What is your name? How old are you? What made you smile? How did your laugh sound? Did you giggle in the classroom? Did you zoom through the dirt roads on your bike?
This past month I taught English to a class of 12 rambunctious elementary school students from ages 7 to 14. Each evening boys and girls in collared shirts skipped into the room and shuffled the plastic chairs and tables all around. Folding their hands… “GOOD EVENING, TEA-CHA. HOW ARE YOU?” Every response vibrated with excitement. Hands shot up. The classroom was filled with… LIFE.
Just the way it should be. Right?
Yesterday, the team spent our day off at S-21 Prison and one of 300 Killing Fields. Both places are memorials and teaching centers detailing the horrific Khmer Rouge genocide that occurred in Cambodia during 1975-1979, under Pol Pot. At each site, we were given a tape recorder and map, which allowed each individual to walk through at his/her own pace.
S-21 broke me.
Before Angkar took over, the prison used to be a school. A SCHOOL! A place of LIFE. The place I have spent the past 3 years of my professional life, as a teacher.
Classrooms were converted to prison cells and mass detentions.
Chalkboards detailed dehumanizing rules of conduct. Too awful to repost here.
Exercise equipment used for gallows.
People reduced to numbers, like #408… a 12 year old girl, one filled with LIFE, staring hell right in the face.
Where is the God of justice? How could you allow this to happen?
Thoughts of my own brother, a student, shot several times in the back, robbed of life… I couldn’t bear it. I pressed pause, ran out to the courtyard, and sat on a bench and cried. My friend Betsy came over and comforted me.
As my team debriefed, Stephanie shared her perspective on the power of deception. The mind is powerful! Blair Grace shared a vision she received on her tour. She cried out to God, “WHERE ARE YOU?” and he showed her several pictures of him in place of the prisoners, taking on their beatings. He reminded her that he took on the wrath of God for all of us, including the tormentors. Clarissa reminded us of Jesus’s Killing Tree (the cross).
Now more than ever, I know that Christ is our only hope of redemption. Left to our own flesh, we trade LIFE for mere ideas.
Please hear me. I don’t want this to be another cliché blog that simplifies the sufferings of humanity and offers a few consoling words.
I believe it necessary to end this post with a sobering word that burns on my heart, something I am meditating on this month…
Every thought makes an agreement with Heaven or hell.
Yes, every thought. That means our minds are powerful gatekeepers that empower the mission of God or Satan. It’s one or the other. Nothing in between. Every day we pledge our allegiance to God or to Satan.
At some point, Pol Pot and his “brothers” entertained an agreement with hell and therefore, pledged their allegiance to Satan. Deception sneaked in and invaded everything.
Christ is our only hope of redemption.
Christian, we must take our thoughts captive to obey Christ.
It matters.
1 Peter 5:8-11
Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like aroaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the dominion forever and ever. Amen.
