Refugees.
So I have been home almost a month and I have yet to write this… here is goes.
My last week of ministry in Malaysia was one of my favorite weeks of the entire trip. It was also one of the longest, most exhausting weeks of the whole race, but I loved every second of it. Our last week, Nathan and I were staying with Cherished Flame in Klang, Malaysia. They had been working at a school for refugees all month. Lucky us, we got there and the next morning we left to go to the schools camp that they host once a year, where we would be sleeping in a room with kids for the week and working at the camp. These kids were the sweetest, they also needed 0 sleep, they would go to bed around 2am and promptly wake up at 5:30am. Needless to say, we had bags under our eyes for days after it was over. The camp consisted of different games, classes, activities, songs, and bible lessons. Etc. The kids were broken up into groups and practiced skits the whole week that acted out a bible verse. They then performed their skits at the end of the week along with songs that they had learned. It was a really great week of getting to spend time with the children, pouring into them and loving on them as well as getting to spend good quality time with the team we were with.
In Malaysia, you are unable to attend public school if you are a refugee. Without this school, the children would not be able to get an education. Thanks to this school the kids are able to learn, grow, learn about Jesus, get poured into and have friends that have gone through similar things as them. For the privacy of the parties who these stories belong to, I am going to simplify and leave out details: During my stay I heard some stories of older refugees, not from Malaysia. They saw their mom and sisters raped and murdered; they saw their father and brothers killed. By the grace of God, each of these individuals was able to escape and seek refuge in a nearby country. They had lived there two decades when the country kicked all refugees out. During their stay they had made friends with someone who generously bought them a ticket to Malaysia and told them to start over. Hearing their stories, my heart broke for them. As I watched as they so deeply still grieved from this, they think about it everyday. They have made a great life for themselves but they still have so much hurt from their past.
As I was listening to their stories I couldn’t help but think about the kids I had loved on all week and how a lot of them probably have similar stories. I began thinking that a lot of them might not have ways to process things that had happened to them. They might not have a way to heal, to comprehend what’d happened to them and see the Lords hand in it. As I looked at the camp (every second of the day was planned out), the kids loved this of course because it is camp! go go go. I started thinking about how people sometimes fill their life, book and plan every second out because they dont want to deal with the grief that they feel, it is too hard to revisit those things so it gets pushed aside, burried under all of the things that they are filling their life with. I realized that if I could be part of that process, if I could be part of helping them see God in their life, help them heal, help them process, gosh I would love to do that….
…. And with the completion of the race, God gave me the final pieces to things he had been teaching me all along and vision for my life… tell y’all in the next blog.
Ps. The smiles of those children are forever burned in my brain. Their laughter I can hear forever and the love that they showed me I will never forget.
I love you all!
