This is part one of a three part story.
For part two click here.
For part three click here.
Lessons Learned- Part 1: The Day I Found Myself in a Cambodian Police Station.
My team has been going to a small village called 42. It’s in a rural, poverty-stricken area of Kampong Cham. As soon as we drive up our motor scooter carriages called a Tuk-Tuk, dozens of kids run towards us with smiles and laughter and their desire for fun. It’s been a tremendously humble opportunity to play and jump and wrestle and tickle these children who have so much less then we could ever imagine. My team plays with them for the first part of our time there, followed by bath time near the local well, medical care to their wounds, usually caused by their terrible living conditions, and we end the day with feeding them a good ole fashion bowl of delicious soup, gathered together on the dirt ground, eating and laughing together. It truly is an amazing time.
The day started like normal. We all gathered together before we rode out into the village, had some devotional time, and headed out. I usually bring my soccer ball and my iPhone to listen to worship music on the way there, getting myself ready for a day of ministry. We drive up and the kids run straight for us! I give my iPhone and headphones to Noah to put inside the lock box and kick the soccer ball as high as I can into the sky. The kids just go nuts as they see the soccer ball touch the clouds. It’s adorable. We begin the day wrestling with the kids, playing ninja and dance to Gangam Style. Then it’s bath time; all the kids rush to take their dirty, worn out clothes (if they even have any clothes on.) We get soaked as they play in the water, sharing laughs and having a good time. We set up an area for the kids to come over so we can clean up and bandage their wounds; most of them cry at the pain of the antibiotics stinging their small bodies. Lastly we get the plastic bowls and small spoons and begin passing out the soup. All the kids line up franticly in a hurry. One by one the children get their soup and we end the day filling empty bellies. The sound of bowls being stacked and packed up means it’s the end of another good day. But then one sentence changes the atmosphere of the whole village.
“Where’s your iPhone?!” Noah gasped to me as he opened the broken-into lock box.
My heart sank…
“It’s not in there?” I hurtfully uttered.
“No, someone broke into the lock box!” Noah yelled, which brings me to lesson number 1:
People steal.
I’ve heard World Racers getting stolen from. It’s almost a given. You’re in impoverish parts of the world with depraved people who don’t know the Gospel let alone morality, and you’re a walking target for pick-pocketers, thieves, crooks, and in this case, kids.
I was distraught.
“It has to be here, somewhere!” I shouted in panic.
What was first an ending of a good ministry day, became the beginning of an all-out search for my iPhone. The 42 village isn’t a big village. There are probably more people in your blocked people’s list on Facebook then there are in this village, so I figured it has to be here somewhere. My team and our contact began to question the kids and search the village. House after house, or should I say, hut after hut we searched. It’s an iPhone 4 inside a small Cambodian village. Surely it shouldn’t be hard to find… But as walked around the village and ran around in an attempt to be successful in our rescue mission, hope dwindled and dwindled and the painful realization that I wasn’t going to find my iPhone began to sunk in marrow deep, which leads to lesson number 2:
God doesn’t need your approval to do whatever it is He needs to do, however way He wants to do it.
I had just written a blog about how I wanted to live more radically simple. I’ve felt that this Race has been taken away from me not so much with catastrophic events, but more of the time with more little distractions like wifi, movies, apps, and apparel. You can get lost inside the little tiny screen in the palm of your hand, or with the last bit of effort you give in order to look semi-decent with a new shirt here on the mission field. And I’ve caught myself falling into these traps. So I prayed to the Lord that He would make my life a little bit simpler. Appearance isn’t so hard for me. I just get up out of bed. But I’m confident that the apps and music, although maybe good, was not what God wanted for me, because I was now without it.
I was bummed, but was over the situation. I told my contact that it was okay and that we could leave without my phone. But she thought differently. Despite my martyred spirit in desiring to let go and leave it, she demanded that we stay, and not only that, but that we would call the police too!
There began a panic in the village; no doubt this was the most action and drama this village has gotten since the chickens got out. Slowly but surely, as the rumors went around the village that the police were being called to come, it became a classic Jerry Springer showdown. One woman started claiming she saw several children open it. Another woman said that we left the lock box open anyways, so it was our fault. A little girl started crying when she heard that the police were coming. Parents came out of their fishnet hammocks and began shouting and talking, which leads me to lesson number 3:
All sin, even forgiven sin, has consequences.
I didn’t want the police involved, but that’s what happened because of the consequences of sin. I personally love forgiveness. I love being forgiven, and forgiving others. It’s this grace that what first attracted me to the Lord; this scandalous Savior that looked upon sinful man and said “holy, blameless, and above reproach.” We know deep inside we are broken people. And yet God in His grace and love says we are whole. But even though we are whole and there is forgiveness of sin, there are still consequences. If you murder someone, you can be forgiven by God and the people that were impacted by the murder. But the guy is still dead. In this case I had forgiven and moved on with my phone being stolen, but the consequences of this sin was that the police were now involved. I often times move towards pacifism in conflicting situations such as this one. But sometimes that can be more hurtful then beneficial. For example, if there is another World Race team that comes after us, and the kid who stole the phone sees that we didn’t try and find out who stole it, then he will figure he can steal again, and learning this at such a young age can be lethal. If he doesn’t learn now that there are consequences, he can fall into habitual sin and steal over and over again until he is caught or he steals from the wrong person… The discipline of God in sin is to teach us and help us. When I am disciplined for my sin and face the consequences, it’s for my benefit. God disciplines those He loves. And in a world where we are demanded to be politically correct and cautious of hurting someone’s feelings even though they wronged us, or in a world where the environment of the home is therapeutic and where the kid can get away with anything, we forget that there is consequences, even severe ones, of the things we do. For this kid, the authorities were now involved.
After several minutes passed, the police arrived… Or should I say, without trying to be offensive of Cambodian authority, a couple of old guys with cow prods on scooters (which they really were!) I tried so hard not to laugh. This was a serious situation. I mean, I just wrote a paragraph about the seriousness of consequences. And for these kids (whom we figured out that at least three of them were involved) seeing the retirement committee dressed in their brown uniforms coming to their village to take them away and throw them in prison forever was devastating. The cops asked that we would come with them and the perpetrators and their family to the local police station for further investigation. So my team, the three kids, the three moms, and some other woman breastfeeding her child whom we never figured out why she even came, all piled into our small Tuk-Tuk and set off to the police station.
One by one they called the children into the interrogation room for questioning. And when I say interrogation room, picture a shed. They questioned and questioned and questioned, until they figured out that one specific boy, whom my team played with and bathed and ate with, took it and hid it. Now this is where my story doesn’t make sense, even to me. Even though we knew which kid had it, the police couldn’t do anything about it because they needed to go through the parents, which in the Cambodian culture, just don’t care. It’s not like in the States where if someone steals something and you know it was them, they’d get put in prison, or in this case, juvenile detention. Here, they knew the kid had it, but they just couldn’t do anything about it… I know.
The only thing we could really do is go back to the village and find where he hid it. But that was gonna be impossible. It could be anywhere. Hope seemed lost. I was bummed. I filled out the police report: name, date of birth, and that’s it. I gave them my thumbprint, not sure why they would need it, and as quickly as that, my prints were in the police files of the local station, on a case that was not gonna be solved unless we could find the phone ourselves.
Then all of a sudden, a light bulb came on into my head.
Every night at 10pm, an alarm goes off to remind me to do my devotional.
Something Beautiful by Need To Breathe begins to play.
If we were there in the village when it went off, we could follow the sound until we found it!
I quickly told the police about it to see if we could go there at night.
He paused. Looked at me. And smiled.
Tonight, I was going to help in a police raid!
Click here to read part two!
