Sitting out on the balcony I listened to the sounds of Phenom Penh … There is the sound of construction across the way, the crackle of a fire where someone is preparing dinner… Youth playing in the street… a motor bike riding past… a bike bell chiming one street over… There is no remnant of a sound that might even elude to the pain and devastation that once ravaged the people of this country. There is only the sound of life and growth… My mind began to race as a conversation from a book i am reading currently came to thought. The conversation takes place between a priest and a former goverment offical, cut off from society because he voted against the King. Here is what the man written in the book as “G—–” had to say:
“I meant that man has one tyrant, Ignorance.I voted for the abolition of that tyrant…I voted for the downfall of the tyrant, that is, for the abolition of prostitution for women, of slavery for man, of darkness for the child. In voting for a republic I voted for that: i voted for fraternity, for harmony, for dawn… We brought down the old world- a jug of misery overturned, becomes a vessel of joy to humanity.”
-From Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables
I love that this was the book i decided to take on this month. It is a book of a people struggling to break free. Much like those of us on the World Race and others, we are struggling to break free… to walk in freedom. We’ve been called to choose… the tyrant of our flesh, or the freedom of the Kingdom… The tyrant will only offer ignorance, slavery, darkness, prostition of your heart… In that tyrant you wll find only misery, despair, and decay… a stagnate pool where you may be but never really live. However, in the Kingdom, the overturning of the flesh… when all of that putrid filth pours out, you are washed out… you are made pure… a vessel ready to be pour into and one made to countinually out… you become a vessel of joy for humanity… I believe that my squad and hundreds upon thousands of my brothers and sisters of the Kingdom are rising up… we are bringing Light where there is none, pouring out Hope, Love and Joy wherever we can. We are a fraternity of revolutionaries, crying out for a better world, a world that is Kingdom bound. We are revolutionaries bound to bring change… It must come…it has to come… God did not desire for his people to dwell in a jug of misery… But you have to choose to allow yourself to be overturned…
The Cambodians had no choice… Men took what was not theirs and implemented immesurable pain to the people with power they stole. But that world of misery was overturned. now you can see it in the faces of the people… it radiate the Hope that I cannot even explain… it looks like laughter sounds, feels like sweetness tastes…. This country is truly a vessel of Joy for humanity…
And as i look around at my teammates…my squad mates… I see jugs of misery that have allowed God to overturn them, and find myself surrounded by vessels of joy for humanity…
My question to you is which one are you?
