Today has been absolutely amazing! Joni (my roommate) and I woke up well before our alarm was supposed to go off. This gave us time to chat and get to know each other. God made her my roommate for a reason! After our chat we both got up and got ready for church. The breakfast that we ate at the hotel was pretty good. We had omelets and toast. Nothing too exciting but it definitely reminded me of home. After we were all done we loaded everyone up in the bus and traveled through town to New Life Church. The service reminded me a lot about Common Ground. The worship part of the service was very fun and lively. People were dancing and really into the music. The crowd was younger than the other churches the girls have attended before. I think this will be good in the long run because they will have more people that they can relate to and that will reach out to them. They need a sense of community, especially in a faith that is new to them. The sermon was perfect (I’ll get into that a little bit later). After we got done with church we ate lunch. It was a great experience because we all ate family-style and we tried a bunch of different types of traditional Cambodian food. I pushed aside my annoyance of textures enough to try some things that I would not have necessarily tried before. It was a lot of fun! After that we traveled to the Daughters’ house where the girls live. It is such a cute little house. They sleep on the second floor and the living areas are on the first. It is on a fairly large plot of land and they hope to develop it over time if the property owners will let them do that. We played some hand games with the girls and then retired to the hotel to get some much needed napping in. The girls came to the hotel for a pizza party and for a fun activity. We made nametags with the girls so we could get to know the names, but we could also help them with their English. We had to drawn an animal that the first letter of our name started with. I "drew" a snake. I'm definitely not an artist so it doesn't look much like a snake. The girls then left to go back home and let us have a team meeting. Now I'm laying in bed about to fall asleep on my computer so I'm typing as feverishly as I can. Hopefully I'm making some sense but I can't promise anything.
The sermon related completely to what Joni and I were talking about this morning. God calls us to go and do and we have to answer His call. I had thought about this before when I received the letter that was telling me not to come on this trip. But a faith-filled life is about being a player in the game and not a spectator. Being a player takes work, it can be fun, but it can be a hard time too. Being a spectator is about the fun of the game. Being a player can be fun also, but it takes on a completely different meaning for the spectator as it does for the player. I'm not going to be a spectator in the life that God has planned for me. I'm not going to watch as the days idly pass by. I want to touch people's lives and have them touch mine. I'm being blessed just as much as we are blessing the people that we come into contact with here.
The other part of the sermon that struck me was that there is a difference between believing and having faith. Faith is an action. It's when God calls us to do something out of our comfort zone and we follow His calling because we believe in Him and His glory and His grace. It's not having a life devoid of problems, but being able to overcome the problems that come into our lives. God wants us to put our faith in Him so He can work miracles in us and through us. I truly believe that is why God has brought me to Cambodia. I'm learning so much about myself and about the wonderful people that God has put on this earth.
A few of the girls at the Daughter's Project are being "tested" to see if they can make a dress completely on their own in 10 days or less. This is one of the girls showing off her hard work.
This is Srey Nouch. She's my photography body. She asks for my point-and-shoot camera so she can take pictures of everyone. She is absolutely beautiful inside and out. If I could bring her home I would in a heartbeat. She's 10 years old.
This is eyeball fruit (I don't know it's actual name but they call it that because it's exactly what it looks like). It has the consistency of what I think an eyeball might have. It tastes like something at home but we haven't been able to really figure it out yet. The white fruit with black spots is dragon fruit and it's very tasty.
Our nametags that we did with the girls. Saran is on the right and she is a sweetheart!!
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