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Last night, actually the night of October 14th, we had our first family night with Lighthouse Battambang. Instead of having devotional at 11:30 am as we do every other day of the week, we have family night on Friday evenings.
This week in Battambang, the city has been sponsoring a boat festival. It’s been going on since Tuesday, but the for the weekend Battambang had pulled out all the stops!
Friday evening, our team, the house parents, and the students were gathered by the wife of our ministry host to give us the details of our outing. We ran around poking each other in the side as we waited for everyone to get there.
Lokhena pokes me and says “tickle” in English as she darts away. I love these students…
We are organized into 3 groups; 1 group with all the guys and 2 groups of ladies. We walk down to the festival as a group. Varun holds my hand as we walk and talk on the way. In between tickling her brother I also hold Sinat, the house mom’s, hand.
We get to the outskirts of the festival and Somaly stops us at the group meeting point. We get into our groups and we’re off!
I’ve already know that these ladies are so sweet and loving and beautiful. It warmed my heart to experience God’s love through them.
I’m black… just in case you didn’t know…
The Asian culture, amongst others, doesn’t value the deep brown hue of my skin. That is not just my skin, but their own as well.
As we walked through the festival there are booths here, booths there, booths everywhere with skin whitening products to help people achieve their ideal of beauty.
I looked at all the different foods, but I couldn’t avoid noticing all the men and women who had used those products to lighten their skin. And guess what… they noticed me too. So much so that they stopped and stared. They leaned over to their friends and made comments to each other as they looked me in the eye ignoring the warm smile I tried to give them. It broke my heart that as I held hands with girls from Lighthouse that these people would then start to look at them too.
We approached a beauty table. One of the ladies at the table started to ask Siekmourne questions about me. I watched as this little girl was made uncomfortable by the questions the lady asked her. I watched her try explain how we were connected. I watched helplessly as this girl had to deal the racism I was receiving as she spoke to this lady in Khmer, a language that I can’t speak.
Even though my heart was breaking for her, she never let my hand go.
She never let my hand go.
And as we moved on through the festival she made sure one of the girls came back held my hand whole time.
I’m supposed to be trekking the world to love, but God is using the world to show me how much He loves me.
He says to me “no matter what other people see, I love you and will never let go of your hand”.
He says to me “no matter what other people say, I love you and I will never let go of your hand”.
He says to me “I created you just how I want you to be. I love you and I will never let go of your hand”.
