Hope for a broken world (Sarah)

Broken country? Funny. I feel at peace here more than I do back in the states. I've seen the impoverished floating villages on Tonle Sap river, puppy-eyed children chanting "very good" until the van doors shut, unruly tourists treating native babies as props for pictures -- and though I know that what I've seem so far is the bare surface of the signs of governmental, social, historical, and spiritual brokenness, I feel peace. Hope. Something pure.

Though, I should remind you, I am looking out tinted windows of our safe honk of a van.

Maybe I'm being influenced by the sound of crickets outside. Or maybe, fellowship really does go a long way. Fellowship with God. Fellowship with the team, and with our brothers and sisters halfway across the world. I think it's both.

Our team began the day by reading Acts. The reading was surprisingly relevant to recent yearnings of my heart: to be filled with the Holy Spirit, to truly experience God's love and power working through me so that I may do all things cheerfully and confidently, and to be a blessing to everyone around me. Sometimes I just want to give up and say, "That is just who I am. Get over it." But I know that God has greater plans than that! While reading Acts I was reminded of how He filled Peter -- passionate yet so often foolish and cowardly like me -- with the Holy Spirit to bring to Himself three thousand souls. The same God is using us today for the same purpose. We worry so much about what to do in life, when God simply asks us to love and obey him!

Today was the first day of class at Bridges Global University (BGU) in Siem Reap, Cambodia. After introductions and Bible reading, the BGU students (Soken, Ratanack, and Phong, with Richard Park, Eunsook and me) discussed the education system in Cambodia. "Occupation before education," Ratanak said as she described how children often stay home to help families make money before prioritizing school attendance. After all, what comes first: a successful future, or survival? Schools and teachers are lacking, and the government, Phong said, does little to alleviate the situation. Tourism here constantly attracts rich foreigners and brings an inflow of cash; yet where does this money go? Not to those in the countryside. And certainly not to their education.

I don't know. We can turn away our heads and say, "Hey they seem happy enough. Why should we care?" Sure, they do seem not unhappy. But if Phong grieves for his brothers and sisters in Cambodia because they don't have enough food or adequate education, our hearts are not 'more reasonable and intelligent' than theirs -- they're just numb. Or maybe stupid is a better word; stupid because we think we understand but we don't. Blind from the reality of our undeserved blessings as we claim them our own.

One general consensus during our discussion today was that education develops not only knowledge, but also character and wisdom. And also, that knowing God prompts us to love, and how essential loving relationships are to spreading the gospel. Education isn't simply a tool for us to advance on our social ladders so that someday we may have prestige and the 'power to help,' as genuine as that desire may be. Education, as the students put it, helps us know beyond our little bubbles, whether Cambodia, United States, our school or workplace -- to see a greater plan that we can't fully conceive but can partake in. It paves way for more opportunities to share the gospel. And it's in knowing that that we begin to see God's bigness and holiness, and our worthlessness without his abounding love of forgiveness surrounding us everyday.

A major part of BGU's education is Bible reading. There is something about a group of people who love Jesus coming together to enjoy and dwell in his word. Though we're not talking about ourselves or 'getting to know each other,' we're acknowledging the most precious and mutual thing in our lives, which is the gospel, the reality of Christ's loving sacrifice on the cross. How different our lives would be if this was truly the focus of our every day and every action...

We also went to the Tonle Sap River today and saw the impoverished floating villages. I don't have too much to say on it right now (I need some time to process it in my head; the floating houses were unlike anything I've ever seen) but maybe another team member will blog about it sometime. And hopefully we can post pictures of it too.

Teaching feels like it happened ages ago. I feel lucky to have seen so many different aspects of Cambodia today -- even the extremely cheap yet extravagantly delicious dessert cafe was a reminder of the disparity of wealth here in Cambodia, as I caught glimpses of only foreigners inside before falling asleep on the well-placed giant sofa.

But hope is what the BGU students gave me today. They are learning English so that they may learn about what else is out there, beyond their families, country, histories. They are climbing the scholastic ladder so that, with what they have lived through, they can push for necessary changes in a country with such a painful, gruesome past -- its imprints still visible in the streets of Siem Reap. They are studying the word of God so that education and character may not bring them the world's fame, but its persecution as they seek to represent Christ in this broken - world. And we are developing relationships with them to remember that the Gospel transcends not only culture, but also identity as we find ourselves more alike than ever, and loved by the same God.

And I leave you with this: "One of the most important functions of the missionary movement is to continually rescue the faith itself from becoming lost through institutional and cultural evolution and absorption.... That process of trying to make our faith understandable cross-culturally has in many different but vital ways pumped back into the home church a constantly renewed sense of what is, and what is not the [gospel]... Unless we become as serious about rediscovering the true faith in contrast to the assumptions of our own culture, we will trumpet an uncertain sound wherever else we go." -Ralph Winter,International Bulletin of Missionary Research

Please keep praying for Cambodia and missionaries all around the world!