He Uses All Things To Bring Glory...

What a start to our outreach so far. The last two days in America were extremely busy. I realized that I forgot to do about a hundred things and left them to the last minute, but God is good and his grace is for times such as these. One of the major things I left to the last minute was having all of the students get passport photos taken for their Cambodian visa. We needed to present these at the Phnom Penh airport so this was not optional. We were able with the help of family and friends to get all the photos taken the day we left. What I did not anticipate was leaving mine and one other students photos on the dash of my car. The reality of this brain lapse hit me about 20 minutes before our plane took off from California, just about 15 minutes too late to do anything about it. So as we were flying from the Central Coast to LAX we began praying that God would 1) manifest the pictures miraculously or 2) that we would be able to find a place in LA to take the pictures within our 5 hour layover. Having asked the flight attendant we found out there was a pharmacy that took them just a few miles from the airport. So after landing I called only to realize that they were closing the photo department in 2 minutes and that they could not provide that service. We kept praying for option 1 but sensed that the Lord wanted us to go and possibly share with a taxi cab driver about Jesus. So we went with some pictures of ourselves on a flash drive hoping that it might do the trick and went on our little LA adventure. The moment we entered the cab, we realized our driver was not in a good mood. He spent the first half of the trip cursing under his breath at us since our location wasn't very far. So we got to the pharmacy, and asked the driver to wait. We entered the store and asked the clerk if he still could take passport photos. Surprisingly he said yes, and about 15 minutes later we had our very own passport photos for our visas! God was so faithful in taking care of us even when we mess up. As soon as we got into the cab we kept talking to ourselves (rather loudly) about how God has totally taken care of us and answered our prayers.So still sensing that we were supposed to talk to this cab driver about Jesus we started trying to enter into conversation with him. I don't know what happened, but his attitude completely changed. He began talking to us about his family and about what it was like to live as a Russian immigrant in LA. Before leaving the cab we were able to simply tell him that Jesus loved him and had a plan and purpose for his life! It was so amazing!
The second situation that God has used to bring his glory was just last night. We arrived here in Cambodia yesterday morning and unfortunately one of our students already got heat exhaustion. It was looking quite serious so we made the decision to take her to an emergency clinic. At the clinic they treated her by giving her 2Litres of IV fluid to rehydrate her. This takes approximately 3 hours. So as we were waiting and sitting by her bedside a nurse came in to switch the IV and to check on her. He asked us what we were doing in Cambodia and we shared with him that we were here to serve God and help out orphans and the poor. He started talking to us a little bit about his religious upbringings and he shared that he had grown up Buddhist (as is about 94% of the country) he is a practicing Buddhist, but he has had some questions about Jesus because he had heard about Him but didn't know much, only that Christians do a lot of good things. So we were able to share with him about Christ and answered some of his questions about God and Christians. It was so amazing to see how open this man was to God, not only open but hungry. We were interrupted in our conversation by the doctor but were able to resume with him a little later. We were able to ask him if he wanted to know Jesus and apparently touched this man answered yes that he wanted to know more about Him. We have made plans to go to the clinic again to speak with him and give him a Bible so he can learn about Jesus. Please pray for this man, that His heart would remain tender to Christ, and that the Holy Spirit would give us the right words to share. I believe that we will see this man make a decision for Christ in the next week and I am looking forward to seeing him continue in discipleship.
These are just a few of the ways we have seen God move, and it's only the 2nd day of outreach! Please pray that our hearts would stay tender to God and His leading and that we would continually be bringing God's kingdom here in Cambodia.