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Last month was spent in Kampong Speu, Cambodia and I might have to say this was one of my favorite months. It was yet another lesson in….LOVE. I have been asked several times why I came on the race or what my religion is or what I believe in…my answer, after 6 months is simply...to learn how to love better.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these.
-Mark 12:30-31

This month we taught English class again and I was teaching the youngest students. I absolutely loved teaching the ABC's and 123's. I was greeted every class with smiling little faces and eager-to-learn eyes. At night we switched off teaching bible studies. It never failed that the kids would stand up and sing praise songs ever so loudly. The village was so kind, warm, and inviting it was almost hard not to fall in love with them. Our contact Ra and his wife Neun took care of us the whole month, loving us and feeding us 🙂 We also had extra company, Icky, Jona and Tami who had been to the village before, but came back to visit. It was a treat to have extra people to talk with during the month!

The list of mishaps last month was a long one, including a staff infection, cracking the glass on my laptop (pray for my finances), having my bag infested with ants 3 times and the list goes on… However, what I found most interesting was that I hardly realized until we left Cambodia that all of these so-called mishaps or streaks of bad luck had all happened in the same month. The old me would have whined and complained for hours on end (which I did my fair share), however I found myself much calmer and without as much care for my material posessions. We have a joke that when we break something God is trying to "teach us a lesson." I joked about that for the whole month until I stopped and realized…He might have actually been trying to teach me something and the joke was on me!

The night before we left, I stood waiting for my teammate to get out of the bathroom so we could walk up to our house together. When I turned around I noticed one of the families we were staying with sleeping in their bed. This had happened every single night, however for some reason it caught my eye on this particular evening. I stopped and stared and thought…."now they have it figured out." The whole family was sleeping on a flat straw mat in a circle with the children cuddled together in the middle, content and happy. These people who have hardly anything to their name are constantly happy with what they have…how could this be? They don't have laptops or iphones! I couldn't help but smile and realize how wrong I have had it. I did not honestly think it would take 5 months to learn the true meaning of community, but it honestly did. And when I finally realized it, it hit me hard. To put more value on my material possession than the love I give others, my family, my community, my friends, and those I meet on a daily basis is completely against what I have been learning on this trip. A calming sense came over me and life almost came easier.

We live in community every day with our teammates on the World Race. We are pushed to our limits and tested how well we will love others when we don't necessarily like them or when we don't feel like loving them. It truly takes the power of God to help us learn how to do this.
It really does make a difference when we put away distractions and start connecting with those right next to us….and we wonder why we have all of these communication issues…