This morning, we took an hour's drive out of Battambang to visit a house church:
The agenda was to play a few games, sing three songs, have Pastor Troy deliver a short message, do a craft, distribute some school supplies and food, and then pray with and for the church leaders. The songs were "Peace like a river" with motions, "Allelu-allelu-allelu-alleluia" in Khmer, and "I can count on God," also with motions. We used the drive time as rehearsal time:
When we arrived, the women and girls played Duck-Duck-Lobster, and the men and boys got a soccer game going. The only reasonably flat space to play was about a twelve foot stretch of the unpaved driveway, but that didn't dampen the kids' competitive fire at all.
We then sang our songs for them, and I hate to admit this, but they looked baffled. Part of the problem was that Chloe was singing solo on the verses, since the rest of us hadn't quite learned all the lyrics. Another glitch was that I was doing everything mirror image to everyone else -- after all these years, I still can't reliably tell left from right. But some of the more upbeat youngsters motioned along, and they all clapped politely at the end. We adjourned to get the craft and distribution ready while Pastor Troy delivered his message:
After we did the craft and distributed food and school supplies, we talked through the interpreter with the lady who leads the house church. Pastor Troy asked her how she came to start the church; she said when she came to know the Lord, she felt like her heart was on fire, and she couldn't stop telling other people what had happened to her, and the telling snowballed until her home became a church. Troy asked what we could be praying for, and she asked that we pray for a Bible teacher to come teach her congregation, and also for her to be able to repair her home and improve the plumbing.
We prayed those requests, and if you're reading this, it would be wonderful if you prayed over them as well. This village is very remote, and there are no jobs, so the poverty is a heavy burden and people are drowning in unmet needs. A number of the kids have unmistakable signs of malnutrition and poorly-healed injuries. Sara noticed that a few of the girls wore makeup, age-inappropriate clothes and jewelry, and that they were noticeably far more slow to engage with any of us; Pastor Troy said very likely their parents are desperately poor and are trafficking them to make ends meet. Again, unspeakable and intolerable suffering, close enough to reach, and no 911 to dial, no sledgehammer to swing: we had friendliness and small gifts, and those were our ministry tools.
Back in Battambang we debriefed, and a genuinely difficult question came up: are we making any difference at all? We were there for about an hour, had a little limited, wordless contact, and gave away things that won't last long. Was it a waste of time? That question hangs over a lot of mission work, especially short-term. There were a couple of stabs at glib answers, but where we wound up is that real change, real ministry, is the cumulative force of loving and prayerful acts from a lot of people on a lot of occasions, permeated with trust that God marshals those efforts and directs them in ways we don't see to where the need is acute. Someone today, several someones, made a lifetime memory, and will do something, go somewhere, choose something, motivated in part by that memory. Someone really needed school supplies, and God arranged the delivery. What's naïve is the belief that if change didn't happen on the spot, visibly, as an observable outcome of a single group's efforts, then nothing changed and nothing is going to change. That's not how it works; not that quickly, not that straightforwardly, and not, as Mary Jo pointed out, like a movie plot, with everything neatly tied up in two hours. We came today and reached out where we saw openings. And we will keep it up.
In the evening, we saw a troupe of Cambodian acrobats, all teens or very young adults.
They were students at Phare Ponleu Selpak, an NGO that offers vulnerable children education and training. They were very skilled, and it was obvious a great deal of hard work and discipline went into working up the show. Tomorrow, we're off to another area church where we'll have a little more time, so more games, more singing, possibly two crafts, another message, and more human contact. We'll plant and water and trust God to give the increase.
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