News

With your supports and prayers I am able to meet Jesus and help Him in some rural areas in Cambodia (Mathews 25).

This is just a brief report about the Life Project’s activities :

The first three pictures are about two little girls who live with their grandmother and great grandmother.  The great grandmother is paralyzed and blind. Their father died about a year ago from auto accident in order to save his younger daughter. Their mother currently is working at a restaurant in Phnom Penh and comes home once a month with some money to support the family. They are struggling financially.  As you can see the wall behind them is made with plastic sheet. The grandmother and the girls also have some income from washing  the neighbors’ clothes as you can see behind the little girl.

After posting their situation through facebook,  I got some donations. Today I bought two bikes and a bunch of cloth and shoes for them. I also found a good carpenter who will build a room where the great grandmother sleeps. 

The other pictures are about my mother’s baptism and her birthday celebration. This is the first christian service in the village. The villagers were so thrilled to join us and heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 

The rest of the pictures are about our mobile medical clinic.  We provided them a lot of medicine, reading glasses  and other educational supplies. I am still waiting for other supplies that I shipped out before I left home. 

Thank you again for your prayer, thoughts and support. 
May God bless you.

I love Christmas music. The day after Thanksgiving, I am ready to decorate a tree with lights and tinsel. I even love wrapping presents! But when it comes to worship, I need Advent. I need one place where the world isn’t buzzing, and instead it’s quiet. I need a place where people look less like perfect Christmas cards and more like Mary and Joseph searching for the inn. I need one place to confront life’s hard realities, like the wise men facing Herod or George Bailey facing suicide before the “everything’s-fine” ending of It’s a Wonderful Life. I need one place where “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” is not co-opted by department store speakers trying to convince me to buy one more thing. Instead, I need a place to pray for Christ to come to a world where there are still the hungry, the poor, and the broken, no matter how many Angel Tree gifts I delivered. I need a sanctuary in which to pray “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus,” because I need to acknowledge that we are not there yet, but the promise is to come. 

I know I am not the only one who needs this waiting time. Each Christmas, I do more pastoral care than any other time of year. It seems with everything that surrounds us (the lights, the presents, the cards, the movies, the songs) we get to thinking about the places in our lives which don’t match up with the glossy, sparkly, cheery whirlwind. People are nervous about connecting with families marked by addictions, mental illness, abuse, or long-standing hurt. Others go into debt with the expense of Christmas, while TV ads equate love and “being good” with receiving gifts, rather than love and being good being the gifts themselves. The days are short and the nights are long, and it seems to be the time of year when watching the news leaves us with more questions than answers.

Advent is the place to take those questions, not for easy answers but to experience the sure and quiet presence of God.

During Advent, we might think of our sanctuary like an inn that still has space for those who need it the most. During Advent, we welcome those who need somewhere to belong, those who need a place to pray in hope, those who need shelter from the chaos outside. After all, isn’t that most of us? Come to worship this Advent. Come to rest. Come to listen. Come to ponder, and I trust that you will find a Christmas that is more honest but also more hopeful, more generous, and more joyful. 

Celebrations

• Christmas decorating, Saturday, Nov. 26, 10 a.m.
• Christmas Eve worship, Saturday, Dec. 24, 7:30 p.m.
• Christmas Day worship,  Sunday, Dec. 25, 10 a.m.