I do realize that I have not written in months. I apologize for that. So to make it up to you I will post 3-4 blogs within the next 2 weeks. (:
Here is my blog from Cambodia!
Cambodia was one of the shortest months of my race. As I arrived at my ministry location, I did not know what to expect. I was placed in a completely new team. Some of my teammates worked with special needs kids and others worked with the elementary age kids in a school. I worked with Madi. Madi is an austistic 7 year old girl. She was found in a trash dump when she was a baby, she had been abandoned by her biological parents. I was her second first grade teacher. I home schooled her every morning for the entire month. She is one of the most outgoing and dramatic children I know, in a good way. When she talked to you, she talked like an adult and had a large vocabulary. She liked to order people around, specially her brothers and sisters. Our contacts have 8 adoptive Cambodian children, plus 4 children of their own that live in America. Words that I can use to describe her are diva and strong willed.
It was hard teaching Madi, her attention spam was smaller than small. Honestly, I sometimes counted down the minutes for class to end because it was so hard to teach her, but at the end of the day it was all worth it. I learned that she was super smart but she just got bored very quickly. The few times that she willingly wanted to do her school work, she would answer math problems correct all the time and do her work so fast. She always wanted to control everything, but I had to let her know that that was not the case. I had to put her on time-out more than once a day and she did not like that at all. But day after day we started to bond. She would ask for me all the time after school. It was a very hard month for me but I learned so much from Madi.
Just because someone is “hard to teach” or stubborn, doesn’t mean we stop loving them. We try again and again and again. Jesus doesn’t stop loving us even when we don’t love him back. He tries again to woe us back to Him. You see, we are all created uniquely and just as God loves each and every one of us the same, we have to learn to love everyone we come in contact with whether we like them or not. It’s not about you or me. It’s about Him.
I encourage you to go to that person at church that you politely say hello to before service every Sunday but have never invited them to lunch or have never asked them their story. Everyone has a story. You will be surprised that that person might end up being one of your best friends. So go on, go love on someone today!
Here is Madi!
