A Different Sunday in Cambodia

My usual Sunday in Cambodia involves a sleep in and a relaxed morning, occasionally phoning Australia, catching up on e-mails, sometimes some prep for school or some grading, and then off to church mid-afternoon. The service I usually attend starts at 4pm, so if I'm on worship team (leading, singing or playing piano), then I'll leave home around 2.30pm, otherwise I leave about 3.30pm. Not today!

Today, after a short night (went to bed early, but took a long time to go to sleep), it was up at 7.10am to have breakfast and get ready to head off for the morning service. That meant leaving home about 8.00am since I was joining a morning service worship team (interesting - much more traffic then than I usually experience on Sundays). It was fun to be part of a team of 3 musicians and 3 singers this morning, and the message was challenging as well. Thinking about evangelism. Pastor Richard raised some interesting ideas, but I think that the main idea which struck me was that we are all called to evangelise, but that doesn't mean following a formula or preaching at someone or even simply having them pray to become a Christian, but rather that we are to share with them, in a wide variety of ways, the good news that the Kingdom of God is here, and to show them how they can be part of it. There was a lot more to it than that, but that's a starting point. If you Google ICF Phnom Penh sometime next week you should be able to download the message and hear it for yourself.

After the service I invited some friends home for lunch and had a great time with them. They are both on staff at ISPP where I did my final QUT practicum, so we have a profession in common as well as other things. After they left I had a more normal Sunday afternoon, checking e-mails, reading Facebook and even playing Scrabble on Facebook.

Church this afternoon was a special treat as worship was led by a talented couple who are friends of our Youth Pastor. Despite the power going off in the middle of the service (that's Phnom Penh for you), it was a blessed time of worship. It was also great to see a number of folk back both this morning and afternoon after the holidays/home assignments (OK, so I only got back a week ago, but some of these people had been away 6-12 months).

Not so unusual really, but a good day! The coming week is starting to fill up with all sorts of people to meet up with and jobs to do, so I'm looking forward to it. Bye for now. Karen