Horror... and Hope

     Last Monday in Cambodia, we visited the Killing Fields and the Tuol Sleng Prison Museum, and I almost threw up.  The atrocities committed under Pol Pot are nauseated me more than tortuous car rides and bumpy airplane flights.  I can better understand now what Maria, a Filipino woman I met in Phnom Penh, meant when she said that she wished she could bring all Cambodians together at the Killing Fields so that they could just weep and lament the horror of their history together!
     It is said that one death is a tragedy; a thousand is a statistic.  But how was I to respond to the personal individual stories of the Killing Fields' audio tour, which were then multiplied into the thousands by the numerous photographed faces in the Prison Museum?
     These faces of the prison's many inmates fascinated me, and I looked at them one by one for a long time.  Some had friendly-looking faces, most were sad.  Some had angry eyes, bruised eyes with bloody faces, confused eyes, hurt eyes, hardened eyes, closed eyes.  Each had a story, a family, a life.  So many people hurt, killed.  Pol Pot said that it is "better to kill an innocent by mistake than to spare an enemy by mistake."   No one is safe in a society based on lies and fear!

     I wondered how many of these people represented by photograph after photograph of men, women, children and elderly knew Jesus.
     I wondered how it was possible for all this to happen, and at the same time for the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot to have a seat in the United Nations and to be recognized as the legitimate Cambodian government by Germany, Australia, the UK, the US, and France.

     Then, in the midst of the horror and incredulous wondering, something beyond these sobering realities surprised me.
     Hope.
     I found hope in the midst of this place.  I found it in an unlikely spot as I stood, staring, at the killing tree in the midst of the killing fields.
     As I looked at this tree, I felt a constricting sorrow and I sensed that if someone looked at my eyes in that moment they would see sadness and a profound oldness.  It is actually a feeling that I felt often when I first came back to Canada with my family.  My eyes felt old from seeing so much poverty and addictions, from being unable to save the people I loved most from pain, from almost losing the knowledge of how to live.  I remember thinking that this underlying sadness would never leave and my eyes would always be sad, old eyes in a young face.
     Yet, as I re-felt this feeling in front of the killing tree in Cambodia, I realized that God has begun to heal the hurts of the past in my life.  I can laugh freely again.  I can enjoy friendships.  Jesus is restoring relationships, hope and joy in my life.  So, as I stood on a plot of ground darkened with the blood of countless Cambodians, I felt a ray of hope.  God is restoring to me the years that the locusts have eaten, and I know that He can do the same in the lives of the Cambodian people.
     I still don't know how to totally process all that I saw and learned that day.  Such intense suffering cannot be glossed over lightly.  One of my team-mates said that she saw a wall in the prison where visitors had graffittied all sorts of things, like "How can you believe there is a God when things like this happen?"
 ... ah, and isn't that an age-old question.  I don't want to brush aside any of the horror of what happened here.  But I also know that in that place I saw a glimmer of God's hope, and that is something that I personally take away from that day, if nothing else.
 
I would like to leave you with some verses that came to mind as I thought about what had all happened on the tuktuk ride back to our hotel:
 
"I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army, which I sent among you.  You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God, who has dealt wondrously with you."  Joel 2:25-26

"May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing so that by the power of the Holy
Spirit you may abound in hope."  Romans 15:13