White Robes and Heavenly Culture

February is Missions Month at Brookhaven. As long as I can remember, February has always been Missions Month! I love it! During high school especially, February was a very formative month in affirming my call to missions, and in expanding my heart for all nations and cultures. This year, our theme verse has been Revelation 7:9
“After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language [my favorite part!,] standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands.”
Yesterday morning, as our congregation was reading the verse collectively and aloud, a beautiful illustration developed in my mind. It was a picture of a small gathering – friends from Mexico, Ecuador, Cambodia, Mozambique, Uganda, etc. – dressed colorfully in their appropriate cultural attire, worship Him. It was a beautiful depiction of not only God’s creativity, but of how God is Savior and Father of all mankind!


Then, as our reading continued, we reached this:
“They were wearing white robes…”and I paused. White robes? We’ll ALL be in WHITE ROBES?? And I realized… it won’t be about who we are and where we’ve come from, but about HIM! Our culture will be Heavenly when we are united in His return! I can’t even imagine what a day of rejoicing it will be!

With a passion to see
Christ glorified in Cambodia,
Jewel

The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine

Yesterday I finished my first summer read: The Road of Lost Innocence: The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine by Somaly Mam.  I have heard speakers discuss the issue of human trafficking. I have seen pictures of brothel conditions; and videos of raids in brothels, and of victims. I have attended sex trafficking seminars and conferences, and visited the World Hope Assessment Center in Cambodia. I have even read other books on young girls trafficked in SE Asia.  However, it is Somaly Mam's story that has impacted me in such a compelling and truly eye-opening way.  Telling her own story, Somaly Mam graphically personalizes the horror and violence of the sex trade industry in Cambodia.

Mam was living on her own in the forest around 1980 when a 55-year-old stranger claimed he would take her to her missing family. "Grandfather" beat and abused the nine-year-old Mam and sold her virginity to a Chinese merchant to cover a gambling debt. She was then sold into a brothel in Phnom Penh, and the daily suffering and humiliation she endured is almost impossible to imagine or absorb. She recounted disobedient girls being tortured and killed, and police collusion and government involvement in the sex trade. Somaly Mam managed to break the cycle only when she discovered the advantages of foreign clients and eventually married a Frenchman, Pierre. After a few years in France, Mam and Pierre returned to Cambodia and set up AFESIP - a charity "acting for women in distressing circumstances." Mam has fearlessly devoted herself to helping prostitutes and exploited children. This moving, disturbing tale is not one of redemption but a cry for justice and support for women's plight everywhere.

The statistics are shocking: one in every forty Cambodian girls (some as young as five) will be sold into sex slavery. In Cambodia (and in other countries,) many  people believe that sex with a virgin will cure AIDS; and in Khmer tradition, women are unquestionably obedient.

Love love love, Jewel