Thailand. Our first morning was spent flying from Bangkok to a regional city, Chiang Mai. Once we arrived our first order of business involved a tour of Grace International School and learning about the various ministries connected with the school. Our second priority involved food but I won’t bore you with the details.
This morning we started out with a big bowl of fried rice and enjoyed two more presentations regarding missionary work in Thailand. Later today Sharon and I arrived in Udon Thani, Thailand to visit with missionaries from our home church. We will be here for a few days and hope to post a few pictures of our time here. Here are a few pictures from the last two days:
Posted by Ric and Sharon on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
In our next post you won’t see us looking like this:
Hopefully the next picture we post will be taken halfway across the world and we’ll be wearing shorts and short-sleeved shirts enjoying 90 degree weather. Our blitz tour of Southeast Asia begins now and will end next Friday and of course we’ll be carefully documenting our trip and posting whatever morsels we possibly can on this site as often as possible. We’re looking forward to a whole lot more warm sun on our faces in the days to come.
So no more of this: And a whole lot more flying: 40+ hours of it in fact (round trip). Next week there’ll be a whole lot more meeting new people, visiting remote villages, exploring ancient temples, and learning new things. Please pray for our safety and for clarity as we communicate and learn. We’ll post more ASAP!
Posted by Ric and Sharon on Saturday, November 14th, 2009
We have arrived in Tennessee, the third stop on our seven state tour. Here we will do what we do best recently: spread the word about our lives and ministry.
The drive here proved… frustrating. Two major interstates over the Appalachians were closed, forcing us to take slow and windy back roads. The payoff: we saw some amazing country. Below are some pictures we took.
Ric and Sharon Bruce On a journey with you to Thailand 
It’s amazing how God works. Our 
That title looks like something you’d find on a missionary’s website, right? This Sunday Sharon and I had the unique opportunity to share our ministry with about 200 kids at our home church in Lansing. It was a lot of fun to show them some authentic artifacts, video clips, and pictures from our journey up until this point. But honestly they blessed us far more than we could have blessed them. They prayed for us, asked great questions and thought about where God might be leading them on their journey.
