Yesterday, I watched as Cambodian police officers pulled a dead man out of the river.
Hang on, I’m gonna back up bit.
We showed up in Cambodia a few days ago, really not knowing what to expect. My first impression of this city was that of being a little overwhelmed by the chaotic atmosphere, there are people and motorcycles and tuk tuks EVERYWHERE! There is no rhyme or reason to it. It’s like the city is a living, breathing, flowing organism, and people are the blood running through its veins.
We are working with an NGO called Love 146. They have been taken advantage of by short term missions teams in the past, so they ( understandably so ) are a little hesitant to let us jump right into their ministry in the Red light district. So, they have asked us to prayer walk the various bar areas for our first week. It was honestly a little discouraging at first, but a few days ago we took the time as a team to share and encourage each other ( by the way I have a new team and they are great! You can see all of them on the left hand side of my blog ) and commit to doing whatever we could do in order to be present in the ministry the Lord has given us. Prayer walking and whatever else may come, we committed to casting off all of our fleshly frustrations and to be present where the Lord has placed us.
Just a few short hours later my teammate Heather and I went out to do our 2 hour prayer walk. As soon as we started I saw these two guys that I felt the Lord was telling me to talk to. One of them was asking for directions to a clinic because he had a cut on his arm and, being an EMT, I offered to look at it for him then confirmed that he should go to a clinic. That was it. But, after that God started a series of encounters where we were able to encourage people, BAM BAM BAM, one after the other. We met a Swedish guy named Tony, who lived in India for 25 years and taught Tai Chi there. Then we saw a wreck between a moto and a tuk tuk where a young girl was badly hurt and bleeding. I went to check her out, there were people suffocating her and this Polish guy was trying to help her. She had some bad lacerations to her knee and elbow, but the worst part was that the tuk tuk ( a tuk tuk is basically a cart pulled by a motorcycle taxi ) had struck her in the head and her head was swelling up badly. She was responsive to verbal stimulus but her responses were very slow, luckily there was a clinic right behind us with doctors, so we took her there. Lastly , we got to talk to the Polish guy and encouraged him and spoke some life into him, he seemed to be in a rough place. We were blessed to get to tell all of these people how much Jesus loves them, while we were right in the middle of the red light district where people are sold, daily. After all of this was over, it felt like we had been going for hours and hours. I looked at my watch and 55 minutes has passed since we started our prayer walk.
After ALL of this, I went out again yesterday with Logan and Lindsay. We decided to go to the riverfront by the red light district because Logan had a strong sense that the Lord wanted us to go there and pray for Healing for someone. We had no idea what was in store.
As we were walking along the riverfront, we noticed a large group of Cambodians surrounding an area on the water. As we got closer, we realized that someone was laying, half in, and half out, of the water. Upon getting even closer, we saw that it was an older Cambodian man, and he was, in fact, dead.
Outside of my grandmother’s funeral, I’ve never seen a dead person before, so that was definitely a trip for me to come upon that. I have seen the Lord do almost every miraculous thing you see in the bible; I have seen the lame walk, the blind see, pain removed, curses lifted, demons cast out and lives turned around with love, yet, I have not seen Him raise the dead. Jesus said we would do greater things than He did, so why shouldn’t we pray for this dead man to come to life? Logan said he felt the Lord wanted us to pray healing for someone, wasn’t this just another form of healing? So we waded through the crowd of spectators until the dead man was literally laying at our feet, lifted our voices, and prayed. On the river front of a red light district in Cambodia, surrounded by Cambodians who worship buddah, we lifted our voices and proclaimed the Name of Jesus, unashamedly.
Everyone was watching us.
Everyone saw us and heard the name of Jesus, one guy even asked me about it.
The man was not raised to life, but Jesus name was proclaimed in an area where suffering was prevalent, where death was so common that little children were running around and goofing off mere feet from where the dead man lie. In THIS place, people heard the name of Jesus proclaimed, possibly for the first time ever, and as a buddhist monk walked by, looked, and did nothing, they saw three followers of Christ give honor and respect to a dead man and lift him up to Jesus, while the monk did nothing. I truly believe that while that dead man wasn’t raised, some of the people in the crowd saw something they had never seen before. They heard a name they have never heard before, and it will lead them down a road that will raise them from the spiritual death they are trapped in, and into LIFE in the fullest with Jesus.
In 2 Samuel 23, we see a story where King David and his Mighty Men are cornered by the Philistines in a cave. He makes an idle wish that he wants a drink from the well near the gate of Bethlehem, and his three mighty men broke through the philistine lines to get to the well and to bring their King a drink of water. Then, David does something very interesting. Rather than drink this water that his men risked their lives for, he takes it and pours it out as a sacrifice before the Lord. I am sure he was hungry and oh so thirsty, yet he still chose to pour this very valuable thing out as a sacrifice to God. Likewise, we should take one of the most precious things we have, the thing we work so hard to protect, to make better, and pour it out before the Lord. That precious thing, is our Life. Like David poured that potentially lifesaving water out as a drink offering to the Lord, so also should we pour our lives out as drink offerings to Him. Pour out your expectations of what you think everything is supposed to be like, look around you and see where God has intentionally placed you, then ask Him who He wants you to love. If you do this, you might just get the opportunity one day to pray for a dead man to come to life.
