It started with a simple team time.
Our team was doing ATL in Cambodia, and with the Christmas holiday upon us, we had been hitting a bit of a wall when it comes to finding ministries to meet with. This is when ATL truly becomes ATL, when you pray and ask God to give you opportunities to minister to people in need.
Friday night before Christmas we went caroling with Love 146 and a ministry called the Message Parlor which reaches out to victims of the sex industry, street children and many other needy people in the city and surrounding areas. While we were caroling, so much hurt was going on around us. We saw drunken people wasting their lives away in these tiny bars, scowling at us as we tried to spread the Christmas spirit. We saw women being bought right before our eyes for what very well could have been as little as $5, and we saw the people who haven’t eaten all day, plain in front of us, starving, begging us for money so that they could feed their children that night. It’s heartbreaking. The whole situation is absolutely heartbreaking. Can we even help these people? There is such a struggle between wanting to help the needy but not letting them become fully dependent on foreigners. There is just as much of a struggle of wanting to feed these people and help provide for them without providing for a furtherance of a drug habit or feeding into the sex trade. It’s a rough spot to be in, and even though some of the best moments of ministry happen there, its not a spot I’m usually envious of.
As much as we love caroling, the things that we witnessed that night weighed heavily on us for the next couple of days. We were in need of good night of ministry that would not only boost our spirits, but also have an effect on people in this area. We needed to give to this city.
Sunday was full of wonderful church services, and we were feeling slightly refreshed when Tanner decided to announce his team time. We were going to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and use them as a way to minister to the homeless people on the streets. I was immediately excited by the idea. It was the perfect way to not only show these people the love of Jesus, but also help them in a practical, earthly way. We made the sandwiches, and headed over toward the area where we had been caroling a few nights before. Our night began with a woman sitting right in front of the mall. She was holding a small child, but even aside from the toll that being homeless would have taken, seemed far to old to be the mother of this child. We gave her the sandwich, and she was thankful. We attempted to communicate with her, but aside from thank you, Jesus and a few numbers, our Khmer was lacking just slightly. We were able to pray for her, but outside of that, we didn’t really seem to get much through to her. We left her feeling good, but it was not quite the meeting that we had been hoping for. We were, I guess, for lack of better words expecting something different from these encounters.
After that in counter, we walked around the area looking for homeless people to love on. We found no one. For a while, we tried to figure out why this was the case. When we were in Malaysia, we were told that not seeing homeless people and prostitutes on the street was usually a bad thing, because it tended to mean that the prostitutes were working and the homeless people were off doing other illegal things. I thought that this may be the case for a second, but most of the homeless people that we have seen in Cambodia are women with young children, so the thought was quickly dismissed from my mind, and replaced with shear confusion. Where were these people?
We walked around for probably a good 20 minutes before we came across a little family sitting on the corner. As soon as we saw them my heart broke. The mom was sitting on the sidewalk underneath an overhang and her baby who seemed to be around a year old was wobbling around on the ground in front of her. As the baby collided with a piece of concrete on the ground and stumbled, her other little boy, who I am guessing is around 4 or 5, made eye contact with us, obviously confused why we were staring at him. We were still about 20 feet away, but I held out half a sandwich and he came cautiously running over to grab it from me. In his hand he held a plastic grocery store bag, filled with what, I’ll never know. As he tried to take a bite from the sandwich and hold on to whatever precious contents were in that bag, the sandwich started to sag and began to break into two pieces. I ripped the part that was starting to sag off of the sandwich to hold for him, and before I even knew what was happening, his tiny fist was trying to tear the piece back out of my hand. He was afraid that I was taking it back. In that moment, the entire world stopped and I was so unbelievably sad for this little boy and the life that he had to live. I tried to remedy the situation by literally shoving the sandwich piece that I held into his mouth to show him that I was not trying to take it from him. He took a bite of it and when I pulled the rest of it away, he just stared at me chewing what was in his mouth.
I have been thinking a lot lately about those God moments that happen in our lives. These moments are better than presents on Christmas. Better than the best piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever had. That was one of those moments. The kind where you can literally feel God right there with you. Moments like that are the kind that you never, ever forget. This turned out to be one of those moments.
We stood there and stared at each other for a while. I was processing everything that had just happened, and I’m sure he was trying to process why there was a person that looked very different from him standing there literally shoving sandwiches in his face. After a few minutes I began to talk to him. I’ve realized that I do this a lot in Asia. I ramble on in English to people who have no idea what I’m saying and hope that if nothing else, they understand me when I mumble Jesu in Khmer, and that from that, a seed will be planted. Usually, they just smile and laugh, usually because they think it’s funny that we are trying to talk to them. This little boy, though, just continued to stare at me, and only moved his head slightly up and down when I said the word ‘Jesu’. After a few minutes of talking to him, and that being my only response, I took his hand and walked the few yards to where Tanner was talking to his mother. She spoke a few words in English, but not enough to hold a conversation by any means. I said hello to her, and Tanner asked her if we could pray for her. One thing that I’ve learned in Asia and found kind of strange actually, is that people will accept prayer from you even if they don’t believe in Jesus. For the most part, they believe that prayer is prayer, and prayer to anyone is better than no prayer at all. I’ve also found that many of them not only believe in many gods, but the majority of them believe that Jesus, if nothing else, was at least a good man, so they have an almost ‘sure why not, you can pray to him too’ kind of attitude about it.
Sometimes it’s hard, praying for people and not really knowing what they are receiving from it, but in the last few weeks, and especially on this night, I feel like I’ve had a bit of an attitude change about it. I now no longer look at it and think about how they can’t understand what we are saying and because of that are no closer to accepting Jesus. Now, I look at the situation and know for sure that God has the ability to reach in to their lives and make them wonder who those people are that care enough to give peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to the forgotten families on the streets.
