This month we are working in an international seminary. We get to teach classes on public speaking, grammar, English conversation, and music. We live alongside the students and professors, joining their schedules in classes and midday chapels. Each day my team takes to the rooms with coffee in one hand and loose lesson plans in the other.
For the public speaking courses we have been asking them to share a 3 minute version of their testimonies. Being an international school we had four different countries represented among our first class alone — Cambodia, the Philippines, China, and Myanmar. Hearing about how each of them ended up in the same room as us has been astounding in and of itself.
Some students and their families have tragically been affected by the Cambodian genocide. Many students grew up in non-Christian homes, and came to this school only to learn English. Others didn’t tell their parents they were coming to Bible school because it would cause shame to their families. Some didn’t want to come here but were coerced, and some didn’t know they were coming until they were dropped off.
I know it’s a cliche thought, but to have the privilege of sitting in a room with students from all around the world and hear of their pain, but this hope they have because they now believe in something bigger than the pain, astounds me. It’s simple but powerful. And it moves me to believe wholeheartedly that we each have powerful stories to tell—we are all, in Donald Miller’s words, “trees in a story of a forest.”
Grateful for the World Race because I’m getting to bear witness to a whole month’s worth of stories from these trees, and they’re getting to bear witness to mine
