April was a month full of blessings and curses. The main curse was the sun! There are not many places in the world that get hotter than it was here this last month. Let me paint a beautiful picture for you. Not only is it 100 degrees with 90% humidity, but in Phnom Penh there is an extreme lack of vegetation. Some people call it the concrete jungle. On top of that, the dust that was previously contaminated from open sewers drifts and sticks to everyone and everything. That being said, doing any activity during this month is pretty difficult. People take multiple showers a day just to cool their bodies down and everyone takes a nap after lunch. I love my wife so much because despite the physical conditions, Bre has been working 50-60 hours a week at Children of Hope (BTW they have No A/C) and has been dealing with children of all ages. Her role at the home is the staff and activity director, but she does much more. Since she took over this role, the mom of the house, Katherine, has left for the states for the first time in 5 years because by the grace of God, her son whom she is adopting, was granted a visa to America to visit her family and church. So as she is away the responsibility Bre has taken over is more than you could imagine. But Bre has been faithful every morning to walk to work and take care of a 1 year old baby, who has a cleft pallet and was on the brink of death only a few months ago before Katherine started taken care of him, and if anyone knows Bre they know how much the Lord is stretching her in this area. She will minister at the home from 6:30am-12:00pm and come home for lunch and then return from 3-8, sometimes later. She is amazing with all the kids, better than she or anyone could have anticipated. Please pray for her and this ministry as you can only imagine the amount of hard work, stress, and patience this job consists of.
The Pastors Conference in Svay Rieng was a huge blessing this month. Adam, Ti Khon, and I rode motos 4 hours to arrive to the village so that we could minister to the people. Normally we get around 60 pastors from 10 different churches to attend the all day conference but this time we only had about 30 show up. This was due to the farming schedule they have. Rainy season will be coming soon and that meant most of the pastors, whom don’t get paid to be pastors, were out prepping their land. Originally I was thinking that it wasn’t going to be as productive this month but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Through all the prayer that has been going out for these pastors to gain knowledge and understanding of the scriptures and how to study the Bible, we made a breakthrough. As you may know already, I have been implementing the Inductive Bible Study Method into my teaching of Acts. (Note that most of these pastors have an education level as low as 3rd grade) This month we went over Acts 13-14. Chapter 13 primarily deals with Paul’s sermon and I was able to discuss the preparation and relevance of Paul’s teaching to his audience. How Paul appealed to the Jews and the God fearing Gentiles while giving the gospel. We need to be strategic when we are presenting the gospel to someone. What I mean by this is that just as Jesus did with the parables, we need to relate the Good News with things that the people you are ministering to can understand. Then moving on to chapter 14, I had them break off into groups and use the Inductive Bible Study method to present what they learned and how they would share that with their churches. I was completely impressed by their responses and thoughts they had to share. Witnessing the progression of these men and women over the last year and a half has been completely encouraging. As we began this journey, there were many times where I started losing hope that maybe they weren’t interested in learning or maybe the lack of education was too much to overcome. This last trip was a testament to their love of the Word and more importantly their love for Christ. Let us continually be lifting these men and women up in our prayers to remain diligent to the reading and studying of the Word and to appeal to the Holy Spirit for direction. Our goal is not to show anyone how to lead a church, but simply point them to the scriptures and have the Holy Spirit lead them and their congregation.