You and I Were Created for Communal Flourishing

I remember how the fans whirred as the afternoon heat picked up that day. January is dry season in Cambodia, and every day I was there, the temperatures rose from a comfortable, cool, seventies, to a dry nineties by the afternoon. I resisted the urge to fan myself that day, and settled into the feel of heat rising under my skin.

I was sitting on a plastic chair, in a room above a restaurant called Green Mango Café, in Battambang City, watching a group of young Cambodian women graduate from culinary school. For the 15 months prior, these women from rural villages throughout the Battambang province had been part of the Center for Global Impact’s Culinary Training Center. Not only were these women trained as chefs and businesswomen in the café and restaurant below, they also took general education and spiritual formation classes. I also witnessed evidence of the galvanizing gift of community and confidence that showed with their lifted chins and wide smiles — parts of the program that aren’t as easy to list on paper but just as powerful as any classroom training.

These young women are daughters and sisters — like you and me, like our daughters or sisters — and each of them is worthy of anything you and I or our own daughters or sisters or mothers are worthy of. However these young women in particular come from an area where girls and women are vulnerable to human trafficking in ways many of us haven’t experienced.

Center for Global Impact’s mission is to bring the gospel of Jesus to those in the grip of poverty and bondage by practically providing pathways out of poverty. This is done through education, life skills, spiritual formation, and vocational training. Of course, I supported this work before I traveled to Cambodia, but after bearing witness to the very real lives this work has impacted over the last 15+ years, I now find my heart irrevocably tied to the women I met and this land of limes and tuk-tuks, and a deep warmth and hospitality I’ve rarely experienced in other places.

On the day before the graduation, I joined the American and Cambodian CGI staff team in visiting some of the students’ homes. From remote dirt-floor village homes surrounded by palm trees to a rented room nestled down a narrow alleyway behind urban businesses, I was overcome with how the women I encountered had such similar hopes and dreams as mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends as myself and the women I know and love in my regular life. And I was struck with the reality of how extreme poverty and the brutality of history can keep anyone barred from these same hopes and dreams.

I am not Cambodian, but I am the daughter of a Korean immigrant mother, who lived in the aftermath of colonization and war, and grew up in extreme poverty. I wrote about her story in my memoir, Tell Me the Dream Again. My mom grew up without food and then food became how she colored my own upbringing with love. It’s not lost on me that God would use what was so painful and the place of so much lack in her younger life to later feed and nourish my entire life.

I saw my mother’s face in the faces of the young women who graduated that day in Battambang. I imagined her having had the same opportunities these women did – training, community, education, spiritual formation, love, dignity, and care.

A little over ten years before I was born, our nation secretly carpet-bombed Cambodia. What was said to be an effort to contain Communism, and kept secret until the year 2000, is what led to anywhere from twenty-four thousand to a million Cambodian deaths, according to records. Entire villages, families, and neighborhoods were wiped out. Aside from the death of civilians in a neutral country, the attack also created fear, extreme vulnerability, and distrust. Many historians believe this is exactly what led Cambodians into the arms of the Khmer Rouge and eventually what led to the Cambodian genocide.

While we can’t go back and change the past, we can remember, learn from it, and work towards repair and a better tomorrow. There is so much going on in the world today, and much of it leads me to want to despair and cry out to Jesus, “How do I find you here?”

But what if there’s no better moment and place than the one we are in, to reach out and remember how connected we were created to be: to one another and Jesus? What if Jesus is right here, next door, and thousands of miles away? Your neighbor’s flourishing next door and in another culture means your flourishing. And your flourishing, wherever you are, is tied to hers. What if our communal flourishing is the flourishing of Christ?

I held back a waterfall of ugly tears as I saw my young mom in each woman standing tall with a chef hat, a bouquet of flowers, chef tools, and a deep sense of pride and accomplishment that day. Their flourishing meant my own. Their hope for the future gave me hope as I imagined my kids’ futures thousands of miles away from that graduation.

Perhaps God’s good work through us exists outside of time. If so, whatever I can do to support these women is for each of these women and the communities they are connected to, and it’s also for my young mom of yesterday, for me and my family today, and for everyone I’m connected to — which is also you, dear reader.

Whose flourishing and need can you offer your hands and hope to right now?