On the plane ride over last week, our 747 was equipped with an in-flight entertainment system that offered video games to play and movies to watch on a small screen built into the seat in front of you. After four hours of Tetris, I had had enough and flipped through the list of available movies, eventually settling on “Love and Other Drugs.” You’ve probably seen it – or at least heard of it; it’s about a pharmaceutical sales rep played by Jake Gyllenhaal, who falls for a sick Parkinson’s patient, Anne Hathaway. Anyway, at the very tail-end of the movie, Jake Gullyenhall’s character narrates, “…you meet thousands of people and none of them touch you...and then you meet one person and your life is changed…forever.”
As I thought about that line over the past week, I realized how perfectly it also describes what happens when so many of us come to these orphanages to serve these children. We’ve all met hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children over the course of our lives; but how is it that they’ve never changed us the way Takna has…or Vandom has…or Sreyly…or Sy….or Chhaiya & Pisey…or Kea & Vanna. What is it about these kids? …about this place? …that has such a tremendous and everlasting impact on everyone who experiences it? All of us have wondered that privately; some of us have even discussed it amongst ourselves. How is it that we can meet children everyday day back in the U.S. and never feel such love, Christ’s love, the way we feel it around these children? And why is it so difficult to explain, like Jake Gullyenhall’s character trying to explain romantic love?
I wonder if it’s because of Srey Nath, who weaves a beautiful lei out of flowers to give as a welcome to someone she doesn’t even know yet. Or because of Sivouch, who despite having only known Kasey for a day and a half, held her hand all afternoon and poured such tremendous love and affection into her while she was ill? Or maybe because of Breuch, who gave me a birthday card and a beautifully decorated jar full of very tiny origami figures as a gift for my birthday…which was four months ago – she remembered it from last year! Maybe it's because of Nat, all 89 pounds of her, who grabbed J.B.’s backpack – J.B., the former NFL lineman’s backpack – away from him and carried it to the classroom for him? Or it might be because of little Kea, who despite being physically and mentally handicapped himself, wipes our sweaty foreheads with a cool, damp cloth as we’re working? Or maybe because of Vanna, who massages our aching shoulders when we’re on breaks? Perhaps it’s because of comments like Pisey’s, who when we jokingly teased about winning a million dollars said, “I would rather have God.” And he meant it.
It’s funny, we joke that whenever someone signs up for one of these trips, unbeknownst to them, they’ve actually made a lifetime commitment. They say that of all the mission trips globalX offers worldwide each year, the ones to Cambodia have the highest number of repeat applicants. Why is that? Why are we all so changed? Why do we all keep returning? What makes these kids so addictive? For whatever reason, these kids touch us, they impact us, they change us…forever.
But you know, as I thought about it this week, I realized that maybe the explanation isn’t so complicated after all. Maybe it’s very simple. Maybe the reason we feel the way we do around them, maybe the reason they are constantly on our minds and in our thoughts all year, maybe the reason everyone keeps returning is because these children are themselves under the influence of the most powerful drug there ever was – the love of Jesus Christ!
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