Water bill - just in time?!

Our water bill... Due today!

We haven't been checking our postbox frequently because we don't really get mail sent to our house address except for the electricity & water bills. Just so happened that David decided to look into it today, and behold!

Hopefully they won't be so efficient to cut our water supply by tomorrow morning though. 

Thank God for prompting David to check the postbox just in time so that we can make payment tomorrow (albeit it being one day late). Otherwise, it might have been a whole weekend of having our water supply cut off!

"To see how ugly you are!"

"Why are you looking at me?" I asked David.

"To see how ugly you are!", he replied.

Now, you're either cheering him on for being so bold to say such a thing to his wife... OR you're totally disgusted at how insensitive his words were.

In order to help you make a better judgement, I should give you some context.

Recently, I met up with a friend who's also expecting her 2nd baby. It was inevitable that some pregnancy stories came up during our time together.

When she was pregnant with her 1st child, she had many older women (urm... they were Chinese / Asian in Australia) tell her that she was definitely expecting a boy. Why? Because they could tell by looking at her face! These women claimed that the facial features of women changed during pregnancy to reflect the gender of the baby they were carrying due to the hormones - i.e. testosterone if a boy, estrogen if a girl.

In other words, if a woman was carrying a girl, she would look... more like a girl / female. If she was carrying a boy, she would look... more like a boy / male.

In my friend's interpretation however, it meant that "If you're carrying a girl, you'd glow & look more beautiful. If it's a boy, you're more manly, which basically means you look uglier!"

Being a Malaysian Chinese who's lived in Australia for most of her life, she didn't take offense at those words as she could understand the cultural context of these women. Her Caucasian friend however, felt so insulted when she was told the same thing! What's acceptable in one culture may not be the case in another!

Well, did my friend have a boy in the end? She did! So did her Caucasian friend. Although they sometimes wished they had girls just to prove the women wrong! :)

So... David certainly hopes that I look ugly... The uglier the better!

Robbery... but God provides!

Sarah (not her real name) had her bag wound tightly around a hook on her motorbike. She was on her way home when 2 men on a motorbike rode next to her and started pulling at her bag!
It took a couple of tugs before the robbers managed to get the bag. And then they sped off!

Not only did she lose cash, cards & her phone, she also lost the bag itself which was a valued possession amongst many other precious things that were in it.

That night, Sarah had a headache and wanted to reach for her pills, but then realized that they were in the stolen bag! Different items came to her mind as she moaned for her losses, particularly a favorite key-ring that she had.

The next day, she went to the OMF team center, and guess what she found in the mail for her? A new key-ring! A friend from the UK had sent it to her 3 weeks ago, way before she knew what had happened!

Another great praise story: After learning about the robbery, Janet (not real name), another missionary friend here offered to give Sarah her handbag that Sarah really coveted (liked). Sarah asked Janet to consider it carefully as she really did not think she could bear to part with the bag should Janet change her mind!

Some days later, Sarah was thrilled to find that bag in her pigeon hole. Janet had decided to give it to her. Amazingly, on that same day, Janet later found out that she had received a parcel from the UK. Guess what it contained? A spanking new bag of the same brand that she had given to Sarah!

God's provision is so amazing & timely!

Theft: 1 motorbike, 4 bicycles...

Just a day before I posted about God being our ultimate security, our neighbour's front yard / porch got broken into for the second time. The thieves took a total of 4 bicycles & 1 motorbike over two separate occasions, one week between each.

Our house is joined to theirs & we actually share the same front yard. So our motorbike could have well been stolen too if not for the fact that it was parked on the other end, blocked by both families' cars. It's likely that the thieves may not have seen our motorbike in the darkness of the night.

Side & main gate on the left are on our side of the house. The neighbours have identical gates & their bikes were parked on the their end of the front yard

The thieves had it easy the first time (as the gate was unlocked in the evening). But the second time, they had cut the padlock on the gate. They then hung the broken padlock over our neighbours's door to prevent them from getting out of the house to stop the thieves!

(Before adding the extra security features)

Side gate, view from the outside - there's a hole to allow securing of the padlock on the inside from the outside

(After adding the extra security features)

Side gate, view from outside: a metal piece that covers the hole, installed to prevent thieves from accessing the inside padlock

Side gate, view from the inside: a little latch on the metal piece that can be padlocked at night

Main gate, view from the inside: the black, badly soldered piece of metal prevents thieves from lifting the metal pole that anchors the gate to the ground

While we do thank God for our landlady who has been very prompt in installing extra security features on the gates, we're reminded again that our trust cannot be in these things, as much as we need them to some extent. God is still our ultimate security.

There'll be times when we will experience His miraculous covering and protection. Yet, at other times, He allows us, His children, to be victims of evil perpetrators. We're not immune to the effects of evil. It is part & puzzle of living in this fallen world.

So please pray that we continue to look to God for all things - security yes, but more so, to His enabling & keeping of our faith when bad things do happen.

Video: Learning Khmer - vowel sounds

Video taken sometime in January.. to help with differentiating the sounds of a couple of easily confused vowels. See if you can notice the difference in their sounds?!

The day I couldn't be a backseat driver

It's rainy season. You'd think that I'd have the common sense to pack in a raincoat in my bag... but No...

So it rained last Friday just as we were going back home. Thankfully David was more prepared than I was. So at least we had one raincoat to share between the two of us...

I'm a backseat driver. Especially when the driver is my husband. Even more so when we're in crazy-traffic-land, i.e. Cambodia. Frequently, I have this urge to scream out "Watch out! Car coming!" or "Slow down!" or "Motorbike!"

Even though I'm slowly learning to refrain from commenting, I still feel the obligation to "lend my pair of eyes" to watch out for the traffic. As if I can somehow control the driving just by my looking.

So... it was a rather... urm... faith-testing (& nerve-wrecking!) experience to be riding home under that raincoat without being able to see anything apart from my own two feet! You bet I was clinging on tighter than usual!

Maybe that's why God sometimes keeps us in the dark about where we're going in life. So that we can stop being backseat drivers trying to tell Him what to do? So that we can learn to trust & cling on to Him more?

When our windows of security were removed

Wrote this post in May, but only got around to posting it up now.
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When our “windows of security” are removed, we’re forced to remember God as our ultimate security.

This was our ‘literal’ experience  during our Field trip to the Royal Ploughing Day Ceremony here in Cambodia.

We had arrived early at the OMF Team Center with another family, waiting for the others to gather. David had wound down the (automatic) windows from his driver’s control panel so that we could all get some fresh air while we waited in the car with the engine turned off.

As we were about to begin our journey, each of us pressed our own control button to wind up the windows, but the windows wouldn’t go up except for the one at the driver’s seat. David tried from his ‘master control’ but nothing happened either with the 3 other passenger windows. We even tried turning off the car engine in hope of “rebooting” it (just like a computer perhaps?)!

Shrugging it off as one of those problems you get with an old car, we travelled through the dusty streets of Phnom Penh, occasionally moaning about the fumes that were getting into the car because of our open windows.

It was not until we arrived at an open-space car park that it suddenly struck us – our car was now an easy target for car-thieves! We parked right in front of the little hut where the guard was, but guess what? He was asleep! That certainly didn’t give us much sense of security!

So we prayed. There was nothing else we could do. Right there & then, we realised that all we could do was to trust & depend on God to protect the car & its contents.

Yet, it was also eye-opening to realize that, we wouldn’t have thought twice about depending on God when the windows were working!

But isn’t that faulty thinking? Who ultimately holds the security of our car, our possessions, even our lives? The multi-faceted locks on doors & windows? The security gate? The state-of-the-art alarm system? The insurance policy?

The security hedges we build around us sometimes do hinder us from experiencing the amazing loving hand of God holding, sustaining, protecting us from harm or loss. Sometimes, it takes the removing of some of these ‘security items’ before our eyes can see beyond toward the true hedge of security, toward God our fortress.

As it turned out, our car & everything in it was safe & intact when we got back to it after the ceremony. God was watching indeed!