What does it look like to cram nine missionaries onto bamboo sleeping mats under five mozzy nets hung in the upper room of a simple yet lovely cambodian home? It looks like family, and it looks like the kingdom of God in a small village in the province of Takeo, Cambodia.
After recuperating from our time in Svay Rieng, we packed up our things and headed south for twelve days- days that would touch our lives in ways we never saw coming. Our ministry was entirely spirit-led, so it turned into an amazing adventure. We went on prayer walks around the village- walks that took us to both likely and less-likely places. We visited the homes of some of the local families where we prayed over the people and over the land. We hiked up the mountain that we lived near and built an altar next to the buddhist tamale at the peak. There we worshipped our king and we prayed for the province and over the kingdom of Cambodia.
On one of our home visits we met with a woman who wanted prayer for healing. We got there and quickly discerned that we needed to take her to the hospital. She had a two week old gash on her ankle, that was massive, deep and visibly infected, from an accident with a motor blade. She had seen a nurse for stitches, but those had torn out of her soft tissue and made things worse. At first, she didn’t want to go with us because her family couldn’t afford it, but we knew she needed to or she could lose her whole foot. We took her to the hospital, where she was seen and where she needed to stay for a few days. The whole process – the daily cleaning, the hospital stay, the sugar for the wound, painkillers – ALL OF IT, cost twenty dollars and this woman got to keep her foot. But this story doesn’t end there; While we were at the hospital, we got to pray for eight other patients. We saw three people get healed, we cast out demons, and we saw four people come to know Christ as their savior. For one woman the difference was literally life and death. And it was all due to our obedience in taking the lovely lady to be cared for at that hospital.
We built really strong relationships with this woman and her son, Kim Hong throughout the week. The family we were staying with quickly became like our own, we gained a mum, a sister and a baby brother. Our translator Sam was this incredible young man with a strong brave heart. He primarily manages teen challenge and a rehab centre for boys; but his dreams with God are even bigger. He has plans for a new community centre in the village and for a new ministry that he will call “Sons of God”, and for a traveling medical ministry based in Takeo. We got to be a part of Sam’s current ministry when we went to teen challenge to play volleyball with the boys. We also got to know the other team he was working with from the world race. Together we worshipped almost every evening, filling the nights with our voices - with our praise. We made with them the kind of friendships that go the distance – that will stretch around the globe as we go our separate ways. We asked God to meet us in a big way, and he obliged. We saw healings, we saw deliverance, we saw freedom and salvation, and we saw relationship within the body of Christ. We saw, simply put, the glory of God in the province of Takeo.
