Cambodia Seems Dusty (Poem)

I wrote this poem as a Christmas present to the Suh family, who are Christian Reformed World Mission's full-time missionaries in Cambodia. (Note: Most of the text effects are working okay in this format, though not all. I should probably learn how to edit HTML at some point)

Cambodia Seems Dusty

To you whom God calls here

Does the day start when the roosters crow?

Seems so:

The day awakes before the sun.

The sun is strong,

the rain is strong,

and the heat is strong.

In the villages, the people are friendly—

and weathered.

And everyone comes from the villages,

Where the rice fields lie flat

lollipopped with

coconut trees

and palm trees.

The buildings are bold

bright

blue and red and

orange and green and

traffic median-paint yellow.

The buildings are muted

wood and faded thatch,

rusty metal roofs.

The background is bright

rice-green to shame lawn-care,

tropically flowering-fruiting-and-flourishing

forests and fields,

farms, yards, gardens, and

painted pots.

The background is drab

dust-ridden paved roads,

dust-red dirt roads,

bare-trampled yards,

and construction zones.

The people are rich

See the thousand rooftops

‘round the royal palace?

The people are poor

we see the young ones,

see the old ones on the street.

The past is bleak—years

of power struggles,

land-grabbing,

and terror.

The past is glorious—because…

Who has built such temples?

The future is dark—fears

of corruption and prostitution

ever ensnaring,

stripping the richness of the

land from all people and

twisting it into the

pockets

of a few.

The future is bright—because…

The people are building,

The church is dawning,

And after all,

what is the miracle of man but

bones out of dust,

tendons out of dust,

flesh out of dust,

beating heart full of dust dissolved in rain,

running red only by the hands of

God?

And we know:

God’s hands are still moving,

And Cambodia has a lot of dust.

Development and Disciple-making for Everyone...

I’ve been reading and thinking recently about development. Have you ever read When Helping Hurts? You should. I had heard of it before, but I read it for the first time while I’ve been in Cambodia. I’m working on a review of it, which I’ll post here sometime. The following are just thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head:

I’ve been thinking that what the world mostly needs, after the return of the King and after prayer, is people who are satisfied to do small things in a small place for a long time and with great love (semi-quoting Mother Theresa). And for them to connect to, communicate, and cooperate well with their predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. That is, to recognize and respond to the fact that our life’s work will be only an infinitesimally small piece of Christ’s work through his body – we are mere cells.

I don’t think we need people who do great things – or at least, we don’t need many. Or, perhaps, none exist; everyone’s work is rather small. After all, we each have only 24 hours in a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, and “the length of our days is seventy years, or eighty if we have the strength.” (Psalm 90:10) The great names you hear of, you would never have heard of, except that many others worked alongside them. Even those who played great roles in awakening or converting the masses... if they played a role in converting thousands or millions of people, what of the thousands or millions who walked alongside these, discipling them? Jesus never told us to make converts.

Each small person does need to be united, though: to other people who want to serve and to the people we want to serve. In Cambodia, many NGOs just do their own work, reinventing the wheels that other NGOs have already developed. How much better if we could all be connected to one another and build off of one another! Another development message I hear loud and clear, over and over again is that the people we want to help also need to be invested in anything we try to do for them (with them). There was an NGO that came into Ploung Village to install toilets. They didn’t expect the people there to do anything, as though they were helpless. They didn’t ask them what they needed, as though they didn’t know. Now, most of these toilets lie utterly abandoned and unused.

But beyond this, I think that we ourselves need to invest our own lives in a deep way – by living in the places where we minster, and – as much as we can – in the way of the people we minister to. If we don’t stay in a small place for a long time, how can we minister to those who live there, and disciple them, teaching them how to live like Jesus? How can you teach someone to do something that you have never done? How can you ask something of your disciples that you are not willing to do yourself? From my perspective now, changing the world is about changing people, and changing people is about being changed yourself and entering into their lives – fully. How can you say that you love someone with the love of Jesus if you are not willing to incarnate?

More and more, I am convinced that we need to lay down our lives and share in the sufferings of those we want to reach, and remain. The changing world needs small people who are constant and overflowing with the love of Christ. The other influences of people’s lives – the ones are want to fight against – are not just coming for a short-term mission trip.

Not to say there isn’t some value in, for instance, my months here in Cambodia. But the value lies in my own learning, and hopefully also in how much I build up the people and organizations that will be here long-term. And there is some good in mixing it up and meeting brothers and sisters from different places. But I don’t think that ought to be a lifestyle for too many people.

Finally, development and disciple-making isn’t limited to the developing world or the inner city. Those of you who live in places where “bad things don’t happen” know that God has much work to do in your community as well. When I hear stories about people who prayed, “God, please don’t make me a missionary – and especially, don’t send me to Africa,” and went on to be missionaries in Africa, I sometimes wonder if I won’t end up back in Suburbia myself!

You can read the figures

You can read the news

People aren’t numbers

It’s your attitude (that’s flat)

How can we know if we don’t come?

How can we know if we don’t stay?

Incarnation grips me

and takes me to the city

Incarnation grips me

and leads me far away

I want to breathe the air

I want to eat the fare

I want to walk the dirt

With feet like yours.

I want to learn your words

I want to know your name

What if I feel the pain

Of feet like yours?

And incarnation grips me—

When I see Him:

Swaddled up in skin,

Rode a skeleton…

With a heart of meat,

He was made of dust –

Like the rest of us.