By 8:15 the size of the group had doubled. The pastor began the service at 8:20 by introducing us visitors, giving us an opportunity to stand, smile, and wave.
The power had gone out shortly after 8:00am, so the Pastor and the praise team debated about how to proceed-they normally accompany the singing with a synthesizer and use microphones to lead the praise. But in the absence of electricity, they simply began singing a cappella. At about 8:30 the power came back on, so they fired up the synthesizer and microphones at that point.
All of the songs throughout the service were in Khmer of course, but quite a few of them were familiar tunes, so we visitors could sing along in English. “Hosanna in the Highest,” “No Not One,” and “They'll Know We are Christians” were a few of the numbers.
The service was punctuated by prayers at various points, led by members of the praise team, the pastor, and one or two women from the congregation. For at least one of these prayers people kneeled on the floor and bowed their heads. During the offertory prayer, the deacon held the offering over his head while he prayed, demonstrating that this was in fact an offering to God.
Before the sermon, someone from the congregation came up and led a responsive reading of Psalm 67, an appropriate Psalm that says more than once, “May all the peoples praise you.” It was exciting to hear that in Khmer, English, and Tagalog.
The pastor prayed again before beginning his sermon. He read a text from 1 Corinthians 13 and preached for a while. But every few minutes he had us turn to another text, and then he would preach for a while on that. I think all his texts had something to do with love-God's love and Christian love and maybe even love in the face of persecution. At the end of his 40-minute sermon, the congregation applauded, and the praise team returned to the front for two more songs.
The singing was followed by testimony time, during which the pastor invited us foreigners to address the congregation. We said a few words of encouragement, and then another woman from the congregation came up to pray.
Our doxology was “Shalom, Good Friend,” which they sang about four times in Khmer and then once in English. Very nice. The entire service was finished before 10:00am.
After rejoining the rest of our group, we all traveled to Tuol Sleng, the Cambodian Genocide Museum. This was an incredibly powerful experience that is difficult to put into words.
The museum is a compound of three buildings that had been an elementary school before the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh. Comrade Dutch, a Khmer Rouge commander, turned the school into a prison where people were brutally tortured and killed. Each of the classrooms was turned into a cell. Some housed individual prisoners; others held large groups at a time.
I think this museum is so powerful because it is so simple. Most things have been left exactly as they were found in 1979 when the Vietnamese forced the Khmer Rouge out of the city. A few photos and signs have been added to explain what happened, but nothing is roped off or under glass. You can walk into each room and see the shackles that held each prisoner; you can even still see the blood on the floor. It's eerie.
The first building we entered was made up of rooms where individual prisoners had been celled. In fact, when the Vietnamese arrived, they found in each room a body chained to an iron bed, left there to rot when the persecutors fled. The Vietnamese took a photo of each body before burying it in a plot next to the building. Those photos now hang on the walls of the rooms. The beds are still in the rooms. And the shackles still lie on the beds. So each room is sort of a shrine to the victim who died there. It's haunting.
In a separate building are displayed some of the torture devices the Khmer Rouge used. It is almost incomprehensible, the perverted creativity that these people used to kill their victims. Seeing the different tools and machines they invented, you sense that these killings were sport to them.
I kept trying to understand this place, kept trying to wrap my mind around the reasons people would do this to other people. And I couldn't. Whatever political or ideological motivations Pol Pot had, they are simply inadequate to explain why. As I looked at the photos, read the history, smelled the fear and death in the air, I kept coming back to the question, How could this happen? No answer seemed satisfactory.
Tuol Sleng was a place where many of the city people- educated business or government people-were killed. After lunch we drove out to one of the killing fields where thousands of peasants had been slaughtered. Again, the site is haunting in its simplicity. Looking across the field, you see only grass and trees and paths around a number of large pits. It doesn't look like much, and there are few signs or explanations. But slowly the realization dawns that each of these large pits was a mass grave for hundreds of victims. When you look closely, you find fragments of clothing, bones, and teeth.
The bus ride back to town was very quiet.
That night after supper we gathered for one more session. Before our report from the Philippines, we sang a song together: “Because He Lives.” Watching our Cambodian bookkeeper sing that song brought tears to my eyes, having learned what I did that day, and knowing that she had lost her whole family to Pol Pot's horror. How beautiful to know that for her all fear is gone, and she can face tomorrow because He lives.
Final thoughts
Monday, February 28
We began our final day together with Philippians 4:1-7, which we read in unison before hearing the report on our ministry in Thailand. The rest of the morning was spent on ministry discussions, and then we all had lunch together before checking out of the hotel.
As our plane took off from Phnom Penh to Bangkok, I found myself praying almost desperately for our ministry in Cambodia. The problems throughout the country are so deep and so many that it seems almost foolish to think that we can make a difference! And of course such thinking is foolish. Only God can make a difference here. We can make a difference only in God's power. In fact, God does not even call us to make a difference; He calls us only to be faithful, for “the one who calls [us] is faithful and he will do it” (1 Thessalonians 5:24, NIV). Amen.
