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Global Urban Trek 2008
Just ChangeJuly 13, 2008
We just had our mid-project retreat in Kampong Som.
We stayed at this wonderful bungalow village by the beach; it felt like we were in tropical paradise. It was great to check in with everyone and hear more about their sites and how they are feeling about our time in Cambodia.
We sang and swam in the ocean and prayed and asked big life-altering questions of one another and walked through a touristy quasi-red light district…just your average weekend. Sam leaves tomorrow, which is sad, but it was nice to have this concentrated team time together before he’s gone.
Our weekend was full of great discussion time that helped a lot of us (me especially) to process some of what we have been seeing and feeling with our host families and at our work sites. We also spent a lot of time discussing whether or not our Christian goals of ministry and justice are different from any other organization or group of college students. We are here because we see brokenness – does our view of wholeness through faith change the landscape of social justice; does it change the end goal to one of conversion or something?
One of the articles that we read helped me to more fully understand how Jesus touched people and interacted with them in order to bring them life more abundantly. He never traded healing for faith, nor did he use love as bait. Witnessing miracles and becoming healed, feeling the love of God – these things drew people into his following, but He never ransomed grace.
This has definitely affected my perspective. I think it is easy for us to separate evangelism from justice work, when really the Bible calls us to fight oppression, advocate for human rights, seek economic redistribution and environmental redemption, feed the hungry etc, and, of course, show people God’s abundant love.
I just feel lucky to be able to discuss this so openly. I have never been with so many people who love Jesus and also care about social justice. I feel really blessed. I guess it is also especially easy to feel blessed when you’re at the beach!
I have been writing a lot down in my journal throughout this trip. At orientation, I copied a lot of statistics about poverty and economic injustice, afraid that I would forget what we were hearing. But over time I have felt God say, “I don’t need you to write down every word and remember it, I need you to just change.”
What does it mean to live with the knowledge of global inequality when I am no longer in solidarity with the blessed poor, but am back to a way of life that arguably creates poverty in the first place? I guess I could just say we are all called to helping differently – the original easy way out…we’ll see.
- Kim
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