Cambodia.
I didn’t know that much about this place before arriving here at the beginning of September & boarding a bus bound for Siem Reap along dusty roads, lined on each side with rice fields, homes on stilts, palm trees & naked babies laughing & playing. All I knew was that I was getting deeper into the heart of Asia, this country was Buddhist by law & in this particular country’s history there had been a horrific genocide that had destroyed a nation & forced it to start anew.
I had a lot to learn, & my first lesson was one in history.
Cambodia is now a young country trying desperately to find it’s footing in the world, a nation that has only been recovering from tragedy for 36 years. The Cambodian Genocide under the Khmer Rouge regime led by Pol Pot had taken the lives of roughly 2 million people. Two million Moms, Dads, babies, sisters, brothers, lovers & friends. So I knew I was walking into a hurting society that I didn’t fully understand…& I wanted to understand…& I wanted to help where help was needed, where young fools like me always assume help is needed…the dark alleys & lonely trenches.
The thing is though, our ministry this month was not exactly in the trenches. When we unloaded our bags after nightfall at a bus stop in Siem Reap, we were greeted by our ministry contacts & led to a roomy, air conditioned van. Unlike the humid, smelly, crowded vehicles I had known thus far on this journey. The van took us to a guesthouse with air conditioning, beds & hot water, where we would live with two or three teammates per room. These basic amenities made these accommodations feel like the Hilton. These things that I’d taken for granted at home & easily went without when they weren’t available were now luxuries & it felt amazing to not sweat in your sleep & to genuinely get clean under a cascade of water with actual pressure behind it…but I also kind of resented these comforts now (I’ll talk about that more later).
We rested a while & were taken to our ministry site, an International School, Samuel International School. A wonderful, beautiful, clean, good, professional school with 13 precious students & 6 fantastic teachers.
It was awesome…& not at all what I had expected.
Over the course of the next three weeks our ministry involved helping at the school in any way that we could, which was mostly teaching ESL classes, being Teacher’s Assistants & giving the teachers a break by taking over teaching regular classes some days. I was also kept busy (& blessed actually) by some classroom decorating projects, & I was given the opportunity to teach a couple Kindergarten Art classes. After the school day ended we had an hour break & then ran a Youth Group with missionary children from Korea. The school is actually run by a Korean couple, so we were a group of Westerners in Cambodia settling in with Koreans & teachers from the Phillipines. We would bike home after our long kid-filled days & we’d go out searching for supper at around 6:30 pm.
It was great. The kids are hilarious & beautiful, the school is amazing, love was exchanged all month long. Hours were spent using our gifts to serve a wonderful ministry & having fun with tiny, funny, loud kids & crazy, sweaty, loud teenagers.
But what I did in my soul was settle into a routine.
Things became monotonous & ordinary.
Life become a little…9-5ish, except it was 7:15-6.
And it was like I was subconsciously telling God I needed something more.
I was listening to a song by Beautiful Eulogy the other night & Propaganda’s verse at the end embodied my condition:
“Elijah saw the clouds split
And I know that God did it
And does it still
Still, His presence feels like chills
Right, and if I’m honest it doesn’t happen often
Something must be wrong
It’s boring when my life is more like the book of Ruth than Exodus
I’ve never seen the parting
Of an ocean
Or a cloud by day or a pillar by night
Just a normal everyday working of life
Where things that suck royally
Is evidence of His royalty
Scratch your temple
So deep it’s simple
Silly us, ignore the plain
We prefer a riddle
Dying to see a miracle
While holding God’s diary
Looking for signs”
Something the Lord has taken me through at home was office jobs, office jobs & substitute teaching jobs. Jobs where you don’t necessarily feel effective, where the Spirit doesn’t come in a mighty, howling wind, where you don’t see tongues of fire fall…but you trust Him anyways. That He is who He has been & that this is missions, because life is missions.
Among the various things that the Lord has been unearthing, renovating, starting, finishing & teaching me this month, one of the hardest lessons to learn & one of the best lessons to learn is the lesson of contentment with the ordinary…or maybe just the realization that nothing is ever really ordinary with Him, you know what I mean?
When we’re walking with the Lord things aren’t really mundane & commonplace by default…I feel like they become that by choice. The daily grind can be a place where we allow the Lord to refine us & teach us & give us joy & insight & perseverance, or it can be a calendar that we mark the days off of waiting for something better to come along…but…there’ll always be better than your better. Looking forward to something in your future to bring you relief from your present instead of looking up to your God to bring you comfort in your present can simply be diagnosed as discontentment. In looking forward to something other than what we have, we completely overlook the magnificence of just having the Lord present in our daily lives.
Some peoples’ discontentment comes in the hard times, the times when the world is crumbling around them.
My discontentment comes when life is easy. That’s when I curl up into myself & say “Lord, I’m coasting & I can’t stand it. Give me something to do just to be doing something for you…” & then I retract & get introspective to my own detriment. I spend too much time in my own head, looking for injustices & difficulties for which to pray, things which I don’t understand. Then I step away from the Lord because I don’t deserve Him. Then I get overwhelmed with my own lack of understanding, for which the only antidote is unwavering focus on & trust in Jesus. A trust that endures through questions & analysis. So that’s where I am, needing that trust unmovable.
I came on the World Race without expectations…or so I thought. The one place I expected myself not to be was the one place I found myself. Back in the classroom. No longer with the forgotten babies in India, or the alcoholic lady with bandaged feet on the roadside in Nepal. I was in the classroom with kids who have Moms & Dads & access to education. I was in Youth Group with kids who have missionary parents who love them deeply…and yet I am called to do the same. I don’t get to decide who needs help, the Lord does. I’m not just called to love the unloved, I’m also called to love the content, the happy, the popular.
It is not His will for me to forget the un-poor, to overlook the people who’s lives seem to be going okay. It is not His will for me to resent my middle class upbringing, or my free education, or my hot showers. It is not His will for me to resent material blessings, it is His will for me to accept them with genuine gratitude. If I can’t receive the physical gifts He gives, how on earth can I accept the magnitude of His love & affection for me? It is not His will for me to turn a blind eye on the rich just because He’s opening my eyes to the plight of the poor & letting me see how He sees. I feel like with heavenly lenses, the businessman on Wall Street walks around in rags while the disheveled old lady on the street side is wearing a crown & jewels…because to the Lord the condition of our soul is what’s visible. All people have equal need of the Messiah. Like…Beyoncé needs Jesus as much as the teenage boy on the streets, so I’m called to love Beyoncé & Beyoncé fans, even if the compassion doesn’t come naturally.
What if God sends me to Beverly Hills one day? Or the suburbs? Then what? Do rich white people not deserve His love as much as the orphan?
None of us deserve His love, that’s what grace is.
When I found myself in a classroom this month I thought I’d be doing the teaching (even though I’m not that great of a teacher), but I was reminded instead, of my position as a student, my identity as a student, even though I don’t have the little ID card from a university to get me deals at coffee shops. And honestly, I’ve kind of always wanted that little ID card. Haha. I’ve always wanted to drop names of schools & tell people my major, I’ve always wanted to present proof of my continued learning. But the truth is…this is a life of learning, & I don’t know if that’s cheesy to say or not, but it’s really, really true.
I was always the one that was like “Lord, I need to go to school, I need to get that degree. I need that credibility in my back pocket for conversations with people who I’m trying to impress, I need it for those moments when young people begin comparing studies & life experiences so I don’t feel so inferior. Send me back to school, for something. If even just a piece of paper & debt to prove that I pursued learning, something I dearly love.”
But the thing is, I have learned so much outside the doors of prestigious universities or community colleges.
I have gained an immense amount of understanding by missing out on what Western society considers a pretty integral part of growing up. I mean I would probably benefit from it, but this is His will for me right now.
I have learned that life is a classroom. And that any place can be an educational institution if we choose to glean from our surroundings. If I choose to learn diligence from the lady weaving bracelets in the heat of the day, if I choose to learn patience & humility from the friction between me & my teammates, if I choose to learn perseverance through redundancy. If I choose to recognize the fact that tons of unknown people do the “insignificant” daily grind with the magnificent love of God & that’s what makes them missionaries. The fact that they know Him so well they walk out an epic adventure far greater than that of 100 restless, discontent missionaries overseas even if they stay put for 30 years. People aren’t made missionaries through heroism, inspiration & mountaintops, or selected moments that are Instagram-worthy. People are made missionaries like Jesus, by Jesus, for Jesus. The Messiah, who lived the utterly human life of a carpenter until He was 33 years old, then He went out & saw water turned into wine. Life is awesome, but as Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes, it is also like striving after wind…it’s as simple as working hard & then passing away, & our eternity is far longer than our finite life on earth. There are the obvious magnificent & extraordinary things then there are the magnificent & extraordinary things hidden in the mundane, common & ordinary. Like sunsets, or human reproduction, or the veins on a leaf, or gravity, or the human heart. Like the water cycle or vocal chords, or the diversity of languages. Like bright green Cambodian crickets, or the power of human muscles that move our bicycles through the craze & danger that is foreign traffic. Like the fact that the Lord calls people to Himself from the slums and the skyscrapers. Like the fact that He called me to Cambodia from Fort Vermilion, Alberta…like what the heck?! And I’m not trying to sound like a Disney movie, I’m saying that Jesus & life with Jesus is mind-blowing, it’s the peak of human existence.
There are beauties & lessons you have to look for in what people may consider the plain things. I haven’t been a student since 2009, but I have no choice but to be schooled everyday by my Lord. I enrolled myself in this crazy, beautiful pursuit of pure knowledge the day I met Jesus, by nature He’s a teacher, so by divine appointment, I’m a student.
Plus, He’s got some pretty sweet classrooms…
