It is December 27 and life is moving beyond the big Christmas holidays.

For us, we spent December 24 cleaning and baking and Holly and I stayed up late watching old episodes from season 1 of Monk (our Christmas present to each other, 5 seasons for $10!). Christmas morning was as traditional as they come, complete with John David opening several presents (books, marbles, a soccer ball, some gifts from friends in Missouri, and a T. Rex model excavation brick were among the treasures). We then ate biscuits and gravy and made cinnamon rolls. Yum.

In the evening we hosted a neighborhood Christmas open house (the reason we spent Christmas Eve cooking and cleaning). We had pineapple upside down cake, braided cream cheese fruit bread, oatmeal raisin cookies, popcorn balls, rice krispie (really corn flakes this time) marshmallow treats (green in the shape of trees, inspired by our fellow MCCer Erin), cinnamon rolls, coffee, tea, and some odds and ends. Over 20 of our neighbors showed up to wish us Bonne Noel and Bonne Anne (the French colonized Cambodia...). The celebration ran on into the night, topped off with John David sharing his Christmas sparklers with the neighborhood kids (he had a box of 100). When those were gone, they switched to incense sticks (John was glad to share - he got an enormous bag of just one kind and wants to use them up and get some variety!). We had "incense island" outside our house - a mound of sand covered with the red glow of incense sticks.

Christmas was also a time of good news/bad news. On the sad side, we received news that Holly's Aunt Delores died on Christmas morning; she had had cancer for some time but experienced a remission just before we moved to Cambodia. On the glad side, a co-worker of mine at Peace Bridges was able to be reunited with her newborn baby. Both had to be hospitalized after a difficult birth (the baby had fluid in the lungs) and we rejoiced that the baby got to go home yesterday.

So passed our first Christmas in Cambodia - happy, busy, sad, tiring, and, overall, very good.

A reflection on John 6:1-14

Before moving to Cambodia, we moved houses twice in 3 months. We were transitioning out of pastoral ministry and didn't have definite plans, so between Belle and Cambodia we moved to the house we had previously remodeled. The first move, we got rid of a ton of stuff, down to what we thought we really needed. The second move, to a place halfway around the world, we got rid of even more.

We have been committed to the idea of de-cluttering and living simply for a long time. But we had our weaknesses. I used to have, for instance, a huge library - nearing 10,000 volumes (now I am under a 1/10 of that and most is in storage). Then there was all the odds and ends and extra furniture we had collected to help with foster care. Add to that our personal quirks, and though we have only been married for 8 years, you would think we were married for 80! We had, for instance, almost every note we wrote each other during college, printed e-mails from when I lived in California, a trunk full of wax from when we made candles, crates of craft material, boxes of camping gear, and a collection of boxes that had been packed when we moved 3 years earlier. We hadn't kept everything, but sometimes it felt like we had!

Who would know I could see a picture, in the midst of my remembered clutter, of what the Bible has to say about Jesus?

The story in John 6 is really familiar - the feeding of the 5,000. I think we are used to the parts about the disciples wanting to send the people away, about Jesus testing their faith, about the willingness of the little boy to give what he had, and about the miracle of God's provision of much from little. But what caught my eye this time were the words of Jesus when he said, "Gather up the leftovers, that nothing may be lost."

I love the picture. Crusts of bread - the leftovers, the parts we don't want, the parts that we stick in our fridges until they grow mold - being heaped into baskets. The disciples walking around the crowd, poking behind rocks and bushes and in the plentiful grass for an overlooked fragment. I picture something like an easter egg hunt in my head, with the surprised disciples scurrying around, and Jesus smiling on the spectacle. 12 baskets leftover - so that each of those disciples would have a physical reminder of what God had done that day.

I couldn't believe I had missed it before, but then I looked at the commentaries. I thought maybe someone would have something to say to the glimpse I had at the meaning of Jesus' words. But instead, I kept finding the most simple of moralisms. Jesus had the disciples collect the leftovers because he was a frugal person. We should be frugal, too. It is bad to waste anything. And kids, eat your vegetables. It's not that I disagree with what they wrote. Certainly, we live in a terribly wasteful society and it would do some good for us to live more carefully. We make way too much trash, and both we and our earth suffers for it. We should also be careful not to waste because wastefulness is a form of ungratefulness. Taking God's gifts for granted is a selfish thing to do; wasting what God has provided is disrespectful to God. Waste also is a form of selfishness toward those who in need. What gives us the right to be wasting God's plenty when others suffer want? What we have, God tells us, is to share with one another in mutual joy. All of these are good and true points for us to remember.

But as necessary and urgent as those messages are for us, they don't bring us all the way to Jesus. In the first, there would have been nothing unusual about them collecting the leftovers. It is only unusual to us, who throw so much away. Matthew Henry records, for instance, one of their proverbs - "He who despises bread falls into the depths of poverty." Adam Clarke quoted the Synops Sohar. - "Great will be the punishment of those who waste the crumbs of food, scatter seed, and neglect the law." It would only have been natural, then, for Jesus and his disciples to have been frugal. There would have been no reason for John to have pointed it out if this were all Jesus' words meant to the disciples.

Instead, I think that Jesus' words give us a glimpse at his mission. Jesus was always concerned for what was lost. In fact, John uses this word at least 10 times in his gospel. We don't usually notice it because our translations use 4 different words to translate the declensions of this one word in Greek, apollumi. Let me read you some of those verses to bring out how important this word is in the book of John, beginning with the most famous:

John 3:16- "For God loved the world in this way: He gave His One and Only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not PERISH but have eternal life." HCSB

John 6:39 - "This is the will of Him who sent Me: that I should LOSE none of those He has given Me but should raise them up on the last day."HCSB

John 10:28 - "I give them eternal life, and they will never PERISH--ever! No one will snatch them out of My hand." HCSB

In fact, Jesus' words here in John 6, "that nothing may be lost," are echoed in what was on his mind the night he was betrayed to be crucified. "That nothing may be lost" sums up Jesus' whole mission. That's why he prayed, just before Judas came and betrayed him with a kiss, that "While I was with them, I was protecting them by Your name that You have given Me. I guarded them and not one of them is LOST, except the son of destruction, so that the Scripture may be fulfilled." (John 17:12 HCSB) Earlier, Jesus had even used this word to describe the difference between his mission and the destructive violence of the powers of this world:

"A thief comes only to steal and to kill and to DESTROY. I have come that they may have life and have it in abundance." (John 10:10 HCSB)

Lost, perishing, destroyed - those are fighting words for Jesus. There was more than bread in those baskets when Jesus fed the 5,000 plus people that day. There was a symbol of all that Jesus came to do and be. Jesus' compassion was part and parcel of his whole mission. He was doing on earth what the disciples were doing in the field: gathering leftovers. Jesus came for even the people that the world normally overlooked. He came for the lepers, the prostitutes, the lame, the women, the traitors, the enemy. Jesus didn't come to discriminate. He came to blow open the narrow doors of prejudice and classism and sexism and racism and replace them with the narrow door of his love. "That nothing may be lost," he said. And when the disciples held those baskets with bread to the brims, they could see it. They could see in their hands, if they were willing, a picture of what Jesus came to do. The kingdom was bigger than they thought.

But the gate was smaller. The terms of admittance to join the mission boiled down to dedicating your life to bringing life to the dying and light to the darkest places. So Jesus kept talking, not just about his mission, but about ours:

John 6:27 - "Don't work for the food that PERISHES but for the food that lasts for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you, because God the Father has set His seal of approval on Him." HCSB

John 12:25 - "The one who loves his life will LOSE it, and the one who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life." HCSB

A piece of bread becomes for us a powerful symbol of this mission. For bread represents our life, our sustenance. Who wants to give it away? But the wisdom of Christ's words are brought out in life, as in the testimony of Victor Emil Frankl, a Jew and a survivor of the Holocaust. He lost his wife, father, and mother in the concentration camps, but he did not lose his humanity. He wrote,

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms-----to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way....When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way which he bears his burden." Viktor Frankl

I think this lets us see the true meaning of what the people said after the miracle. "This is indeed the Prophet who is to come into the world!" What they meant was that Jesus' miracles reminded them of the prophets of old - those incredible stories that they had heard but that nobody had seen anything like for hundreds of years. I am reminded most of all of when the widow's flour and oil did not give out. The people saw the baskets of bread and realized God was up to something again.

And God WAS up to something. For Jesus was indeed the prophet Moses spoke about back in Deuteronomy, the One they had long waited on. The people just didn't know what that all meant. Victor Frankl wrote that "His unique opportunity lies in the way which he bears his burden." And just as the prophets of old stood in judgment on their times, so Jesus' life, death, and resurrection stands in judgment of the whole world. The way Christ bore the burden, in opening his heart to all, "that nothing may be lost," he revealed both the wickedness of the devil and the wickedness in our own hearts. He shows us that we have filled too much of our lives working for food that perishes, too little of our lives on the side of God and life. We have spent too much of our lives filling our garages and closets with stacks of boxes, and too little of our lives filling our hearts and churches with the love and grace of God.

Jesus forces us to see it squarely and to come to terms with it. Which way will we follow? But in the middle of those decisions and all our daily temptations, Jesus also comforts us with the promises of God. Because the same Jesus who desired that not a crust of bread be lost on the day he fed the 5,000 also desires that not one of us be lost. In fact, just as Jesus said each of us is of more value than a sparrow, I believe it's safe to say that we are also of more value than a loaf of bread. And so we rest - when we take that narrow gate - in the confidence that this way is possible and that it is good. We rest in the confidence that God has made room for us, even the leftovers, and that none are overlooked or despised....

We have spent our month recovering our energy drained by Dengue. :) So it's about time we blog again!

We had Thanksgiving dinner with a big group of expatriates at the MCC office, complete with a Butterball turkey from the USA. We tried to bring sweet potatoes, but we couldn't find any. Instead, we bought 'dom cheur,' which is a white potato with a texture and taste about half way between a regular potato and a sweet potato. It is named 'wood potato' because it is the tuber of a thin, quick growing tree. Anyway, they don't cook like regular sweet potatoes, so we tried converting it to scalloped potatoes. That didn't work either, so they became chunky mashed potatoes. They were okay smothered in precious cheese. ;)

We survived the Water Festival - we were still so tired that we didn't get out much for the festivities. Several million people come in from the provinces to watch row-boat races at the royal pavilion. We did spend a day in the countryside with our neighbors. It was nice to be in a green place again! They had a grove of fruit trees that John loved wandering in. On the downside, driving a family of 3 on a moto is a great way to make parts of your body go numb you never imagined possible.

I (David) also attended the wedding reception for a partner Peace Bridges is working with. These are huge events! Hundreds of people go to a very formal, 8 course dinner. The wedding singer is very loud, which made it even harder for me to talk and listen in a second language (I had trouble enough thinking!). And, may I add, if you go to one of these sometime, pass on the Crab Soup.....

Holly has started contacting partner organizations to work on some domestic violence issues and I have begun work at Peace Bridges. I had a nice welcome in attending some trainings with the staff, giving me a chance to get to know everyone a bit better and get comfortable interacting. There are 10 full time staff here, and only 2 expatriates (Barry, the director, is Australian).

Finally, Christmas is coming! We received a wonderful Christmas package from friends in Missouri, complete with a miniature Christmas tree. We have done a little decorating around the house and are still trying to figure out how to adjust our old Christmas traditions to our new home.

We did go to a Christmas tea at a small Christian coffee shop last weekend. On the way home, the group of us (7 in total) sang Christmas carols. Our tuk-tuk driver did get some looks and even some questions, but didn't seem to mind!

Lots in the news here lately regarding human rights and trauma recovery. You can read up, for instance, about the Cambodian government's argument over the UN Envoy's report about land grabbing issues here.

Meanwhile, I was struck by the work of Chanthol Oung, who is working on behalf of women in Cambodia and teaching abroad this year -

Having witnessed violence for her entire childhood, Oung refuses to accept a violent world for her children. "I hope that my daughters would live in a peaceful society without harm, without any violence, and they could go to higher education," she said. But given the trauma Cambodians have encountered in the last three decades—and how devalued women have been in their society—she recognizes the challenges.

Read her story here.

For a critical summary of human rights issues in and a good brief on Cambodian history/politics, read "Cambodia has peace, but no freedom."

For a photographer's experience working with some church groups at the Phnom Penh dump, read on -

How in the year 2007 could any human being have to live like this? And not only one human being; the entire dump was covered with people of all ages, picking through the most unimaginable slime to find anything of the slightest value.

I put the camera back up to my eyes, shielded once again from the reality of children as young as 5 picking through maggots and fresh loads of garbage dropped by huge trucks.

This garbage is their home. Roughly 2,000 people, about 600 of whom are children, live and work at the 100-acre landfill. The shelters where they live are made from any scrap material they can bind together for cover: old burlap bags, torn then sewn together to make a wall, and tin siding held together by twine.

Read the rest here.

This testimony fits well with UN Envoy Ghai's advice, during a special human rights walk -

"The ultimate custodians of human rights and social justice must be the people themselves, just as they must be the custodians of political and economic sovereignty," he added.

Good words for all of us, no matter where we are.