Forgiveness

9.2.2010 von Christoph.

[DEUTSCH macht heute mal Pause, da der Buchauszug recht lang ist -  viel Spass beim Englisch lesen! Morgen werde ich hier entlassen…]

[ENGLISH]
I am going home tomorrow and I suspect this blog will be updated much less frequently. So I need to make good on the promise to select a passage from Rob Lilwall’s book “Cycling Home from Siberia” (see entry on 7 Feb), which I am hoping to finish tonight…

Apart from Rob’s gift for describing foreign countries and cultures with a lot of colour and the hairy bits when it gets quite dangerous, one of the things I love about his book is his encounters with people who have amazing life stories to tell. Here is the story of a Cambodian pastor (shortened from Rob Lilwall: Cycling Home from Siberia, pp. 219f):

“I was nine years old when the Khmer Rouge took power. I lived in a village with my parents and I had seven brothers and sisters. One day the Khmer Rouge soldiers came to the village. They ordered me to go with them to work on a farm 23 kilometres from my home. I worked there for three years and was very unhappy. But then the Vietnamese invaded and I thought that we were liberated. But still I wasn’t allowed to return to my family. There were many land-mines and every month someone from the work camp was killed or injured. So me and a group of friends decided to escape. During the escape eight of my friends were killed. I was sure I would die too. One night I heard a voice speaking to me. It said that I would not die. I thought it was one of my friends and told him to be quiet. But he said it wasn’t him. Then I heard the voice again. I didn’t believe in God. We had been told there was no God in the camps. But later on I realised it was God telling me this.
“At the Thai refugee camp they gave out Bibles. I accepted one because the pages were good for rolling cigarettes. Gradually I started to take an interest in what the Christians were saying. After a number of years I became a Christian.
“After the war I want back to my village to look for my family.  My old neighbour told me that the Khmer Rouge had killed my parents and all of my brothers and sisters. Then he said quietly, ‘So I was the only one who had survived.’
“My life is still full of sadness, but I believe that God is good. He has helped me to forgive and love. I even forgive the people who killed my family. Cambodia still has many troubles but I believe God has called me to start a church here so that I can teach the people how to forgive.”

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