I love you.
Three of the most powerful, yet arguably, over-used words in the American vocabulary.
Like money when an over abundance is printed- it loses its value, so are the words I love you when casually tossed around . . . they grow stale.
Last year in Romania I was re-awakened to God’s love for me. God’s love was not dormant, but in my heart phrases like, “Jesus loves me” or “God loves me unconditionally” lost their luster. I had simply heard them repeated to me over and over and over again since childhood. Their value to me was a head knowledge.
Okay great, God loves me . . . check. Next item on my super-spiritual, Christian list please . . .
But then God ignited something different in me as I walked the hills of Romania with him; or asked him to fling stars across the sky just for me . . . and he would! I was no longer content with the level to which I had known or felt God’s love all these years prior. Something was missing. I was still wanting and searching for something more. That month on the WR, God revealed Himself to me on a deeper level as Father. The deep love a father has for his daughter and it was in that love that I rested and reveled.
In Khmer class the other day a teammate asked our teacher, “Nek Gruu, bpiiek ‘I love you‘ Khmer taa mut?!”
(Teacher, the phrase ‘I love you‘ how do you say in Khmer?)
She answered, “knyom sroline nek”
. . . what came next shocked me.
“But in Khmer, we don’t use really.”
WHAT?!
She went on to explain. . . sometimes you will hear a husband say to his wife or maybe sometimes a boyfriend to his girlfriend, but really we don’t use it.
I asked, “What about between parents and children?”
“No,” she said. “Like, for instance, my mother, she has never said that to me.”
I came from a world where the words are so tossed around the potential for their potency to diminish is high; into a world where they are so rarely spoken that their value may not fully be recognized.
I have been asking Jesus the question, “What are the effects of both on a people and a culture?!”
In Western culture I see people devaluing themselves- I was one of them once- as a result, we hear God say, ‘I love you’ but then we tuck that information into the far recesses of our brains or allow it to roll off our backs as we keep on believing lies about our worth. As such, we are not living in the fullness of God.
Here in Cambodia, I wonder, what will happen when I begin talking to people about the Love of God . . . will they be able to grasp it? How foreign is this concept in Khmer culture? Will they even be able to accept that Creator God, Heavenly Father looks on them and utters these three powerful, little words, “I love you,” if they have never heard it from their earthly Father?!
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