Being sure about safety on missions

I've been on a few mission trips, but none in a long time and never overseas. If I were to go, I'd probably think of some of the worst scenarios I could find myself in while overseas. The story I heard from Mark Harrison, pastor of Cumming Baptist Church, confirmed one of those scenarios. It also got me thinking about some basic stuff people should think about doing before heading off overseas on missions.
Last fall Mark and a group from First Baptist Cumming were teaching English at a school in Thailand. Late one night the missionary they were helping out came to their hotel room and told them to turn on the TV. That was how they learned that the country had been taken over by the military.
Interesting enough, the missionary who told them, Rick Kuter, is from Georgia. He learned from his son, who was working in Alpharetta. A co-worker knew his parents were in Thailand and asked him if he had heard about the government being taken over. He hadn't and after seeing it on TV called his parents halfway around the world to let them in on it.
I originally had that in the published story, but because of space restrictions I had to take it out. I also just couldn't find the right place to insert it.
Another element on this I wish I could've included had to do with a member of the team who had a hard time dealing with the uncertainty of the situation. He's retired from a successful business, but just couldn't stop shaking or pull it together for awhile after hearing of the coup. Scary situation. You have no idea how the military could view Americans, especially in this day. He told his teammates later that the experience just made him realize how he was somewhere that his money couldn't get him out and he was totally dependent upon God.
In order to get some more pictures, I did a search on Flickr for photos of the coup and found some good ones. Before contacting the photographers, though, I realized there could be problems with using them. We, of course, give photo credits for pictures we use. More than likely the credit would have been the Flickr sites of the individual. I think we were under deadline at the time, otherwise I might would've checked anyway. However, I didn't want us to be linked to someone and then if a reader went to that page (since we cited it) they might see images that we wouldn't want associated with The Index. It's an avenue I still might explore someday.

Small church burns, then rebuilds

I truly can't think of why anyone would want to burn a church. It doesn't seem there are too many things worse you could do to get on the bad side of the Almighty. When a tragedy like this happens, though, sometimes it can end up being a positive.
Emit Grove is a small rural church near Statesboro in the southeastern part of the state. It sits adjacent to some cotton fields off a county road. When it burned, a lot of history and sentiment went up with the flames. When I wrote the article for the paper I didn't want to sugar-coat too badly the fact that people were angry. Although there is grace and forgiveness extended to the guy who did it, people were ticked. I know I would've been.
It's cool too see that the church is rebounding though. The new family life center has become more than what it was originally supposed to be. This is opening doors for the congregation in the community.
The only thing I regret about running this story is that we couldn't use the picture bigger. We didn't want to wait another issue, and ads had eaten up our other color space. Too bad. The lady who took this, not a professional photographer, did a really good job with it.