"I wonder what sort of tale we've fallen into?" - Samwise Gamgee

There is a little shop here in Phnom Penh’s touristy Russian Market that sells these beautiful embroidered banners. The labyrinth of stalls in this market, which we unashamedly frequent, is often very repetitive. A whole row of jewelers; there are your North Face backpacks, there’s your Cambodian-tourist parachute pants… the items go on and on. This one stall in particular is a one of a kind. It is backed by a local Christian NGO and helps at-risk women with employment by teaching them the trade of screen printing. The result is these beautiful banners they sell which display scriptures from the Bible. Gretchen and I put our order in a couple weeks ago for a customized banner. We wanted to get the first verse from a passage of scripture in the book of Romans which memorializes many of our experiences here.

Romans 8:18 is the verse on our banner. The text speaks the promise God gives us for persevering through the pains of the present world. It urges us to consider the present sufferings and pains of the world as incomparable in light of the glory of God to be revealed to us in the coming future. We wait in hope of this. We search in hope of this. We all have this hoping driving us in all sorts of directions. Toward accumulation of money sometimes; toward success at work other times; toward the pleasures of sex; toward the desperate approval of all people. The desire drives us to many destinations in search of satisfaction. The satisfaction is coming though and has been promised by the God who does not lie and who is always faithful.

We’ve seen a lot of sad things here during our trip, to sum things up briefly. Sadder and harder things than we’ve every known. It’s had to trust that God is in control of all things sometimes in view of the seemingly insurmountable work to be done to end pain and suffering. He’s doing it though. We also get to see the changed lives that faithfulness to God’s promises yields. Commitment to working with God toward his promises does not come up empty at the end of the day. God’s promises are not empty. His truths are full of life, full of joy, full of strength; they are full to the brim with satisfying tastes of joy! Big, delicious gulps of desires-fulfilled.

This morning we attended church an area north of the city call Svay Pak. This little, economically depressed town is known for its once thriving sex industry. Thriving in the sense that nearly every door front in the town may have once offered any service a buyer wanted. Today the place is significantly different. The seeds of God’s promises were planted and have matured into beautiful life and growth. The church there, of nearly 200 I would guess, was a huge encouragement to us - seeing the smiles of their faces, the passion in their voices, and the family-feel of the whole group.

Walking in though, we also got news about the little, sweet boy who HPC has been loving so tenderly for the last few months. Sok passed in a Vietnamese hospital just days after we had received news of his recovery from heart surgery going so well. The pain of his passing for his father and many of our staff is real and difficult. Please keep them in your prayers. (Here is a post from the HPC Director, Alli Mellon, on the news of Sok’s passing.)

Sok’s story goes on though. Like each of us, he is in the hands of a loving God who does not let even a sparrow fall outside of his knowledge and purposes. God’s story encompasses us all and we have a role to play. We must all wake up to this! Wake up to the reality in an all-of-life-encompassing sort of way; but also wake up the the reality in an every-day sort of way. Each day our head raises off our pillow, God is calling us to Himself, into His story, and toward our greatest joy. We each have scenes to play in the epic story that culminates in God’s great and magnificent glory and our everlasting fullness of heart. The Khmer have a word here that translates in English to “favorite.” Its literal translation though means that the favorite thing “makes your heart full.” That’s what God is promising us! Our hearts will be full - unimaginably, unknowably, satisfyingly full like only our deepest desires can hint towards now.

“One day soon we will round a bend in the road, and our dreams will come true. We really will live happily ever after. The long years in exile will be swept away in the joyful tears of our arrival home. Every day when we rise, we can tell ourselves, My journey today will bring me closer to home; it may be just around the bend. All we long for, we shall have; all we long to be, we will be. All that has hurt us so deeply will be swept away. And then real life begins.”

Josh, 8/18/13