Baby News?

We wish we had some baby news for you all.  We are waiting, so you will have to wait along, too.  The doctor is looking to induce if the baby doesn’t come soon.  February second may be the date.   Everything looks good.  Courtney is feeling great, but really uncomfortable.

We are staying in a serviced apartment in Bangkok with Jeff’s parents, Dick and Margaret.  They have been a big help, especially with Weston.  Yesterday, we went out to eat, leaving Grandma and Grandpa to baby sit.  This was a chore they were more than willing to make, as it has been a year since they spent time with their Grandson.  We enjoyed a few hours reprieve from the needs of our 18 month old, enjoying some Japanese food.

We had planned out our stay in Bangkok before we came.  It was the least expensive option, but with the best quality of health care available.  Now that we are here, our time line here may be extended.

What we discovered is the hospital needs time to produce the birth certificate.  They are saying 15 days.  This is a long time to wait!  Bangkok is a fun place to be stuck, but not that fun.  We are hoping they can expedite our birth certificate, giving us one in the Thai language only, where we can get it translated at a private firm, near the embassy.  Maybe we can shave some time off our stay?  This is the hope.  We will talk with the doctor about this on our Thursday visit.

Please pray…
…our stay in Bangkok will be short.
…Grandma and Grandpa will get some quality Grandson time.
…for Courtney and the birth of our daughter.
…Sret and Daah, our Cambodian co-workers working in our place in Koh Kong.  They are very busy.
…Pat and Jeannie, our American co-workers.  They have just arrived in Koh Kong after a six month home assignment.  Please pray for their re-acclamation to Cambodian life.
…Kamrint and his soccer ministry.  He needs more workers to help him.
…our finances.  We are running short in support.  Maybe it is because we have been in Asia for three years?  It is a long time to be away from our supporting partners.

The Hope Video

“The Hope” video is a production of Mars Hill.  It is quiet possibly the best video presentation of the Gospel in the Khmer language.  I was invited to show this film in the village of Bak Klong, where we have been sharing the last six months.  Here is a poor quality video I took.  It’s dark, sorry.  We had over a hundred people attending (and five chickens and several dogs).

Shark Island (off the coast of Koh Kong)

Joy to the World

Joy is an elusive treasure.  It amazes me how Joy is dispersed to humanity.  To some, Joy is abundant and to others, it has been so absent, that they can’t remember the last time they had it.  The hope of Joy is the motivator for people to enter into ministry.  It is the fruit of love, the result of showing love to another human being.  If you don’t love anyone, then you won’t have any joy.

Joy is amazing.  It can be present during physical and emotional pain, under hardship, loss, and a bleak future.  I have seen rich men without it, wanting to end their life.  I have seen dirt poor men with it, consistently excited to see what the next day brings.

Joy is not the results of thrill.  The search for excitement does have a byproduct which briefly resembles Joy, but quickly vanishes.  And thrill requires more thrill to recreate the feeling.

Joy to the World.  The hymn tells us that Joy became available to the world when the Savior came.  The Lord, our creator, came to establish His love relationship with all the nations of the world.  It became visible for all of us to see.  While we were practicing self love (which has no Joy), Jesus came to love us (which is the source of all Joy).  He showed us this for certain by dying for us on the cross, a penalty that we deserved, bearing it in our stead.

I saw Joy in my friend Kamrint, today.  Here is his situation: he is a poor young man.  His parents have broken all relations.  He has no family to care for him.  He lives just above destitute poverty.  He sleeps on a cot at night in our dusty gym, alone.  He owns next to nothing.

Kamrint, being inspired by the Savior, has started a soccer (football) ministry here in Koh Kong.  Because of the Joy he has received, he spends his free time, leading over fifty young boys in the game.  He is the sole leader, coach, cheerleader, and referee for all of these boys (can you say, “overwhelmed?”)  Yesterday, Kamrint spent what little of his own money to throw a Christmas party for his players.  He was the MC, entertainer, cook, and janitor for the festivities, which kept him busy late into the night.

This morning, Kamrint broke his big toe teaching his players.  I saw him hobbling down the street, in pain, his toes swollen twice their normal size. He was exhausted. But, Kamrint was bubbling over with Joy.  His players are improving, he has a match scheduled next week, and the Christmas party was a huge success.  He couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen next.  He wouldn’t trade places with anyone.

Kamrint doesn’t have the money to get his toes x-rayed and couldn’t care less.  He was filled with Joy because he loves those fifty soccer boys.  And they love him.  When I saw him and this Joy I said, “this is supernatural!”  He is a hero.

If the Lord decided for me to swap places with Kamrint, even just for the day, would I have Joy?  Would you?  I’m ashamed to say, I don’t know. I would hope so, yet I am usually over optimistic of my self.  Probably not.  I would most likely be in shock.

Joy is amazing.  It turns people into heros.  It elevates the soul.  It is a treasure.  And it comes only from love.

I am so glad I get to be apart of helping Cambodians discover Joy.  I don’t bring Joy to them.  I don’t create Joy.  I am simply a witness to Joy.  I help people foster Joy.  I help people share Joy.  It is in this process that I get a little Joy myself.

Coming Events:

January 14:  We leave for Bangkok and the birth of our daughter
January 17:  Teammates Pat and Jeannie return to Asia.
February 26: Koh Kong Prayer Summit

Ping Pong Tournament at the Club

We are praising God for the first Ping Pong Tournament hosted by the Koh Kong Health Club this past Sunday! We hope you will be rejoicing as we share how God answered our corporate prayers!

God amazed us with His plans. Four days before the tournament several applications for participation had been taken from the club, but none returned. We began to worry. How do we hold a tournament with no players? Later that same day, 2 of our referees, Greg and Jane, fellow co-workers from Phnom Penh, were on their way to Koh Kong when they got an unexpected phone call. Their landlord gave them an eviction notice, they had to be out of their residence in 4 days!  They will not be attending. Greg and Jane had the experience in tournaments.  We had no idea how to referee a ping pong nor how to bracket a match.  Maybe we would be forced to cancel?

The evening before the tournament 8 application were submitted! One of our co-workers from Phnom Penh, Annissa, agreed to stay on and do the bracketing for us while Jeff, Kamrint and Sret got a crash course in refereeing a game.

The morning of the tournament we were surprised to see how many spectators had arrived to watch the games. It was a great encouragement! Not only were there youth their to watch but older men from the community including some police men! All the applicants were older, too,

After the rules were explained everyone was excited to start. Within three hours we were in the play offs for first and second place. All the contestants had great sportsmanship and in the end were very grateful for the tournament. Many people comment that “next year”  we should do it again but bigger and get sponsorship from local business and broadcast it on the radio.

Several of the spectators had never been to the gym before, but we knew their faces from the community.  Next year when our teammates have all returned we hope to see more interaction with the spectators and possible activities or games for the kids.  The opportunities are endless! Maybe a guest team from a church could come and host the Tournament for us while we mingle with the crowds?

Thanks for partnering with us and look forward to next years collaboration in the second Ping Pong Tournament!

Evangelism Explosion and the Bak Klong “E” Team

AM Ministries

My friend Bruce Campbell of Assisting Missions Ministries came for a visit.  He was a big encouragement to Courtney and I.  I was able to introduce him to my friend Phearum with Evangelism Explosion Cambodia.  We together found some ideas for raising money for more Evangelism Explosion seminars.

My Gym Friend S

S came over today.  He is a friend from the gym.  He has been a regular there since it’s opening, and we have had dinner a few times together.  We have shared with him our faith on a number of occasions, having some great discussions, but no mutual understanding.  He is a Buddhist and has no desired to change.

He came over today to talk to me about leaving his wife.  S, his wife, and two kids, live with her parents and her siblings in a small house near my home.  He has skills in making jewelry, but since the financial crisis hit Cambodia, he has had a dramatic drop off in work.  There isn’t much need for jewelry in a country where money is tight.  A year has passed and S’s family is still struggling to make ends meet.  Now arguments are regular; the endless blaming one another as to why they are struggling.

He came to me asking for work.  If he divorces his wife, he will have nothing, except the clothes he wears.  He will be homeless, because even the tight quarters he lives in now will be obviously closed to him.  He will be without transportation as his in-laws own his motorcycle.  And he will be without income, as he will be leaving her family business during a down financial climate (half the population without work). He will also be without family, as his own mom and dad are also destitute in a province worse off than my province of Koh Kong.

So what was my advice to S?  Obviously, I though leaving his wife was a bad idea.  I was actually surprised he could not see that his options were somewhat limited.  He argued with me, thinking if he only had a job, or a bit more money, he could divorce his wife, be respected again, and have peace.  I told him I thought he would be jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, penny-less and alone.

The problem with S is he thinks that his reality now, will be his forever reality.  He believes the present fighting issues with his wife, will be all that his future holds from now on.  He wants to be free from the pain he feels.  I do not denying he is going through a hard time.  I take issue with his pessimistic view of the future.

What S doesn’t realize is the force his Buddhism plays into his decision.  This world view does not focus on the past, as there is nothing you can do about it.  Nor does it focus on the future, because that is just speculation.  S is looking only to the here and now.  His present situation is not peaceful, and he wants peace.  Even Gautama left his wife and new born son to find peace, later becoming the Buddha.

Wanting peace is not a bad thing.  Everyone wants peace in their lives.  My perspective is peace is still possible for S within his family, especially if a redemptive force is added into the mix.  Sure he is fighting with his wife and times are tough, and he has no peace now.  But who knows what tomorrow will hold?  It may just get better.  And if he is redeemed, I know for sure, he will have a true and lasting peace.

Please pray for S.  Pray that he will look beyond his current struggles.  Pray for his redemption and healing in his relation with his wife.

From The (London) Times December 27, 2008: As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God Missionaries

From The Times December 27, 2008 As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa’s biggest problem – the crushing passivity of the people’s mindset Matthew Parris

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it’s Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work. It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I’ve been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I’ve been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God. Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good. I used to avoid this truth by applauding – as you can – the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It’s a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith. But this doesn’t fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing. First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world – a directness in their dealings with others – that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall. At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi. We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission. Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers – in some ways less so – but more open. This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. “Privately” because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service. It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man’s place in the Universe that Christianity had taught. There’s long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours. I don’t follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition. Anxiety – fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things – strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won’t take the initiative, won’t take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders. How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds – at the very moment of passing into the new – that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it’s there,” he said. To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It’s… well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary’s further explanation – that nobody else had climbed it – would stand as a second reason for passivity. Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I’ve just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates. Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted. And I’m afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

Our October

The Koh Kong team has slimmed down it’s members in country. Our teammates, James and Lynette and family, and Pat and Jeannie and family, are temporarily in the US on home assignment. Pat and Jeannie return first this coming January. This leaves Sret and Daah, our Cambodian teammates, and us pushing forward, waiting for our teammates to return. We have set up our work here expecting this time with half of our team in US. It is a common occurrence with missionaries; always coming and going. I anticipated these few months would be a time in which I could just maintain what was going on, and not push forward with any new endeavors. Courtney is pregnant, and busy with Weston (15 months old). I figured there would be needs for me to help her out at home. However, our Boss, the Lord, had other plans for me.

We have see a lot of results from our Evangelism Explosion seminar. Not in the way of many new believers, yet, but a fire among the believers trained to share the Gospel. They are hungry to get the message out. Especially in the neighboring village of Bak Kong. Bak Klong was the village I had mentioned in my previous post: “Swiper no Swiping.” Only one believer from that village was trained in EE, but what he had learned he shared with other believers there, and a new group has formed. This group, including well as Sret and myself, meet together on Friday afternoons. We have been practicing the things they learned in EE, and are even making new illustrations to use in sharing. They are boldly going out now, meeting with people they know already, sharing the Gospel.

Our plan is to quickly include any new believers in with our group. Going in with the prayer and singing together before we break up into smaller evangelism teams. We will include those new believers with the older, more experienced believers, in these smaller teams to get them exposure and experience in sharing. They will be mostly observing in the beginning, of course, later as they feel led, also participating in sharing.

My current thoughts are this: as the groups grow, we will split off in an organic fashion, half the group staying in the original Friday meeting, and the other half starting a new evangelism group. Bak Kong is big enough for maybe two or three teams, but there is room in the Koh Kong town and out lying villages for groups to go.

The second big task God has given since my teammates left is a young fellow by the name of Kamrint. I am hesitant in mentioning Kamrint to you, because he is a young man, without a family. What has been the case, in my experience here, is young men are very unreliable, and those who do not have family ties to a community are a nuisance, looking for action, and moving on. Yeah, I have been burned, but I can’t dismiss them all.

Kamrint was, at one time, such a young man as I previously mentioned. So much so, his own mom and dad have disowned him (only after they herd he became a Christian). Fortunately for Kamrint, he was allowed into the Youth With a Mission (YWAM): Discipleship Training school here in Cambodian and he got more excited about his faith. Somehow, WYAM decided to send Kamrint to Koh Kong for ministry experience at a small church I know. Kamrint had finished with his course of study with YWAM and had no where to go. So he came to me.

Not a penny to his name, and only the clothes on his back, he asked for our help in getting a job.  We gave him work at the gym in the evenings. In the mornings he teaches English to some local kids. In the beginning he had five or six students.  Now he has paying students, too many for him to keep his night job at the gym.

In his off time, Kamrint has started a ministry endeavor, on his own. He teaches soccer to fifty boys and Sunday, after bringing them to the local church. He needed only five soccer balls to get going. I am impressed.

The gym is also coming out of it’s slump. The rainy season is over, and more people are coming. I don’t have enough time to teach all the new people who are coming. I just go around and find out peoples names and answer short questions. I am glad to see more people coming. It was really quiet in there the last month.

Then Weston was sick with Roseola, only we didn’t know what it was. He just had a high fever, 103 degrees, for three days. As a new parent, I was surprised about how much stress a sick kid brought to me. We were worried, thinking he had Malaria or something, He is just a little guy, so such a high fever for so long…we weren’t sure how much he could take. But he is better now. His rash is completely gone.

So, that’s my October thus far, who knows what next week will hold?