Heavy-Hearted in Bangkok

Friends,

While I am defeated and downtrodden this morning in wake of ten heart-wrenching days in Cambodia, a weight in my stomach that pulls to be home, and the morning's discovery that I lost my cellphone in Khmer lands, God remains good, and I'm trying to affirm that now and not dwell on else. I arrived in Bangkok from Phnom Penh yesterday morning, and I fly to China within hours.

So much of Cambodia was a tremendous blessing to me, witnessing and facilitating the Lord's work, and yet I keep coming back to my last day in the country, when I bicycled to the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng Prison of the Khmer Rouge. A Holocaust camp in the East: mass graves, horrors, the after-effect of Pol Pot's 1970s plot of genocide. My mind twists and turns around the motivations and deranged morality of those who killed, while my heart remains firm to remember that each skull not "once had" a soul but "now has" a soul.

I traveled most days with an adult Cambodian couple, their two daughters, and a microbiologist who has ministered in and out of China for the last 20 years. The five of them are all from my hometown. We scoped and considered opportunities to cultivate Godly growth in local areas over the next five years and distributed medicine to the ill and love to formerly enslaved teenage girls at a place called the Rapha House. I shared one morning what God is working in my life, pulling from, as usual, Luke 14: 25-27, Romans 12: 2, and 1 Thessolonians: 16-18. But most of my time was spent praying for the wisdom and leadership of the Cambodian man with whom I traveled as he shared daily the Gospel with his people, be they asking for money on the street or assigned to leadership positions within the Rapha House.

Both he and his wife escaped from the Khmer Rouge over the Thai border and fled to the US. Daily, as we drove to our work for the day, a sight of the land or people would cause them to tear-up with stories of their teenage flight from the Khmer Rouge. I'd listen.

I've yet no resolve or conclusion, no truths exacted from Cambodia and this heavy heart, except to continue in the Word and pray. I'm stalling my crusade through the Old Testament so to not start the New Testament until I land in the US. And reading John Piper's book, "Let the Nations Be Glad: The Supremacy of God in Missions", to be finished in two days so to start Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" before boarding a plane to Pittsburgh.

Oh, friends, I'm down, but that will pass. It's no mood in which to write you, but tonight I'm away to China in route to Hong Kong, and I fear our correspodence from now until the 9th will, when occuring, be brief, and soon enough draw to an end, as my summer's stay in Asia draws to an end. As I told my Dad last night when we spoke, I've learned so much this summer that has repositioned Christianity for me as not just a doctrine to understand and behavior to follow, but an alive and real seeking of God's will and face.

"And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy and
to walk humbly with your God" (Micah 6:8)

To love mercy,
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