This blog is just a journal entry made about a week ago, so
it is in raw journal form. I will
paraphrase what I can, but bear with me:
3/22/09
Sunday Day 77 8:03PM
Yesterday at
Love In Action was crazy! They have such
little structure. In the morning, we
wanted to do a skit for them (10 Plagues of Egypt) and they just kept trying to
watch Defiance
[on the laptop there]. So we finally got
the skit done [with much attention lost] and did a craft where they were given
a heart cut from paper and drew in the heart what was in their heart. [After what had happened with the skit] we
thought it would be a total bust, but they actually all really got into it. They were all totally consumed in drawing
what was in their heart for like 20 minutes.
It seemed so
strange. [Last Saturday] we played games
and did relays and stuff and only half of the kids were really having fun. And the ones who were had no intentions of
following the rules or structure of a basic relay. And after about an hour, they just started
going off and doing their own thing with one another. It was chaos. Then we do some silly craft and they totally eat it up. Is it so rare for these kids to express
themselves? I guess they are orphans
[mostly taken from Rubbish
Mountain, but that’s a
whole other blog]. They’ve got a lot to
express. Srey Pet was talking to me
again. I love that girl. She is so real.
This whole month we’ve been saying
that Good Shepard has been the main attraction, and now I want to spend most of
my time at Love In Action. The boys need
a good role model and the girls need someone to open up to. I don’t think these kids were uninterested in
us (as we had recently assumed). I think
they just wanted us. No games. No teaching. No structure. Just us.
After the craft, we stuck the
hearts on the wall and got a picture with all the kids and us in front of it. Then we left for lunch. We went to the Russian Market (which we have
yet to figure out how it got its name) to eat and come back at 3:00. When we were leaving for lunch, all the kids
were asking us when we were coming back. They were really interested. We
were finally making a connection! When
we came back, we were going to do a little field day like before (slow
learners). But first we had to wait for
Koinonia to get there. So for an hour we
just hung out with them. We played
soccer for quite a while. I talked with
Srey Pet & two other girls for a while and was teaching them dramatic
faces. I wish we had more time. There’s so much I want to tell them. So much I want to help them grow. I want to be a strong role model for them and
to be a father to them.
Is this a form of brokenness? Is this God breaking me and preparing
me? No one knows what this next 9 months
will hold. So much has changed. So much has yet to change. I come out here praying and believing that
God was going to change me totally. But
I didn’t really know what that meant. I
expected to be changed in my daily habits like TV, eating, materialism and all
that. But it is so much deeper. God is so much bigger. I will not change out here. I will die out here. I had no idea what that meant until now. I thought I did. My pride said, “Die to Self? That’s easy. Simple theology of removing the self centered parts of ones life.” It’s not about becoming more like
Christ. It is about becoming
Christ.
I don’t think about home in the
same way anymore. I will not necessarily
see it in November. Home has nothing to
do with location. Cambodia has
taught me that. I found home here in the
moments when a child looks to a man as a father. As a man they long to be like. Children we are. How often are we at home?
9:00PM
