My entire life I felt a tug on my heartstrings for Africa. I never understood it. The only connection I had to Africa was a missionary family my church supported, The Bates, in Kenya. My grandparents had taken a couple trips to deliver supplies to them. Still, I hadn’t heard much about it and couldn’t make sense of the yearning deep inside my spirit.
Then I met Jay. He was born in Kenya to missionary parents. His aunts had done stents of missions in Kenya. His grandmother had served in Botswana. Jay, himself, had even been to South Africa for a semester serving as a missionary. When I met Jay, it all made sense.
I knew that God was calling me to missions. Since Africa suddenly made sense, I was willing to go but also had a heart for Latin American culture and knew quite a bit of the Spanish language. So when we applied for The World Race, it seemed natural that I was most excited about Africa and Central America.
Then we came to Asia. Asia was the part of the Race that I was most apprehensive about. I was ignorant of the culture and the history, expected to be claustrophobic all the time, thought the language barrier would be incomprehensible and was afraid of the food (look up balut and you’ll know why!)
The day we arrived in Cambodia, we faced a claustrophobic visa line in Siem Reap. Our bus to Phnom Penh stopped on the side of the road for “food.” Fish heads and mystery meat everywhere. I was pretty used to it from Thailand and Malaysia, but in those countries there always seemed to be another option. I searched high and low and found a bag of peanuts for dinner, served with a heaping side of language barrier. I went to sleep that night in a hotel with a midnight wedding celebration downstairs blaring music. Yep, this was the Asia I thought it’d be.
I had no idea what the Lord had in store.
We spent the next days praying for the month, visiting a Khmer church and getting a cultural debrief. Every time I prayed, something within me stirred. Sitting in church, my spirit fluttered at the beautiful sound of the Khmer songs. At the cultural debrief, my heart shattered into pieces as I heard the traumatic history of this country’s genocide. That week, we visited the Choeung Ek Memorial, more commonly known as The Killing Fields. Words cannot explain the solemn, yet hopeful atmosphere of that place.
The month continued and I saw the Kingdom of God like never before. My team was on the Unsung Hero Campaign which meant we traveled around to meet people who were doing Kingdom work. We came alongside them, encouraged them, prayed for them and set many of them up to receive future teams. I heard story after story of people acting on God-sized dreams. I saw the body of Christ working together –churches, individuals and organizations across the country cooperating to maximize the effect for the Kingdom. All the while, I saw people’s hearts beam outside of their bodies.
The passion and the hope and the love in this place is so tangible. I fell in love over and over again with children and ministries and servants of my God. Everytime I left a village, I felt like part of my heart stayed behind and I cried myself to sleep the night I had to say goodbye to Hope, a little girl with Cerebral Palsy under the care of BYKOTA House. .
I’m crying as I type this because I don’t want to leave this place that has captured my heart, even if it's to go to Africa – the place I've dreamt of since I was a white-haired little girl. I know the Lord is calling me to finish the Race, so I have to go on, I have to board the plane to Africa. However, right now, it’s the last thing I want to do.
I didn’t think there was room in my heart to love Cambodia. I thought it was all about Africa and Latin America….and you know what? I was right. There wasn’t room for Cambodia in my big, beautiful heart. I am amazed at God because He continued to expand my heart to love and love and love and love some more. Sometimes He stretched it so much that I was afraid it might break, then He kept stretching and stretching and it happened. My heart broke and it was and is so very painful, yet beautiful and I wouldn’t have it any other way because He is mending it up with Cambodia stitched inside.
Pray for my heart to make this transition. Pray for this passion and love for Cambodia to be hidden in the depths of my heart until the Lord reveals His divine purpose for it. Pray for the moment that my feet hit African soil, that moment that I always thought would spark something to life in me. Oh and pray for our uber travel day ahead – Phnom Penh, Cambodia to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam to Doha, Qatar to Entebbe, Uganda and then a bus to Kigali, Rwanda!
Jenn Dannelley
