I am happy to share that we are all here! Pam and I arrived on time this evening and are settled into our rooms here in Siem Reap. I am hoping that sleep will come soon. Of course it would help if I turned the wifi off and went to bed. 
We got a glimpse of some amazing beauty on our flight over today as this was our view between Chicago and Seoul. I thought of Psalm 19′s “the heavens declare the glory of God and the skies proclaim the works of God’s hands.”
We read in Micah 6:8…God has shown you what is good and what the Lord requires of you…to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.
That is my prayer for our team as we all are (nearly) on our way to Cambodia. The last two of us head out in a few hours. There is much excitement mixed with anxiousness about the details of today especially with the 24 hrs ahead of travel. I am deeply thankful for the opportunity to be a part of this trip and am very excited to experience what God has ahead for all of us.
Thank you for your continued prayers for us all and for the Benadums and for the people of Cambodia.
The first part of our group are on their way to Cambodia! Three members of our team headed out this morning 
to spend a few days in Thailand before meeting the rest of the group in Siam Reap on Thursday of next week. Please be praying for them for their travels, especially due to the flooding taking place in the area. The rest of the members of the team are heading out over the next several days. We will all be in Siam Reap by Thursday (Cambodia time) of next week.
Wifi and internet connections permitting, I am planning on keeping this blog up for our trip, so feel free to bookmark, RSS, etc to keep up with what’s happening.
My prayer today is not as much about what we are going to be doing and bringing to Cambodia, but instead more of what God is going to do in and through us as we learn from the Cambodian people and see how God is on the move there. Thank you for your prayers and support.
Sorry the posts slowed down after a few days at Pine Ridge. We had a nice strong wifi signal for the first few days and then it died out and didn’t come back.
Our time at Pine Ridge was truly a blessing in many different ways. We were blessed to serve in many 
different ways with the people of Pine Ridge and the Wings of Eagles school. We were blessed to begin relationships with the families we served. We were blessed to build relationships with the others with whom we were serving – both those within our group and those we just met. We were blessed to complete or continue some pretty extensive projects. We were blessed to serve with Next Step and the faithful work they are doing at Pine Ridge and many other places. We were blessed to be surrounded by the awesome beauty of God’s creation that we see in the Black Hills and in Western South Dakota. We were blessed to be touched by the Spirit and the power of God in many different ways. We were blessed to have our lives changed through this experience.
This Sunday promises to be a wonderful Sunday as our youth share about their experience and lead in worship. Join us to celebrate God’s work in and through this wonderful experience.
What a great day here! The sun came out all day and we were able to really get a ton done on all our projects! Looks like everyone will have things mostly wrapped up tomorrow in time for our free day on Friday.
We also went to Wounded Knee this afternoon. A very moving experience being there and thinking about what happened there in our history. It was not a “fun” place to visit, but it was a necessary place for us to visit given what we are leaning about the Lakota people’s experience both historically and today.
Tomorrow, we will finish the rest of our projects and will then spend time at a buffalo ranch when we get back from our sites. Apparently, we will be able to ride a buffalo!
God is very present through all we are experiencing here – we are seeing God in many different ways.
Cue Beatles music…here comes the sun…the day started out like the last few days, grey and rain but the sun eventually came out and gave us a beautiful afternoon. Most of the groups got some great work done on projects as the weather finally cooperated for the most part.
Even more so, it was great to see and hear the ways that students are connecting with the people here at Pine Ridge. Watching some on our work team playing with the kids and the joy and the smiles was absolutely wonderful. We have also begun to hear stories of God touching and changing lives of some of the many who are here with Next Step. God is on the move in some very tangible ways here. It’s been great.
Looking forward to day 3 tomorrow!
Work day one is in the books and wow it was wet and cold, but it was a great day of work for everyone. A few groups got more work done as they were either inside or their jobs could be done in the heavy cold rain. But the groups are blending together beautifully and there is going to be some wonderful work done as the week goes along. Also, Bethany says hi to everyone!
One of the beautiful things today was hearing the God Sightings or Yeah Gods from people at worship tonight – it was awesome to hear the many and see the many ways that God was experienced today.
We also visited the Red Cloud Heritage center before dinner tonight. It was really striking to hear the stories of the Lakota people and to see the beauty and truth in their art that was in the center.
Day two promises to be even more of what we have experienced thus far. We appreciate your prayers!
Just a quick post to let you know that all arrived safely here in Des Moines. Day went well for everyone and we are all settling in for the night in one semblance or another. I think I just heard someone in the hall say that the pizza had arrived. We spent time as a group tonight focusing on what it means to be a servant as we reflected upon Jesus’ example of service for his disciples and by extension to us. We served one another in a very selfless way this evening with our prayer being that we will continue to do the same throughout this week for one another and for others.
Tomorrow the majority of the group heads to Pine Ridge first thing in the morning (another 9 hrs or so) while Amy and I head to Sioux Falls to get the kids settled there and we meet everyone on Monday morning at the worksites in Pine Ridge.
I have always loved Eugene Peterson’s books. Books such as Working the Angles, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, Five Smooth Stones, and several others have been guide books for me along the way in pastoral ministry. His Message translation of the Bible has also been vital for me in my devotional life. I am deeply appreciative of the voice he has shared over the decades.
But there has been one thing that I have struggled with about Peterson’s writings along the way. I often wondered – was he ever really a pastor in a church? For example, the “angles” of pastoral ministry he writes of in Working the Angles – Prayer, Scripture, and Spiritual Direction – are absolutely things that I would want to have as the primary angles of my ministry. But where do budgets, personnel matters, building decisions, come into those? One of the ongoing struggles I have had in pastoral ministry is knowing that those are the “angles” of pastoral work, but finding it difficult to keep those as the central angles of what I am doing when there are so many other things “out there” that have to “get done.”
What I appreciated most about Peterson’s newest book, Pastor: A Memoir, is the fact that this feels to be the most personal of Peterson’s books I have read. It is all first person, stories, remembrances, etc of his calling, his avoidance of the calling initially, and then his embrace of it, along with his struggles throughout. There were many places in the book where what he writes of speaks to exactly things that I have experienced or felt as a pastor for the last 12 years now.
This book is by no means a “how to” book, but it is, to me, more powerful and more effective than any of the “how to do pastoral work” books out there because it is his story and not just something that is a “you should do it this way.”
The middle third of the book spoke to me the most strongly as he reflected upon his connection with the congregation he was a part of founding in Baltimore. It was encouraging to read that many things have not changed over the decades, especially the call of Christ in our lives.
This is a very important book, I think for pastors serving congregations now, for those looking to enter into this form of ministry, and for members of congregations who want to understand more of what it means to be a pastor, especially for those who may be like the one who Peterson spoke of in his book who said that pastors “pastors [are] invisible six days a week and incomprehensible the seventh.”
Several of the key quotes for me…
In reflecting upon how he was going to begin to understand his calling, he writes…
[it was] necessary to clear the ground for learning that God at work—not I—was the center of the way I was going to be living for the rest of my life. Inappropriate, anxiety-driven, fear-driven work would only interfere with and distract from what God was already doing. My “work” assignment was to pay more attention to what God does than what I do, and then to find, and guide others to find, the daily, weekly, yearly rhythms that would get this awareness into our bones. Holy Saturday for a start. And then Sabbath keeping. Staying in touch with people in despair, knowing them by name, and waiting for resurrection
As he was discussing the dissonance he felt between American culture and Christian ministry and how the two have intermingled greatly, he wrote:
We wanted to honor that more, to understand and treat our congregations not as a gathering of problems to be fixed but as souls being formed for salvation in a community of worship. Not men and women defined by what we could do for them but by what God was already doing for and in them. We wanted to develop facility in saying God and Jesus as prayer, personal prayer, not as an item of religious information.
He also writes about the proliferation of “programs” in churches:
A program defines people in terms of what they do, not who they are. The more program, the less person. Church was understood not in terms of personal relationships and a personal God but in terms of “getting things done.
The key point he raised throughout the book over and over is the one seen in that last quote…the church has to be about the people and not about the programs. This is an area that is an ongoing struggle for me in ministry – the pressure (either internal or external or both) to have programs that attract, draw, grow, etc – and how so much energy can go into those programs that relationships seem to be secondary. Peterson’s book provides a healthy corrective to this form of thinking and acting for ministry. Again, a highly recommended read.
I find it interesting that this question is “…sacred” and not “…the sacred.” I have often heard the words “the sacred” used to talk about a way of experiencing God as person, force, object, etc. Without the definite article, it does bring in a new element. The word sacred is defined as “something connected with God [or gods] or dedicated to a religious purpose and so deserving veneration.” In the dictionary I used, it is an adjective and not a noun (proper or otherwise). So, this question has a bit of a different slant than it could.
For me, I started initially working through a long list of “times of experiencing sacred” and came up with about 20 things and it still felt incomplete. It felt like there were moments missing and ones that I couldn’t even remember specifically and yet felt like they were missing.
The word sacred has a sense of holy, set-apart, unique, unusual, unexpected, beautiful to me. Sacred comes in where these things interact with daily life. But what is most important to remember is that daily life is not just a process of getting from one sacred point to another, but instead a daily living in the midst of the sacredness of life. Too often, I think we live where we separate “sacred” from “secular” and give the sense that the two are completely separate. I think reality is far different, however, as sacred-ness is all around us and it is us seeking to be tuned into the sacredness that is there.
In this sense, its not that much different from the radio, television, wifi, etc waves that are all around us – we may not see them, but when we are tuned in, we pick them up clearly and are connected to something beyond ourselves. I think sacred is like that in a far more important and life changing way. Sacred is in the air around us and its a lifelong process of being tuned into it around us.
