The Lord is working in Cambodia y’all!

This was the biggest attendance of kids that we have. Thursdays are usually over 60 kids in the morning :D This is my teammate Laura Jane and this is her when we were heading back to base in the van and the kids were coming up to the window and making hearts with their hands up to the window and I just thought it was so precious. This is the guava tree that the kids would climb to get the guava This is what we do before we start teaching, we go into the villages and tell the kids that lesson/study is starting and this is me walking with a little girl. The kids listening so intently, I love it. They're so eager to learn, they soak up everything they can. This is the lesson on Tuesday afternoons. This is me teaching the kids a hand game This is Vikki telling the kids how to say "Hello, how old are you?" and I say I'm 20 This is team YADA at lunch What the houses look like Team YADA! From left to right, Gianna, me, Bella, Eliza, Maddie. Front row, Laura Jane, Georgia, and Lexi! 10/28/23
We are officially two weeks into being in Cambodia and I have been diving deeper into His Word and my relationship with the Lord than I ever have before. I personally have never regularly observed a sabbath but actually having a time to do that has been so transformational since observing in a sabbath since training camp. Right now, I am going through a 90 day devotional through the Gospels, and every single day it feels like the Lord is revealing something to me in Scripture. At the beginning of this year, I realized that I struggle to know God has my Heavenly Father, and that has just been a huge revelation for me. So I have slowly but surely going though the process of getting to know God as my Heavenly Father, not just Creator of all. And I know that this isn’t a process that is going to happen spontaneously, it is something that has to be worked at and the Lord has been showing me patience through that.

This past week, my team and I have been working with an organization called New Day New Life and have been getting engaged in children’s ministry in the villages around Siem Reap! We have been going to a different village everyday and we have been giving the kids an English lesson and a Bible lesson. Since it was our first week getting into ministry last week, we were just observing but we still were having a lot of fun getting to know the kids, playing with them, and engaging with them even though there is a pretty significant language barrier. Good thing a smile is universal 😉

But I wanted to share something that happened last Tuesday specifically. I should start with introducing our ministry hosts and partners. So we have a ministry host who operates the AIM base here in Cambodia, her name is Sreymom and we also have ministry partners that are working with AIM and they are a couple, Vikki and Shannon and they have been working here for 4 years. So on Tuesday was the day that my team was going to walk through a river in the afternoon to get to a family’s house so we could have a Bible study with the mother of the family and other women as well, but they wanted two people to go with them to go check up on a different woman that they had prayed over before. So my teammate Georgia and I decided to go with Shannon, Vikki, and Sreymom to do a checkup. So this woman that we’re going to at this time was previously prayed over because she couldn’t walk for years. When they were praying for her, they prayed for her once they got there then they wanted to see if she could stand up at all and as soon as they stood her up, she shooed the people away from her and she straight up walked across the room. So now 3 years later, this woman is dancing in her house when they come to see her! Now back to the present day, she was so excited about them giving her a radio that will play the Bible in Khmer (the language of Cambodia, which is pronounced kuh-mai) from creation to Christ. She listens to it everyday, she is not ashamed of listening to it at all! So she’s doing well and she tells us about this man down the road that heard about them praying for her and she said that he wanted prayer as well!

So we went down to find this man to pray for him and we were having trouble finding his house so this little boy on a bike said that he knew where he was so he led us to him. When we got there, I cannot remember if it was the wrong house or not, but the man we were looking for was not there, but who was there was this woman who also wanted prayer who also could not walk. This woman was not able to walk for 10 years and she had complete faith that she could be healed if we prayed for her. She said that she had been waiting for the day that we would come and pray for her and she was so excited that we had finally come. She had surgery in her lower back when she was a child, she was told that if she were ever to walk again she would need to have a surgery that would cost over $10,000. So we all laid hands on her and prayed for healing in Jesus’ name. As we got done praying, she told us that as we were praying for her, she felt fire going up her legs and into her back and she knew that she was going to walk. She proceeded to scoot over to the edge of the table and stand up and walk around the table. I could not believe the miracle that God had just used us to perform, it felt like God had placed me in a Bible story! I still feel like I cannot wrap my mind around that happening, it’s just absolutely unbelievable!