Forty Days Alone in Thailand

In 2009, I realized that I had forty days of unscheduled time in Thailand between the seventh mission trip I had helped lead in the “Land of Smiles” and an international conference in Pattaya on the Gulf of Thailand. I was at a point in my life where I felt the need to test my two primary relationships: with God and with my self. I grabbed the opportunity to test these two relationships by traveling around Thailand alone—with my limited Thai vocabulary and my neurological disorder--to plunge into the deep end of the cultural pool, if you will, and see if I would sink or swim. Before leaving I joked with my friends and family that my only traveling companions would be my self and God, and I didn’t know if I would get along with either one. I wrote Forty Days Alone in Thailand partly as a spiritual travel memoir, but partly as a way of encouraging readers to risk moving out of their cultural comfort zones as a way of meeting themselves again as if for the first time.