From one woman to another

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Other, Other

With Ramadan approaching, I was searching for ways to be real with my Muslim friends about our relationships with God. As I chatted with a friend one morning, in between bringing in the washing and kicking a ball with her toddler, she shared what Ramadan means to her. It is a time of year when she seeks favour and merit from Allah, when her good works are mercifully multiplied by Allah—a time for her to pray, fast, give and read the Quran for merit.

She also told me how a woman’s purity affects her prayer and fasting. My friend is not able to pray or fast during her menstrual cycle. This is so different to me. As a biologist, I celebrate daily how God made the world (she does that too), how a Holy God made me a woman who is able to reproduce and give life, and that a natural part of this life-giving creation is a monthly cycle. So I shared in a vulnerable way how I did not understand how our monthly cycle makes us impure or unclean; how I can understand how someone might consider a dead animal unclean with the decay, smell and germs, but that God created the natural cycle of our bodies.

My dear friend gently looked at me, confused that I could not understand that our bodies each month were unclean and impure to God. She then graciously said, “Well, that’s just it, each month it is the result of something dead, where life has not been created, and it is being cleansed and cleared out. That is why we are unclean, it is something dead”.

Well, ‘the biologist’ in me, ‘the woman’ in me stopped: something had clicked. I had been vulnerable with my friend and learned something from her. I thanked her. “That makes more sense now”.

Then ‘the Christian’ in me remembered that the Bible has recorded, for me and for all other women, Jesus’ response to a woman’s bleeding. Her bleeding was not just five days each month; she had been bleeding for 12 years… non-stop, unclean, smelly and shamed. “She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all the money she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse.”

I couldn’t help but share this story with my friend. Well, to tell you the truth, I stumbled my way through telling it. I had not read it recently and was telling it in another language. “When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, ‘If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.’ Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. At once Jesus realised that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, ‘Who touched my clothes?’”(Mark 5:25–30, NIV)

Our conversation continued about how this story shows us that uncleanliness could not be transmitted to Jesus but that out of Him flowed cleansing wholeness. This is why, for women who have come to Jesus, we see that we are no longer unclean before God because he has made us clean.

The author served long-term with Interserve in the Arab world, and now works with CultureConnect in Australia.

Story of a young girl

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Other

When I first arrived in South East Asia, this is what I thought underage sex work looked like: a ‘pimp’ visits a poor family struggling to make ends meet. He kindly offers to give the teenage daughter a good job in a city restaurant. When the girl arrives in the big city she is instead taken to a dark, dingy brothel where she is thrown in with other young girls, the door is locked and she is forced to sell herself on a daily basis. There is no freedom and the treatment of the girls is terrible.

This scenario does indeed happen, but in my city it is not so common. I want to share with you another form of sex trafficking, just as prevalent but less known.

Srey Mom* lives in a very poor rural family. Their sole income is a small rice field. Srey Mom has limited education because she had to stay at home to look after her siblings while her parents worked in the field. Her parents have three loans from local money lenders, with extortionate interest rates. Recent droughts have prevented the family from being able to repay these loans.

Suddenly Srey Mom’s mum falls seriously ill and is taken to hospital. The hospital fees are exorbitant and there is no way the family can pay. Desperate, her parents tell her she must go and work in the local KTV bar to pay the bills. Many girls and women working in KTV bars and beer gardens provide sexual services to men. Most of these men are Asian (locals and tourists), but there are Westerners also. Being underage, the pay Srey Mom would get in the sex industry is far higher than other employment. As filial piety is so strong she has no choice but to obey her parents. She also desperately wants to help her mum get better.

So, Srey Mom goes to the big city. She lives in a rented room with a few other girls and earns a monthly salary as a ‘hostess’. Sex work earns her more money, much of which she is allowed to keep and send home. Srey Mom feels glad that she can contribute to her family, and slowly becomes addicted to the party life.

And that’s when we meet her. We offer her a safe and loving place to live and counselling to help with the suppressed trauma. Srey Mom can now study, gain confidence and self-esteem, and learn a useful skill that will enable her to support herself and her family. She is also gently introduced to the love of Christ and the chance for a new life in Him.

It’s very hard to comprehend the scale of the problem. In our western mindset there is no justification for parents asking their daughters to work in the sex industry. However, it is so easy to judge until you start to understand what abject poverty really means. Focussing on helping the poorest families earn a basic living is a necessary part of the solution. During my time here, I have learned that, ultimately, the only infallible answer for these girls is a transformative encounter with Christ. Please pray that we would be rooted in Christ and demonstrate his love for girls like Srey Mom.

The author is spending two years On Track, working against sexual exploitation of children.

*Srey Mom is a fictional character, but her story is based on many of the girls in our care.

Do unto others

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Medical / Health, Arab World

At the organisation where I volunteer a few days a week doing prenatal care, I meet women who have fled from the horrors of war. Most women at the clinic are victims of the most heinous acts. These women, almost all of them, are pregnant through rape. What can one say to someone who is in a situation like this, violated, pregnant and refugee?

A pregnancy, which for most people is something positive, is for these women a big shame. Some of them cannot even manage to tell us what has happened to them. Some have their story written down on a piece of paper for us to read. When I examine a woman, measuring the size of the uterus and listening to the fetal heartbeat, I wonder—how is she coping? What does she think when she feels the baby kick or when she hears the heartbeat through the doptone (electric fetoscope) when I examine her? I do not know at all what this particular woman has experienced. But the empty mournful gaze I often face on these women tells me that I probably don’t want to know too many details about it either.

Gender-based sexual violence is one of the hardest things I’ve met in this work. It is not only in this country that it happens but everywhere where conflict is ongoing. It is commonly used in war situations. I think of the Yezidi women I met who were captured, used as sex slaves and sent home when they showed signs of pregnancy.

Ever since childhood I have stood up for the unprivileged in society. I had a sense of fairness that sometimes got me into trouble when “solving” problems using my fists! Early in my life I wanted to follow Jesus and work abroad where people did not know about Him. My plan was to work in an orphanage taking care of and loving babies and small children. I wanted to become a nurse and midwife, because surely they would deal with babies! Little did I know back then that a midwife just sees to it that the baby is born safely. But even now I still have the same longing to serve the most vulnerable. So whenever I meet people from other cultures— men and women—I feel this longing to help.

I have been able to use my profession in roles I never could have imagined. I have served in four different Muslim countries since 1991, working with women through antenatal care and family planning clinics. My driving force has been and still is to show the love of Christ to the women I meet.

“How is it possible to survive and even thrive in a Muslim context where women have little or no rights?” is a question I sometimes get. First and foremost I need to say that I have felt respected and valued by the authorities and almost all my colleagues. God put the love for these women in my heart. My motivation was and still is:

‘So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you’. Matthew 7:12a (NIV)

This verse gives me compassion and empathy for those I meet. Yes, I get tired and impatient but as I listen to people’s stories I can’t help but keep going. What I am doing is not so strange; I try to put myself in their place. I know I can’t feel the same but I can show that I care.

This is how we as Christians can have an impact on anyone we meet. It could be as we are serving overseas or even now when we see people from other countries and faiths in our own countries, in a shop, on the bus and as colleagues at work. We need to pray for courage to take the first step.

The author is an Interserve Partner and has served in the Arab world for over 25 years.

The housewife and the shopkeeper

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Other

When I first met Saule she worked as a vegetable and fruit seller. Her kiosk was a tiny wooden shack with a rough-cut tin roof. Saule was young, yet carried a notable dignity. She wore a head scarf and conservative clothes. Most Central Asian women and young girls, at least in this region with its former Soviet Union history, do not wear head scarves unless they are from strictly practising families. What really caught my eye was the copy of the holy Qur’an on the shelf beside her chair.

“Thank you, Saule. That’s all I need today.” As I took my purchases I asked, “Is that your holy book?”

“Yes, it is.”

“How nice that you try to read the holy book even while at work! I also read my holy book – the Torah and Injil*.”

After this, whenever she wasn’t too busy we had some meaningful conversations on different stories from our books, such as Abraham, Moses and Job. Our friendship grew and sometimes I brought homemade snacks and sweets and we enjoyed chatting together.

Saule worked seven days a week, twelve hours a day. She worked hard to support her family back home. “What’s your dream, Saule? If you weren’t working in this job, what would you rather be doing?”

“I would love to become a medical doctor”, answered Saule with a bright smile on her face. “Well, what’s stopping you? You are only 19 years old. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life in this little box do you?”

I knew she could have a brighter future than merely being exploited by others; in fact, I had noticed she didn’t often use a calculator to add up the prices. That day I offered to bless her and pray for the guidance of the Almighty. And we opened up our hands towards heaven and prayed in the name of Isa*. “Lead Saule into her destiny, according to your good and perfect will. Show us the way we should go. Give us courage to follow the dream you give into our lives.”

Saule showed great courage to quit the job. On her last day before returning to her home in the south, we went out for the day to see the city and had so much fun together. It was her first day outside the kiosk and her humble accommodation!

Unfortunately, I lost contact with Saule for two years. We had also moved to another part of the city but, to my great surprise, she managed to find me. When Saule had returned home, she had studied really hard for a year and successfully entered the National University as a medical student; she had been granted a full scholarship for her entire course! Saule thanked me for challenging and encouraging her to follow her dream and asking God to help her to be courageous. It was an overwhelmingly joyful reunion.

Saule has now successfully finished her five years of studying medicine and hopes to specialise in cardiology. We have enjoyed deepening our friendship over the years. As a family we sit around the table to share the meal we have cooked together, and then open the Holy Book and freely discuss and pray to the Most High. God brought Saule into my path and I am truly thankful for the friendships God grants.

My official title in the country is “house wife”. I mingle with our neighbours in the communal courtyard and enjoy building relationships with our local shopkeepers, cracking jokes and bargaining with them. My hope and prayer is to carry the Light of Isa even in my mundane routines of daily life.

Davina is an Interserve Partner coming alongside the Central Asian church in discipleship and mission.

All names have been changed.

* The Torah and Injil are Muslim terms for books of the Old Testament and the Gospels. Isa is a Muslim name for Jesus.

Serving as a single

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Education

I have been blessed with fruitful and rewarding work in theological education, which is very much needed in a church only founded after the fall of the Soviet Union. I often thank God for sending me to Central Asia. I came here as a single woman. It is quite a different challenge to move continents and serve across cultures as a single than as a family, but it also presents different opportunities. I’d like to share some of these.

The opportunities

Being single allows me to fit in easily in relationships with local families. It is often easier to host and relate to one person than a whole family.

A single woman can be a great encouragement to local believers. When I first arrived someone said, “You will be a great encouragement to the women pastors”. I had my doubts as I could not even speak the language. But now, praise God, it seems to be true, and local friends and colleagues, male and female, single and married, younger and older, are an encouragement to me as well.

A single woman can provide an example of a contented and worthwhile life in a culture where single women are often denigrated. They face pressure to be married, yet have difficulty finding a suitable Christian husband. Many women are divorced after unsuitable marriages (sometimes being “bride kidnapped”)¹. People think it is better to have been married and to have a child than to be single. Many young women have found a man to give them a child with no thought of marriage. Christian women have had to learn that this practice is not for them.

I have been blessed here with rich relationships with friends, younger and older, from many nationalities in our international fellowship. Children here, away from close family members, also benefit from a surrogate aunt or grandmother.

When you are single you have opportunity to rely on the Lord, perhaps in a different way to those who have the support of a spouse. Finding space for time with the Lord each morning is not always easy for women with children.

The challenges

You are not superwoman! Sometimes it is assumed that a single person has more time for ministry than married partners. So, we need to set boundaries. There is only one person (not two) to do what needs to be done, and many things take longer and are more complicated here. The danger that work can become all-consuming is not confined to single people. Rest and relaxation are important.

Living arrangements can be a problem. Many single people share happily together. I’m busy during the week and, being an introvert, I need time to recharge so I prefer to live alone. But I have a spare room for guests and I have a study where I often work with local colleagues. It was once suggested that single people only needed a one-bedroom apartment. Thankfully Interserve Australia supported me in my living arrangements, which are important for what I am doing here.

Loneliness can be more acute on arrival and Interserve has a great “buddy” system. I am glad to offer hospitality to new arrivals as I know how much help I needed. Although it takes time and energy, it can be mutually enriching.

Close friends leaving is always a loss and nourishing new friendships need to be developed. Sometimes people are tempted not to become involved with newcomers because you put time and energy into friendships and then people leave. Friendships are important to all of us, whether we are single or married.

Serving as a single woman presents many challenges and opportunities and I thank God for the privilege He has given me here.

Gwen has been working alongside the church in Central Asia for the past 13 years.

Names have been changed.

¹“Bride kidnapping” refers to a practice in which a man abducts the woman he wishes to marry. Though it is illegal, law enforcement remains lax in parts of Central Asia.

A lifetimes service

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Education

It was 1940, wartime, and no one in their right mind was looking to take a ship across the Indian Ocean, but a young dressmaker was walking the streets of Melbourne looking for a merchant ship to take her to India.

Dora Barkla had been praying regularly for Sholapur, a girls’ home in Maharashtra. One night while praying and reading the passage “Take up your cross and follow me”, she heard a voice which clearly said, “India”. Timid, and with a low view of her own capacities, Dora wrestled with the implications. Her family was against the idea, but one by one her misgivings were overcome by the words of scripture and in January 1940 she was on her way.

Forty-two years later I met Dora capably managing a guesthouse in Mussoorie, North India. I should not have been surprised. This quiet, even genteel, woman had been running a girls’ home for decades. When we left India in 1995, I started to visit Dora in her retirement and gradually pieced together her remarkable story.

When Dora joined the Zenana Mission (now Interserve) in 1939, it had a long history of work in India with women in the separated sections (zenanas) of Hindu and Muslim households. It was an all-women mission, responding to the medical and educational needs of these women. Mission centred on “compounds”. After a famine in the early 1900s, female babies had been left outside the mission compound at Sholapur and the mission started to care for them.

Dora believed that she would be in India all of her life, so her first task was to learn Urdu, the local language, well enough to speak to the hearts of people. Her call was to evangelise local women. After a year of study and with the first of her three spoken Indian languages under her belt, she began her ministry of visiting local Muslim women. Some time later, she began work in the girls’ home. At a time in Australia when women rarely worked outside the home, Dora and her colleagues fixed roofs, removed snakes, kept accounts and liaised with local officials. The homesickness was ferocious in the early days and it was five years before she saw Australia again.

How do we measure the work of decades of care of girls in a home like Sholapur, with the yearly round of care and education; periodic epidemics of whooping cough, typhoid, mumps and measles; months of torrid heat and torrential monsoons; picnics, Christmas pageants and the weddings of the girls who were walked down the aisle by mission staff? Literally hundreds of babies grew into womanhood watched over proudly by a woman who would never be a mother herself but who gave her working life so that others may reach adulthood safely with a living faith to sustain them through life.

Dora’s time in India saw many changes. India became independent of Britain in 1947 and with independence came greater Indian control over mission activities. Gradually, foreign control gave way to Indian leadership, and in 1979 Dora handed over the home to her friend and colleague, Nancy Basaviah.

During her career Dora saw many other necessary changes in mission: children’s homes and zenana work were a response to a particular time and place and not a model that would be replicated today.

Dora’s was a life of great nobility, showing what the Lord can do through women with faith to follow Jesus into forgotten places. Till her last days, Dora prayed daily for the girls who passed through the home. There are to this day many women who owe their lives and their faith to Dora Barkla.

Dora’s story is shared by Barbara Deutschmann, a returned Interserve Partner who also served in India.

Conversations

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Other

Beta’s eyes glistened with tears as her face crumpled with disappointment. “He got married”, she told me. Her son had married a girl she disapproved of and Beta had only just heard the news. She didn’t even know where her son was living. We sat together, cradling cups of tea, as she expressed despair over their broken relationship, having lost hope that it could ever be mended. I asked her if I could pray for her and her family and she nodded. I thanked God for this woman whom I admire, asking for reconciliation in her family and that she would know His peace.

Beta said she likes to talk with me because I am a safe space away from her gossiping neighbours. “I often see you praying and reading your holy book”, she said. “I wish my daughter had your spirit.”

—

I met my new friend Iska for lunch at a local noodle restaurant. We were just getting to know each other, so we shared stories about our families and past experiences. We laughed over her funny anecdotes from teaching foreigners the local language. She nodded her head as I explained why I pray to God: to know Him better and become more like Him. Then, with a too bright smile, Iska revealed her heartache of losing a baby at 20 weeks and her nine-year struggle to bear a child. She described the stigma she experiences in her home village as the barren woman. I could feel her grief as she conveyed her longing for a child.

As we made plans to meet again, Iska told me she enjoys chatting with a person like me as it is refreshing to hear my different stories of life and faith.

—

Over coffee and fried cassava chips, Dewi had many a tale to tell about her interesting but unconventional life. She recalled her father’s unfaithfulness and how she was able to whisper, “I forgive you” into his ear before he died. She described with dramatic and heartbreaking detail her broken engagement. She questioned me about cultural norms in the West. Thankfully, I was able to dispel many of her false assumptions about Western norms with the truth that, no, not everyone lives like that.

On the way home, Dewi confided that she appreciates I don’t judge her, unlike her local friends. She struggles to find her place in the world and is searching for meaning in her life. I silently asked God for the words to express the Gospel to her in a way she could understand.

—

Each of my friends has a story to tell. A rich tapestry of experiences, relationships, culture and faith woven together with tales of love and loss. Tales that allow me a glimpse into the longings of their hearts and the brokenness that can lie underneath.

In many ways, I am different to these women. Our cultures, beliefs, identity and opportunities in life do not always easily intersect. But we find connection as women. Over cups of tea or a meal, we can converse for hours. Sharing about our lives, our joys and our disappointments. We laugh and mourn together, both of which can reduce us to tears. But that’s okay. There is understanding in such emotional outpourings.

In our conversations, I learn that there is an art to active listening. There is grace in reserving judgment. There is love in showing concern, acceptance and care. And in each of these friendships there is room for me to reciprocally share about my life. My struggles. My hope. My faith.

“Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.” Colossians 4:6

Kathryn has spent two years On Track in South East Asia.

All names have been changed.

Seeing the invisible

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Medical / Health

When I first arrived in the city that I live in, one of the things that struck me was that I did not see many women. As I walked along the main road outside my house, I saw children going to school, some of them carrying their own little plastic chairs for school over their heads; I saw men greeting each other with warm handshakes and long embraces; I saw shopkeepers (men) sitting in their shops waiting for customers; I saw bakers (also men) baking bread in ovens that were set in walls—but hardly any women.

In preparing to come to Central Asia, I had read many books about the country and its culture. Again and again, I read that its women were oppressed, victims of domestic violence and systemic abuse. My first impressions of this country seemed to prove these notions right. Women are hidden behind the walls that surround their homes, and when in public many are “invisible” as they are covered by veils their husbands or fathers force them to wear.

Or are they?

First impressions can be deceiving. As I started to get to know the women here, I began to understand that they are only “invisible” if we do not take the time to see them. I have met women who are juggling full-time jobs and raising a family; women who are furthering their education by studying at university after a full day’s work; still others who are working hard at home raising their children, caring for their families, and making life decisions for their family members such as who their sons can or cannot marry. These women are by no means invisible to their families or communities. It was not until I lived life alongside these women that I was able to see them … their hopes, dreams, joys and sorrows.

Interserve’s approach to ministry through wholistic mission resonates strongly with me. As I learn more about wholistic mission, I am beginning to understand that it’s not just about how we can use our professional skills in ministry, but rather how we can use our whole life for ministry. If that’s the case then, as I grapple with what wholistic mission looks like in my life here, I should not just be asking myself how I can use my professional skills for Kingdom work, but also how I can use my roles as wife, mother and woman to connect with other women.

So I do what only a woman can do in this culture. I spend time in the kitchen with friends who want to learn how to bake cakes and share stories as we eat together. I attend women-only parties to celebrate an engagement or a birth and eat, laugh and dance with them. I sit with a lady who has lost her child and cry with her and pray for God’s comfort to be upon her. I listen to a woman whose husband is sick and has lost his job and pray with her as she worries about her family’s future. I sit around with the girls in my neighbour’s house and in my conversation with them I tell them a gospel story.

In short, I share life with the women around me and, as I do, the veil of invisibility quickly falls away as we connect as people. The women of Central Asia are not invisible but, in a gender-segregated society, it takes a woman to truly see them and then to point them to One who sees them fully.

The author is a psychologist serving long-term in Central Asia.

Incarnational mission

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Other, Other

In 1881 Elizabeth Bielby, a nurse, Interserve Partner and founder of a small hospital for women in India, was granted an audience with Queen Victoria. She pleaded on behalf of the Maharani of Punna for more medically trained women. The Queen responded by allowing women to begin training as doctors in the UK and more hospitals for women to be opened in India. The liberation, restoration and empowering of women marginalised “overseas”, but also “at home”, had begun a new chapter. Interserve’s early history is representative of the pioneering work of women in mission.

A friend said to me recently that she could see how beginning as an all-women’s mission had shaped Interserve.¹ When the first women went to the Indian subcontinent, they had to work in partnership with, and under, other organisations because of acceptable cultural norms at that time. They pioneered the work of local women as partners in ministry. Local Bible women were an integral part of teaching and reaching out to the community. Community was a way of life because, as single women, they had to find ways of being accepted as part of society. Relationships with the local church were foundational.

Women have always done, and still do, mission as women. Friendship and hospitality that encourage trust, intimacy and community are at the heart of women at work in mission: nurturing relationships, being present, sharing stories of life and family together. This is about mutuality that helps both the missionary and those they are among to grow.

Emptiness, hiddenness and weeping characterise women’s participation. Women in many places are valued differently, and so those working among them live out self-emptying redemptively. Going to places where people feel broken, empty, hurting, unseen and unrecognised, women incarnate Christ who seeks, finds, heals, redeems and celebrates.

In ministry that is comforting and healing, women draw on the Holy Spirit. Mission is about healing the wounds, so many of which are borne by women. Women offer the good news of love, mercy and forgiveness by coming alongside to comfort those in distress. Recognising the other—women who are hidden, unrecognised and marginalised in their communities—is at the heart of women in mission. Seeing and listening are acts of love that include and empower so that the marginalised are given voice and lifted up.

With mind-sets of pragmatic strategy, it can be hard to embrace friendship and hospitality, emptiness, hiddenness and weeping, comfort and healing, and seeing and listening. The story of women’s contribution in mission is perhaps better read through these understandings. We know too little of women’s contribution to the transformation of communities and societies.

Here’s one example. We know few names of the many women who served faithfully in Pakistan at Kinnaird School and Kinnaird College (founded by Interserve), and at the Catholic schools. The Pakistani women activists who fought the injustices and abuses perpetrated under the Hudood Ordinances² had all been educated at Christian institutions. These activists were profoundly influenced by the unnamed women who walked with them through education, and they became advocates for justice in their society.

“As we engage in mission, whether that is through weeping with the broken-hearted, consoling the bereaved, bringing healing and comfort to those who are hurting or whether it is through surprising and unexpected friendships, or through parties and celebrations and feasts, or through hearing silent ones into speech, may we too rediscover the joy of the Gospel as we deepen our love for and friendship with Jesus.”³

Cathy Hine has served as an Interserve Partner for 30 years, working with women in the Muslim world. She now leads When Women Speak…

Learn more at www.whenwomenspeak.net

¹ I am indebted to Cathy Ross, Young Lee Hertig, Moyra Dale and many others in shaping my thinking and understanding.

² Enacted in 1977 to bring Pakistani law in alignment with Islamic sharia law, with profound consequences for the status of women.

³ Ross, Cathy. I have called you friends: Women in Mission (2017).

Trusting God when it matters most

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Other

When we had been in Cambodia about a year and half, our elder daughter, who was six at the time, got into rollerblades in a big way. She didn’t have her own set but would borrow the pair belonging to the neighbour at every opportunity. We watched without real concern – she and her sister had been riding bicycles up and down our little street since we moved in six months earlier. The neighbour had no safety gear, but we insisted she wear her bike helmet and thought, well, that’s probably fine.

One night at bedtime she complained that her hand was bothering her and showed me a little mark on her palm.

“Is it a mosquito bite?” She only shrugged, so I put some bite cream on it and thought nothing more of it.

It was another three days before she finally came back, after a morning of unexplainable tears and tantrums, and said that her hand was sore and itchy.

“Your mosquito bite?” I asked. She held out her hand. The area around what I had thought was a bite was badly inflamed, and she had a track of infection running along the vein from her wrist and half way up her forearm. It turned out the original wound was from falling backwards off the rollerblades and she had hidden it as it grew more and more septic, thinking we would tell her she was not allowed to skate anymore. I generally try to remain calm in the face of medical issues around my children, but I think that day she saw fear in my eyes.

By the time we got her to the hospital she had a fever of 40C, and the process of cleaning the wound and sorting out antibiotics was unpleasant for everyone. However, within 24 hours the infection had retreated to a localised area around the wound, and in a week it was as though it had never happened.

Well, sort of.

Cambodia can be a place of mystery fevers, stomach bugs and unidentifiable illnesses. It’s also home to dengue fever, malaria, chikungunya, and a lot of other serious nasties. And although illness is unpleasant for us as adults (we’ve each spent a couple of weeks in bed since being here with mosquito-borne viruses), it’s much more worrying when it’s our children who are sick. For me, this rollerblading event triggered a lot of questions:

Was God protecting our family?
What might happen to our children, living in this place?
Could the worst occur, and what would that mean?

It was a friend of mine who helped me identify the questions I was really asking in the night-time hours, when I lay awake thinking through the what-ifs and worst-case scenarios:
Is God really trustworthy?
Is God really good?
And what does that mean anyway?

In one sense, they’re not complicated questions. The Bible says that God is love, that he is good, that he will be with us always. On the other hand, it says some less encouraging things as well. In the book of John, Jesus promised his disciples that in this world they would have trouble. He also said he has overcome the world, but what does that mean? Paul said in Romans that we “glory in our sufferings”. The theology of that is interesting, but the implication that we will have sufferings is clear.

And we need only look around.

Ten Christian workers serving in Afghanistan were murdered by the Taliban in 2010 as they travelled between towns providing medical care. Even in our own Cambodian team, in 2013 a family of six, having finished their formal language training, set out from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap to begin their ministry. Part way there, a bus crossed the centre-line and hit their car. The parents and two of the children were killed. One of the children who survived lost her arm. She and her sister had to return to their home country to be cared for by their grandparents. It shocked everyone. It frightened everyone.

Suffering comes, death comes, and being in the place where God has called you does not make you immune. Are there no guarantees? What do we rest on? We don’t have simple answers, though we have spent a lot of time thinking about the questions. But there is this: our children do not, in the final calculation, belong to us. We care for them and love them deeply, but they belong to God. And while it seems it would rip us apart were anything to happen to them, we know that God loves them even more than we do and, no matter what happens, he is holding onto them. I should note that’s not an idea we always enjoy, but it’s one we recognise.

So what does it mean, to say that we trust God with our kids, but we also know that bad things can happen? Right now, it means we trust that, whatever happens – prosperity or suffering – God will be with us, and we cannot be crushed by it. Don’t get me wrong, I still pray for them to be safe, sometimes with something like desperation. But trusting my children to God means trusting my heart to him also, and trusting in the knowledge that, in the end, he has overcome the world – eternity is bigger than Cambodia, bigger than an infected wound, bigger than malaria. Bigger than death.

When we were planning to come to Cambodia, people said to us, “Oh, you’re so brave”. We always rejected that, because we felt called by God to be here. Following God where he leads is not primarily about courage. It’s about a recognition that, ultimately, it is better, richer, greater to walk with him, than to walk away from him. You don’t have to go to Cambodia to risk your heart following God. You don’t have to be in Cambodia to trust him with it.

For her seventh birthday, injury or no injury, our daughter asked for rollerblades. And we bought them for her, because we want her to live a full life, and fear is a lousy reason for saying no. But we pray.

And we make her wear wrist guards now.

Words and photography by Chris Ellinger.

Chris and Stacie Ellinger live and work in Phnom Penh Cambodia in partnership with Connexions Uniting Church and Interserve Australia. They are using their social work and community development skills to work in local Christian NGOs providing technical assistance and discipleship to their co-workers. To find out more about their work, visit www.interserve.org.au/people/chris-stacie