Timothy

11 August 2019

Dear Phyllis,

Gomen nasai for the flood of 4 letters last week, but that was a story that I wanted to keep intact. It's done.

It was around 2001 that I had, perhaps the most profitable trip I was ever on. Mark and I, and another young man, were over to Cambodia taking Bibles to the Jarai people who were being hunted in the jungle like animals. After our Bible drop I told Mark, “We have got to go to the Angkor Wat in Siem Reap”. If I was a tourist going to the Orient and had only one place to go, it would be the Angkor Wat. Nine hundred years ago Angkor was the capital of an enormous section of SEA. And they built a city that is one of the wonders of the ancient world. It rivals the pyramids in Egypt.

The Angkor Wat is the #1 tourist attraction in Cambodia with three million visitors each year. The problem is, there is a swarm of local children selling trinkets to tourist. They are like the frogs in Egypt or the mosquitoes in Siberia. They really are a nuisance. One little 8 year old girl was begging me to buy her postcards. I wanted to be Christian so I reached down and said, “I love you”. She looked up at me with those big, beautiful, brown eyes and said, “You say you love me, but you won't buy my cards.” - and started to weep. I bought the cards. Then everybody swarmed around me saying, “You bought hers but you won't buy my xxxx”. Now how do you get out of that?

Five o'clock came and the park was closing. We had a 30 minute wait for the bus going into town and the kids were all around us. Work was over and we were having a big time playing with the children. I saw my little 8 year old girl; I reached down to pick her up, and give her a big hug. You have never seen anything like what happened next. Thirty kids lined up demanding, “I want a hug”. Then they would run around to the back of the line to get another one. Thirty minutes later, when we got on that bus, those kids had flat torn the heart right out of me. I vowed, “If there is anything I do in this life, I must come back here to tell those children about Jesus.”

The next day we were in the war museum and met a guide who said he had shrapnel in his eye and was going blind. He said an operation would cost $100, which was totally out of his reach. That touched Mark's heart. Three months later Mark gave me $100 and told me to go back to Siem Reap and take that man to a hospital.

It was summer, I tried in vain to locate a missionary or pastor in Siem Reap and went back blind. I found the man in the war museum and told him I had come to get his eye fixed. I asked him if he knew of any church in that city. He said, “My daughter is a Christian”. I begged him, “Please introduce me to your daughter.” He took me home to meet his 17 year old daughter, but she had zero English. I asked her, “What kind of a church do you go to?” “BP” “What is BP?” “BP.” “Please take me there.” We got on a couple of motor bikes and she took me through a maze of rice paddies, finally, coming to a shack that looked like a chicken coup. A young pastor and his wife, who spoke amazingly good English, came out to speak to me. I asked them if they would go with me out to the Angkor Wat to tell the children about Jesus. I never dreamed of what would happen the next day. The three of us went out to the Angkor Wat and got all the children together. I sat there in tears as I watched that fantastic girl, tell 30 children sitting around us all about Jesus. Sang lai is as good as they come. I mean to tell you that girl (26) is a real high quality Christian worker.

Her husband, Timothy, was a poor boy from Sihanoukville by the coast of Cambodia. As a high school student he lived in a Buddhist temple but used to walk past a Bible school with a boarding house, on his way to school. They invited him to live there. Of course he got saved. After completing high school he continued on in the Bible school. But after four years of Bible school he was left standing as various mission scooped up all the sharp boys, but nobody wanted an unimpressive loser like him. With no place to go he stayed on for one more year of Bible school. During that year he met and married Sang lai. When no one wanted him again he purposed, “If no one wants me I will go to Siem Reap on my own”. They had been there for about two years, struggling, when I met them.

When I got back to Chiang Mai and told Mark about Timothy, I said, “You've got to meet this guy”. Mark went back there and was equally impressed. He had some extra funds coming in and gave it to Timothy to hire a bus to haul the kids from Angkor 12 km to his church. That worked fine for a while, but the children were so unruly and tore up the bus so bad, the owner refused to haul the kids anymore. Confronted with that problem, Mark had some more funds and gave it to Timothy to buy a bus. During the week Timothy could use that bus for tourists. Now money was no problem.

Then there was a problem with the kids parents. To settle that problem Timothy started visiting the children's homes. The result was that family after family started getting saved. These people couldn't get to church, so Timothy started having services in areas around these homes. As a result of that small incident of giving that little girl a hug, a number of the children were saved, many families came to Christ, and five churches sprang up in Siem Reap.

A couple years later Timothy received a most unusual letter from his home village, asking him to come down and tell them the Gospel. I have only heard of something like that happening in two or three other places. Timothy contacted Mark asking if he could come to help him with that dendo (evangelism). Mark had a team from the Faroe Islands coming to Chiang Mai and took them with him to go with Timothy to his village. What happened that week beats any story I have ever heard of in missions. I can't begin to tell it here, but it reads like the Book of Acts.

These guys from the Faroe Islands were very unusual. They were very conservative Lutherans and reasonably well saved.. The Faroe Islands are some islands in the North Sea north of Scotland that belongs to Denmark. They are very isolated people and how they wound up in the Orient I have no idea. What they saw that week in that village in Cambodia was like they had stepped on a different planet. That was almost as big a revelation to them as it was for Luther to come out of Rome. There was one brother who had been very wealthy living the high life and then lost everything. In his despondency he decided to join the Christian team headed for the Orient. What he saw in Cambodia blew him away. He stayed on to work with Timothy. Today he is living in a bamboo hut with his Cambodian wife serving Jesus and is the happiest man in Cambodia. Rarely have I ever seen such a man overflowing with joy.

It has been several years since the last time I was in Siem Reap, but the last time I saw Timothy he was a walking miracle. He was a poor homeless boy that went to Bible school who no one wanted. Rejected by men, he and his wife struck out alone to serve the Lord in Siem Reap. Today he is well funded from the Faroe Islands. He has built a beautiful new church. He has started a string of churches around that area. It seems that he is the head of every major Christian organizations in that town. What he has accomplished in 15 years has eclipsed the total production of all the graduates from his Bible school. I don't know another man who could stand beside him. If I ever saw a case of God choosing foolish things, rejected by men, to lay His hand on to do an amazing work it is Timothy and Sang lai. That Bible run to Cambodia 18 years ago was one of the most profitable moments of my life.

Lord Jesus, thank you for this great privilege, bill