This week just gone by for me included the annual Samaritan’s Purse dinner, a little earlier in the year than usual. I don’t recall one happening last year, but as previously explored, I always enjoy the Samaritan’s Purse dinner.

Every year there’s a different focus and this year, SP’s work in Cambodia was the focus; particularly their work with schools.

As is well known, The Khmer Rouge strategically wiped out the education system in the country and targeted teachers. As all good dictatorships know: take out the educated people first. This definitely includes the educated people influencing the next generation. We can’t have them giving educated ideas to the future change makers.

So the school system was decimated in Cambodia and the level of schooling all children received was minimal. Before too long, they’d be forced to cross the border and find work in a neighbouring country.

And that’s why the SP dinner this week just gone was such a celebration.

Across the last 20 years, this Christian organisation has built and helped to staff 51 new schools. The 52nd is on the way, due before the end of the year. Amazing work.

The celebration dinner included many stories of the ways in which schools had opened up opportunities to share the gospel with people in the community, especially when the school principal converted to Christianity and helped to connect the local school with the local church.

As a school teacher myself, it was interesting to be at the dinner. The past dinners I’ve attended, have focused on different professions within the work of Samaritan’s Purse. So to be talking about schools and the need for more teachers and teachers to be trained, there’s a feeling that perhaps I should be doing more.

But is it right for me to think like that?

Is it not better to be thinking ‘Am I in the place that God wants me in right now?’ Surely obedience is greater than anything else. And surely obedience is greater than guilt tripping myself.

We can be rightly excited about work that God is doing somewhere else, but that doesn’t mean we have to be a part of it. What it does mean is that we need to be listening carefully to God’s promptings about where he wants us and making sure we are there.

Wherever that is.

However, it was really exciting to hear about the work SP is doing in Cambodia in schools. It’s fantastic to hear how they have made so many primary schools that they then needed middle schools, then high schools… and now, there are young adults ready to start thinking about what type of tertiary education they will study.

It’s very exciting the way they have turned whole communites around as they have worked to create schools that are effective and engaging for students.

Whatever my personal takeaway point was from the evening, there was one message that was crystal clear:

If you want to turn whole communities around, get yourself into education; for with God’s help, you will.

Yours in schools,

Alison