Apr 7, 2014 A Shady Business Deal

We're teaching this guy named Joo. He works at a nice little coffee shop type place that gets a lot of foreigners. He actually lives upstairs and runs the place after everyone else has gone home. The other day we were at his place a little later than normal and the owner came back and gave him her dog to watch for the night. He told us a little bit about the dog. It's a purebred something or other (names of dogs in Khmer are a little beyond my vocabulary) and was bought as a baby for $400. :O In Cambodia... He says they take it on vacations and to restaurants and grooming places all the time. Then he said, "I don't know whether I love or hate this dog. On one hand, she's so nice and calm and playful but on the other, sometimes I feel like I'm worth less than her. They take her shopping and hug her and love her and give her gifts but all they do to me is make fun of me." Rich people can be jerks. Or just self centered. Doesn't help that it's so cheap to hire servants here...

We passed a girl on the way to church. She was wearing a really moderate dress and kind of looked like one of the Khmer sister missionaries. Elder Duffy said to me, "Hey, maybe she's going to church!" I told him that I doubted it and that there were many thousands of Cambodians on the street at that time and an extremely small percentage of them are heading to our church building right now. That was that, until 5 minutes later when we were greeting people at the door and who should walk in but the very girl we had just passed on the way here! She had learned some with the Sister missionaries and yesterday was her first time at church.

Also, we were talking to this guy trying to find information on an old member when suddenly we saw a really sketchy money exchange. Drugs or gangs or something. Anyway, this guy pulled up on his moto, stepped off, took a large wad of neatly rubber banded cash out of his pocket, dropped it into a cement bucket that was hanging from some construction thing on the third or fourth floor, got back on his moto and was gone. At the exact instant he dropped the money the bucket was pulled up to an ancient looking grandma at the top. She gave us a toothy grin and disappeared. We just looked at each other and blinked.

James 1:17 reads "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning."  Look for gifts from God! They are all around us! So often we take for granted great blessings of divine origin. Don't do it! Recognize that God blesses you and everyone! Love y'all :)

Elder Vore