April 9, 2010
By Dave and Mi Rebok, serving in Cambodia
As a mission, our team occasionally spends time updating and documenting goals and strategies. These are necessary for our short- and long-term vision. But there is also the nitty-gritty of ministry. None of that is in writing anywhere, because it is impossible to predict.
How do we know when we’re going to get a call to visit someone at the hospital—a person we have never met who is having surgery the next day and needs someone to pay them a visit—which may involve several hours of our time, and very likely a sum of money for medicine, food, and travel? How do we know that later today we’re going to get into a conversation in which someone rubs us abrasively—and ideally the only way out is by our gentle answer?
In his book The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “Neighborliness is not a quality in other people; it is simply their claim on ourselves. Every moment and every situation challenges us to action and to obedience. We have literally no time to sit down and ask ourselves whether so-and-so is our neighbor or not.”
It doesn’t make any sense to figure out if I should help someone. The answer is yes already. I finally concluded that a practical definition for ministry is “making oneself vulnerable to imposition.” Anywhere there are people with needs, there is imposition—and there is hardly a side street in Cambodia without people who have a real need for something.
Just as God put the question to Jonah, He puts it to all of us. “Phnom Penh has more than one and a half million people who are spiritually lost. Should I not care about that great city?” (Jonah 4:11). Take that verse and switch out Nineveh with wherever you are, and there isn’t a single one of us to whom that verse doesn’t apply.
May God help us all to make a difference!
Learn More
Check out our Alliance work in Cambodia.
For more about Alliance ministry in Cambodia, watch the inspiring video “Against All Odds” [duration, 2:31].
What You Can Do
Give to Alliance Great Commission Ministries to help bring Christ’s love to lost people in Cambodia and around the world.