I know I need to write about this. I need to post these pictures and these thoughts, but honestly, I’m conflicted and wrecked.
I just re-discovered Papa’s love for me, and how close the blood of Jesus makes me to Him.
And then I went to S-21
Under Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge (an extremist communist regime) drove everyone in Cambodia out of cities in the 70s and made them work in farmlands and villages as slaves.
They were paid a single handful of rice for a day’s labor of 12 hours in the sun…and it is on average 110 degrees here during the day right now.
Cambodian people started dying of starvation, exhaustion, and heat-related illnesses.
Officials went around to all villages and burned everyone’s clothing, issuing a uniform instead to every citizen of the nation. No one had their own identity.
Paranoia swept the nation into a genocide that would wipe out 2/3 of the population in less than 5 years.
The S-21 prison is located in the center of the capitol city of Cambodia and was surrounded by several layers of corrugated metal sheets, and the people had been driven away from cities…so how do we know so clearly what went on there?
Well, first, because the Khmer Rouge was very detail-oriented in their documentation of processing “criminals,” they wrote and recorded everything for their superior officers to prove that they were following orders exactly.
Second, we know exactly what went on there, because when the Vietnamese found S-21 in 1979, they decided to leave parts of it exactly the way they found it…blood stains included.
I walked through all 4 buildings by myself, camera around my neck, hand over my mouth. Step after step followed by wave after wave of anger, remorse, confusion, sympathy…
can I even sympathize with these victims?
There isn’t a category in my brain for the kind of inhumanity they suffered. Every prisoner was photographed with a number displayed on their chest…some prisoners didn’t have clothing on when their numbers were pinned to them, so they were safety pinned to their pectoral muscles.
Face after face after face staring at me, resembling so closely the children and church members I’ve been spending time with this month – even resemblances of friends back in America were staring back at me.
Each photo seems to have captured a plethora of final statements about the innocence and the integrity of those pictured. Every face I looked at, I knew was killed…maybe where I was standing – or maybe they’d just been convicted where I was standing after a time of unbelievably inhumane torture.
How could anyone possibly have thought they were enemies of the state?
I feel helpless, and lost, and confused, and deeply wounded.
I can’t get the pictures out of my mind, or the claustrophobic feeling I had when I stumbled onto the second floor of the third (“C”) building and found myself standing in a wooden cell that was so small that I could barely turn around.
Unprepared, I uttered the words, “oh, my God,” out loud…and I don’t say that set of words together ever. Ever.
But they came out like a reflexive cry and I meant them, and my heart followed them with a “why?!” backed by the most unreal rage and confusion.
I can’t make sense of this.
Somehow it’s easier to digest the barbaric scenes of ancient history wars…but the 1970s? Clips from “that 70s show” flash through my mind and I realize that 1979 wasn’t long ago at all…
my dad was just a few years younger than I am in 79, and he probably heard about the genocide in Cambodia the same way we hear about the genocide in Burma now…what atrocious acts must be happening in Burma today?
I imagine that if I went to visit satan’s house, it would look like S-21.
I was still recovering from a small bout of Typhoid that day and my fever broke as I walked around the museum. Drenched in and chilled by the sweat clinging to my clothes, I nearly collapsed (maybe from the fever, but more likely from the emotional response I had to the memorial) in the “C” building – the one that has remained completely untouched – but I caught myself on a wall and then looked through a tiny doorway carved into the wall.
I was already alone in the scariest and most disgusting place I’ve ever been in my life, why not walk through a tiny doorway having no clue what’s on the other side?
So I did, and I found this:
There it was, on a property decorated by the devil himself: hope written on the walls, declarations of peace, in this life and the next, and promises to never forget the tragedy of the Cambodian genocide.
Appropriately, as I write this I’m listening to “Every Season” by Nicole Nordeman, a song about how God is in every season of everything, and I just listened to these lyrics:
“Even now in death You open doors for LIFE to enter,
You are winter”
I left S-21, had lunch with my friends at a café, traveled back to the island we’ve been living on, and tried to sleep – but I couldn’t. I was awake until the sun came up wondering this:
“Does the blood of Jesus atone for even the sins of the Khmer Rouge?
If they repented…
Could they be restored to right relationship with God, too?”
I know the truthful answer to those questions, but I can’t make myself say or even type it.
I can’t forgive those crimes.
I can’t forgive genocide, Jesus, not today…
and I can’t understand how you could, either.
I was talking to a friend from home this morning about how much I couldn’t wrap my mind around the truthful answer to that question, and she pointed out another truth that I wasn’t ready for:
As repulsed as I am by the crimes of the Khmer Rouge…Jesus is equally repulsed by my sin.
There is no favoritism with God.
I can’t feel it, emotionally I’m not ready to fully accept that even the guards and interrogators at S-21 could be forgiven and gain eternal life with Christ in heaven through the death and resurrection of Jesus…
But the amount of love that it would take for someone to forgive even THAT, that’s the kind of love our God has, and it’s the kind of love He gives us.
We were just as ugly, just as covered in sin, just as despicable (I HATE that, and I mean HATE)…and now I’m washed white as snow…
and I get to live my life with access to a Love that is SO MUCH greater than I can imagine.
Lord, you are more worthy of ALL my praise and all my love and all my devotion than I will ever understand. You are beyond my comprehension, and you are able to do far beyond what I'll ever be able to understand in this lifetime…so thank you for not asking me to do what only You can, but for using me – even in the smallest ways – to be a vessel for the love that is able to do all things. I love you. Thank you for the death that covers ALL sin, and the resurrection that raises us all from the death of our flesh to the fullness of the life in the Spirit!
I am my Beloved's and He is mine.
Amen.
