As I mentioned the last couple posts, I truly did come to absolutely love everything about our ministry in Cambodia. I loved the village, our ministry hosts, the other teachers, the kids… especially the kids…
The Rebellion
In the first couple days of our ministry time, I started hearing talk of this girl in the oldest class who was actin’ up. She gave all the teachers that cold stare and wouldn’t listen to them, she seemed to be the cause of most of the hurt feelings among the kids, and the cause all of the hurt shins among us (she would full force kick em with hers… it was actually pretty impressive when I wasn’t hopping around in pain). And also she wouldn’t tell us her real name, so her temporary, temporary nickname was brat girl. (Conviction set in pretty quick over that one 🙂
The Calling
From the time I started to hear the rumors of her rebellion though, God put her pretty heavily on my heart to seek out and love. She turned out to be one of my most consistent manhunt players, which was awesome, and so I ended up getting to spend a solid amount of time with her every day.
The Victory
As the weeks went by and I spent more and more time with her, I got to watch the most heartwarming thing happen inside of her. A genuine light started to appear in her eyes when she smiled. Her outward behavior didn’t drastically change, but the motivation behind her physical attacks shifted from rebellion to teasing affection. She also started showing up with her best friend to the soccer field in at evenings when we’d be out there playing with the boys to sit on the side and watch – every now and then running out to try to play a trick on us or something. From my perspective it also seemed like her relationships with everyone else improved as well, which was awesome. And then the very last day when we were saying goodbye to all the kids, for a lot of my team she was the hardest to say goodbye to, and she was crying harder than almost any other kid in that room… and she was one of the oldest.
It’s a small but meaningful testimony to me and it was honestly so beautiful to watch happen.
Leaving Day
The day we left was really heartbreaking for all of us, the other teachers, the kids, and even a handful of random adults in the community that hung out around the school sometimes. We had about like six rounds of goodbyes, and then kids we said goodbye to earlier in the day would circle back around for the second, third, and fourth ones, and it just seemed to keep going. The goodbye to our afternoon class was beautiful though.
We did about 30-45 minutes of dances with the kids at the end of each day in the little concrete building they used as their church. At the end of this day it was really hot, we were all soaked in sweat, and there was a visible cloud of mist hovering over all of us from it. I walked off the stage to start hugging the kids though, and the tears started coming. For about twenty minutes we all just sat there holding, comforting, and praying over them all, with worship playing through the speaker. It was the perfect consummation of our month and a half of ministry, and it left a sweet and encouraging memory seeing the kind of impact God can work through willing servants.
It was an incredible 6 weeks of ministry, truly, and I could probably keep writing blogs on it, but I fell very behind, and it’s time to move to Africa.
In Christ,
Jackson
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