Greetings to you all. And it's exciting for us to be back with you all again after it was four years as last time we were here, 2011 is when we left out. 2010 is when we came to visit you guys. And I want to give thanks to each of you for your prayers, for your support, your investment in the work in Cambodia and in our family. And we thank you for that. I also want to give special thanks to Ted and his family for putting us up for a couple nights, and Ty and his family for putting us up as well, for being bold and taking on our little troop. And so we're very thankful to them for that, and they've been very hospitable, in spite of the fact that we woke them up very early this morning. He was on time. Hey, I got him here on time. You know, there's something to be said for that. All right, we are the Canes. And since we were here last, we have two new ones. This is, let's see here, we got Brianna. That's our youngest. She was born 16 months ago. And Julia, she also is new since we were here last. Our oldest is Mia. And Sophia. You. Jackson, and then my wife, Lydia, who's back with the children right now. We minister in the country of Cambodia. Cambodia is located, for those of you who are as geographically challenged as I am, is located in the southeastern corner of Asia. And we're bordered by Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos. We minister up in the northeastern part of Cambodia. in a province called Ratanakari. And I'm having a little bit of delay here on this, so. There we go. And in a town called Banlung. Banlung is the capital of our province. Whoops. I don't know, we're getting, here we go. In Banlung there. I don't know what's going on here, but I'm getting special extras here. jumping through the slides. Do you guys have another one that's maybe a little more tried and true? While they're fishing that out, I want to let you guys know at the end of the presentation here, the report on what's going on there, I want to give you guys an opportunity to ask questions about Cambodia and really I want to open it up broadly anything directly connected with our ministry or just things that you have questions about Cambodia. And you're welcome to do that in any way. And that'll be great. Thank you, sir. Appreciate that. This one to the right here. Ah, that looks good. Okay. And so you guys will have that opportunity. So as you're looking at this, if there's anything that you think, hey, I'd like to know more about that, feel free to do that. Obviously, it's difficult to compress into a short period of time, what's happened in four years. And actually some of this is the result of eight years and beyond. So feel free to do that at the end. We live in the town of Banlung, which is the provincial capital. And in our province, it's a little bit unique. In America, we have different minorities. And if you live in a place like LA or New York City or something like that, you're going to have small sectors. that are basically one minority. You'd have a Chinese section, and you might have a, I don't know, Filipino section, and things like that. But usually in a state, it's pretty mixed. Well, in our province, we have about six or seven different minority groups. We have the tampun, we have the kacaw, we have the jerai, and then we have the krung and the brao. And we work with the krung and brao group, and these are basically laid out in the geographical area that they tend to live in. Each of these languages are mutually intelligible, unintelligible. They cannot understand each other. So everybody speaks the national language, which is Khmer. Cambodians are ethnically Khmer, and so the language is called Khmer. So that's what everyone is going to speak, but each of these different groups have their own native language, and predominantly While they're going to be able to speak some Khmer, they're only going to be able to really communicate well in their own native language. So when we were going to Cambodia, we knew that we were going to end up working with one particular group because we needed to focus in and learn their language. And so the first four years that we were in Cambodia, we were learning the national language, Khmer. And then the last four years, we've been working on getting one of the minority languages, the Krung language. And I put Krung and Brau in the same group because their languages overlap quite a bit. But technically, they only overlap by about 60%. So there's still quite a diversity. And there's hopefully going to be a more specific work with the Brau people as well. In each of these language groups, there are different missionaries, different mission organizations even, working with different language groups. But we have a really cool unity with the other mission groups that are there in our province. And so far, we've been able to get along really well. And there's some cool things that have happened as a result of that. First, I want to give you a little bit of family update. Many of you heard about the sickness that I had in 2013, and we praised God for what He did. In about a week and a half's time period, I went from very healthy to on the verge of death. And the doctor said that if things had continued the way they were, within a week or so I could have easily been dead. But you and thousands, literally thousands of other people, people that we didn't even know, prayed for us and God intervened miraculously and spared my life and spared my wife living with six children on her own. She probably was praying harder than any of you. One of the other highlights of our time here was getting to baptize my oldest daughter. That was probably, above all of the cool things that I get to show you today, that was probably the highlight of, if not the last eight years, the last 20 years of my life. All right, you guys have been investors in the work in Cambodia. So this is your dividend report. And I mean that. You guys, as you pray and as you give monies toward this, this is the results of what you've invested in. And these are some of the rewards that you're getting on this side of heaven. And so I want you to hear the things that have happened. We have some really cool things to share with you. This is what God has done as a result of your investments, both in prayer and in money, giving towards the work there. The first is the Ratanakiri pastor school. About 20 or so years ago, My friend and coworker JD Crowley and his family came to Cambodia. And as they moved up into our province, they realized that there was at that time several different groups of Christians gathered together, not quite churches, per se, because there were no leadership and there was really no structure among those groups. But one of the needs that he realized immediately was if there was going to be any leadership, they needed to have some more training. And so he began a pastor school where he began training these men, teaching them about the Bible, going through books of the Bible. And you understand that these men have no basis whatsoever in the Scripture. So he started from beginning. He started from Genesis, went all the way through the Bible to Christ to give them the hooks to hang on the rest of the doctrines that they needed to be able to teach the scriptures. And over the next 20 some years, there has been these pastor school, at least once, most of the time, two or three times a year. These men are all farmers. And so they come twice a year for these block training courses. And they're taught for an entire week from morning until nighttime, usually through one book of the Bible or one topic. And I'm giving you a little bit of background of the new things that are happening now. So as these men have grown up and been taught here, things have been progressing really well. The way it's set up is most of us as missionaries are the ones who are teaching in this pastor school. So we have about six or six to eight, depending on the years, different missionaries who teach in this Bible school. And we teach in the national language in Khmer for these men. And we have some, and we're jumping through slides again here. Here we go. All right, and as of recently, we've had some of the Cambodian men actually start teaching in the Bible school as well. These are guys who have been in the Bible school for about 12 years. And so as we have begun to recycle some of the material, because we've got a situation where we've got guys who have been in there for 12 years, and then we've got guys who are coming in just in the last two years, two or three years. into this pasture school. So we've been recycling some of the material, which has created a little bit of an interesting scenario or situation. It's exciting in one sense that we have this new generation coming up, but it was a little bit frustrating for the older guys. They wanted to be able to continue on in their training, but the younger guys, they needed us to kind of stay with the basics. So these guys met together. And they decided that they wanted to split the Bible school into two different groups and let the older guys start to pursue things that were a little bit more advanced and have the younger guys go through the basics. These are guys who have probably on average have not completed anything further than fifth or sixth grade. So this is astounding that these guys have stuck with this and that they're actually now pursuing what would be more of a Bible school level degree. And we're pushing on with this. So this has been incredibly exciting to see this happen and to see these guys go forward with this. Now, one of the cool things that happened was as in tandem with this or at the same time, we had a series of or several of the churches have new believers. And some of them had entire villages coming to Christ. Not entire villages, sorry. They had big groups out of new villages coming to Christ. And they didn't have any training whatsoever. So they wanted to start from the very beginning with these guys. And they started teaching in their own language, in those tribal languages that I mentioned earlier. They started teaching Genesis to Jesus Christ and started teaching through Matthew and teaching through Acts. And we had kind of set as our basis for this Ratanakadi pastor school that these men would have to make sure that they've gone through these prerequisites before they come into the pastor school, or at the beginning of the pastor school. But at the same time, these other churches started having these basic levels in their own churches. So we decided, why not just let these guys have their own minority language Bible schools, and we give over this core curriculum to the churches, and they teach their own people, and then it would give them the chance to broaden this out and not just be for pastors, it could be for anybody in the church as well. Now we had tried this in the past, to have minority language Bible schools, but we had a couple of things going against us. One of them was the fact that there was only about six of us on hand. And of those people, there was only two or three of us that knew any of the minority languages. So even though we were doing these minority language Bible schools, the missionaries were doing a large percentage of the teaching, and it was all still in Khmer. So it was not their native language. It wasn't in Krung, it wasn't in Tampuan, it wasn't in Jirai. And only a few of the lessons were being taught by some of these other men. So we had tried this in the past, and it went for a couple of years, but it was never really successful. Well, in 2015, these churches took this and ran with it. They have had Krung, and Brao, and Jirai, and Tampun, and I'm missing one, and Khmer, and Khmer Bible schools in their own languages. And this is the Krung Bible school. And the incredible thing about this Bible school, this was the very first one that they had. This one was done completely by the Krung, completely. There was no missionary involved whatsoever. They scheduled it. They planned it, they taught it. It was all Khmer teachers and the last three, except for this, okay, they did have one white guy. But I was a guest. They invited me to be a part of it. And I taught one lesson out of 22 lessons that were taught that week. I was one lesson out of there. And I was a guest in their Bible school. It was their music. And they did all of the food preparation. All of the churches provided the money for the food. And so these were incredible advances. And really exciting to see these Krung, and Tampun, and Jiraiya churches all doing these Bible schools on their own. One of the other encouraging things was that how many women were involved in these Bible schools. And again, this was something else that had been attempted in the past, was having a ladies Bible school. where ladies could come, because they were complaining, you know, our husbands, they get to go to these pastor schools, and they get extra training, but we never get anything for us. And so, now these ladies have joined in with these minority language Bible schools, and they've been able to be a part of this as well, so we've had, now there's older people, people who are aren't really heading towards the pastorate. They're being able to get extra training. And you've got ladies, you've got younger people who, again, aren't maybe necessarily headed towards the pastorate, but they just want extra training. And they've had three different Bible schools in 2015. And these are guys who are setting aside their harvest. And there are different crops that they have to do. These guys do rice, and they do tamalom. They have manioc harvests, and they have cashews, and they have all these different harvests that they're working on during the year, and they would put those aside, and they would come for a week, and they would listen to the scripture being taught. And this was all done by the churches, completely, 100%. And it was really encouraging. At the same time that this was happening, the Judai were having their own Bible schools, and the Tabun were having theirs, and the Khmer were having their own language Bible schools as well. Again, done completely by the churches. This is not something that we as missionaries did. We've been investing in them and the other missionaries have been investing in them. But all of this, like I said, with the exception of us being guest teachers at these Bible schools, this was done completely by the churches. how familiar you guys are with mission work outside of Cambodia, and how unique of a situation this is. I don't say this to laud us and what work we did. I do this as a praise to God. I mean, this is something that missionaries all over the world strive to have happen. And so we praise God that this is happening. And I want you guys to be excited about what's going on there. As a result of this, there has been a huge demand in having materials translated into each of these languages. As I mentioned before, each of these guys, while they can speak Khmer to some level, that's the national language. That's mostly just for market use, business use. But when you get into religious language and you're talking about issues of the heart, their language ability in Khmer is really not up to being able to communicate on that level. So these guys are wanting all of the materials that we've been using in Khmer, they want them now in Krung, and in Brao, and in Tampuan, and Jirai. So this has created a demand, and praise the Lord, the churches are stepping up to it, and they're translating. In the Krung, which is the group that we work with, these three materials have just been produced in the last year, and I've had these on our table in the, was this the Fellowship Hall, is that what it's called? In the Fellowship Hall, if you'd like to flip through them and look at them. These are three different lesson books. One is Creation to Christ from Foundations. Another one is the Book of Acts. Trevor McElwain had done a lesson book on that, and that's been translated into K'rung. And then, what's the last one there? The first part of Matthew, a Matthew book, a book of lessons for the first 15 chapters of Matthew. all done in the Korean language. And what's cool is this language hasn't had any literature ever. And so the first literature that's being produced in this language is lessons for Jesus Christ, about Jesus Christ. Now, these are all being done. Here's the location. We're jumping again here. Here's the location where all of these translations have been done so far for the Kurung language. This is my friend Nai's house. And this is Nai right here. Do you have a laser on here? Sorry, I'm not real familiar with this one. There we go. This is Nai right here. Nye is about 60, maybe 65, and he's one of the oldest Kurung believers. And he has been translating all of these materials on his own. So he takes these books into his house, and he just goes through them, and he drafts the whole translation. And then he'll invite some of the church members to come along and help him edit it. And then I've come along and helped him clean it up a little bit, and then we'll produce it. And the rest of the teachers for the Bible school have been really excited about this. In fact, if he wasn't doing this, and if the other churches weren't doing it into jirai and tampu, it would largely make these Bible schools fall flat on their face. Because these guys really need to have these materials in their own language. So this has been exciting. This has been cool to see it happen and to see these guys take up the challenge. In addition to this, is a new aspect to our ministry that we haven't been involved with up until the last couple of years. And that is Bible translation. There has been a Krung Bible translation project that has been going on for Let's see. Since 1977. But it's been going on kind of piecemeal at the beginning of the process. first couple that was working on it. They actually were having to do the translation from America because foreigners weren't allowed in country at the time. So they were working on it, and then once they were finally allowed in the country, then they had issues with some of their family members, some sickness and whatnot, and so they had to go back and forth. So the translation of the New Testament has stretched on. It's been about 30 years, a little bit longer than than we'd hoped for, but it has been being worked on. Now, these guys are moving into their 70s. In fact, they're mid-70s, right? Mid-70s or even late-70s. So their health is starting to fall apart a little bit, and they're nearing the time where they're going to have to return permanently to the States. The organization that they're working with approached EMU about two years ago and requested that we take the project and kind of do a baton pass and run with it. And we prayed about it and we were excited about it. I don't know if any of you remember this, but we talked about when we were raising support that this is something that we would like to be involved in, but we don't know if that was God's plan or not. I had no plans. I didn't even know I was going to be working with the Kurung at the time. But it was cool to see how God prepared us for that, putting us with the Kurung people, preparing us for that time. Even the people that I'm working with now, we already knew. When I had visited back in 2002, I was able to meet with the translation group at the time. He was the guy that I met back in 2002, a long time ago. So it was cool to see how God had arranged things to prepare for this time right now. And so, again, here is the Bible. This is the book of God. And you're welcome. We've got a copy of it back on the back table there. You're welcome to flip through it as well. And again, Nye is the one that's working on this. Right now, the process that we're going through. There we go. The process that we're going through is called checking, community checking. This guy right here is not a believer. So we take the books of the Bible that have been translated and have been run through several different checkings already. Then we read it to this guy. And we ask him questions about what the passage was about. We're going through Matthew right now, and so I'll read through. a couple of verses, and then I'll ask him questions about what happened in there, and he responds. And so we're checking to see, are we using the right words for things? Have we taken a word that we thought was good and ended up, it was only we using that because it was related to the Khmer word? Are we choosing the right ones? And the fun part about it, this can be sometimes tedious, but the fun part about it is, This guy is an unbeliever and I get to read the Bible to him for hours out of the day and ask him questions. And in the two and a half months that we were able to do this before I left, We had multiple conversations about the difference between his beliefs and between the beliefs of the true God. And I get to explain things all the time. And I said to one of the other translation groups that's in there working with a different language, I said, This is cool. I'm just praying that this guy will come to Christ. And another lady said, well, I've had two of my community checkers become Christians over the process. And so you get to witness to a guy day in, day out for months at a time. So this is really exciting. It's a fun opportunity. And we're glad we're able to be part of this. All right, I mentioned this just in passing before, but here's another incredible thing that's been happening. We don't work with the Tampuan directly, but we were able to be a part of one little glimpse into what had happened. There was a lady who had developed leukemia. And the missionary that was working with her at the time was out of country. And so he asked if I would take over for her and trying to get her her medicines and things like that while he was gone. She was part of a village that didn't have any believers whatsoever. And as we started to work with her, she was asking more and more questions about Christianity. She had heard some already, and she was wanting to know. And I can't even remember all the details of how it played out. But over the next six months, she came to faith in Christ. And because of her testimony and her witness in this village, A huge group of other people became very interested in Christianity. This is her funeral. She died and she became the first Christian to believe unto death. And as a result of her testimony, and especially in her funeral, there were 30 to 40 believers after that. And so here's a number of believers. They're gathered around her grave site. And then here's the baptismal service. that we had for all of the new believers there in Prat village. And this was just one village among the Tampuan. The Tampuan have seen a rebirth of interest in the gospel. There's been at least two other villages which has had similar things happen there where people have been interested in the gospel where there before that was no interest whatsoever. All right, back on the home front a little bit. My wife, Lydia here, her primary ministry for our family is homeschooling our children. And so she's at that job for most of her time. But the last two or three years, she's had a really cool opportunity. She's been able to work with this family right here. This guy is a restaurant owner in our town. And his daughter speaks English. And there aren't any English-speaking schools. Well, there is an English-speaking school, but the education level is pretty low. And so when he found out that Lydia was homeschooling her children, he asked if his daughter could join in. told him, you know, well, we're Christians, and so we have a lot of Christian material in what we teach, and we teach about the Bible. And he said, that's fine. I assume since you're a Westerner, it's going to be a much higher level of education than she would be able to get normally. So Vanessa here, his daughter, has worked with Lydia. Lydia has been her teacher for the last two or three years. And so far as we know, she is a believer. As she leaves, she's still very young and so whether or not her understanding and her belief is saving, we're not sure. But we praise God for that opportunity and for the opportunities we've had to share Christ with her father and her mother as well. So this is one of the cool opportunities that God's given to Lydia. And in addition to the other things, my wife is one of these people who is always starting up new projects. She raises chickens, or she's building this little thing over here at our house, and things like that. So she's always getting involved with different sectors of our community that I would never have any way of being involved with. All the people in the market know her as the white lady who sells chickens. And so she still, she doesn't raise them anymore because I asked her if we could have a break for a little while. But she still, she goes in the market to buy stuff and they say, hey, do you got any chickens to sell? And she said, no, not right now. She would be raising cows and goats and pigs if I let her. So one of the opportunities she has as a result of that, she has many different inroads into people's lives that I don't know. I wouldn't have any reason to know them otherwise. And she gets to share the gospel with a lot of them, especially with our little coffee shop down the street. And she's had a lot of opportunities there. This is a, this lady right here is a wood seller. And so she's doing all these little projects. Lydia's gotten to know her really well. As a result of that, her husband, who is a judge in our town, and any of you who know how third world countries work, anyone who's in positions of power are wealthy. Or if you're wealthy, you get positions of power. I don't know which one comes first, the chicken or the egg there. But, so this is another couple that I would have never had any opportunity to get to know. And because of Lydia's inroads there, we've been able to give the gospel to these guys and talk with them. And so pray for these guys. This man's name is Sully. Whether you remember or not, you can remember the judge in our town, that God will bring him to faith in Christ. And the last thing is the language ability. And we praise God for that. It's been exciting to see how God has been faithful and giving us the ability to speak the language. Now, I want to give you some, real quickly here, I want to run through some investment opportunities for you guys. These are things that you can still invest in and you can still give towards. And so I want to give you some hooks. I want to give you some names. And I want to give you some names of places. And I won't give you a whole bunch of them, but I'm gonna give you some in a hopefully a memorable enough way that you can pray for some of these people or places by name in addition to this. All right, I've mentioned the Quran Bible Translation Project and the Material Translation Project. And so in connection to that, I want you to pray for this man right here. This man's name is Nye. And you can think of, draw nigh unto me, and I will draw nigh unto you. Okay, so if you can remember that, that's nigh's name. Nigh is very influential right now, and you hate to put all your eggs into one basket. You never know what's gonna happen just having one person being so influential, but that's the way it's worked out. He has a very mature influence over a lot of the Kureng churches. And so pray for his health, that he will remain strong. He's 65, which isn't old, but in their culture, 75 is usually the maximum age. So pray for his health, that he'll have an abnormally long life and have good health, and pray for his spirit, that he will remain strong, that he won't fall into any sin and that he will believe to the very end. So pray for Nye. He's very significant at this point in history. Pray that there will be other men that will rise up in here that will gain influence and we will have other men that we can depend on as well. Pray for depth in understanding the gospel. There are many believers right now. It's very exciting to see how God has spread the gospel in our small little province. But the depth, we need to go deeper in the gospel. And there's still hang-ups from the old ways of thinking. And your old animism recomes in. The culture, the influences that plagued you before, they're still there. Pray that they'll go deeper, that they'll understand how the gospel fleshes out in their day-to-day life. And that they'll be active in doing that themselves, reading the Bible, seeing how does it change the way I should be thinking, the way I should be acting. And developing church leadership. Give you a little bit of a picture of what our average Sunday looks like. On Sundays, we go out to a little village named Kralah. And that's the next name that I want you to try to remember, Kralah. And I don't have a little mnemonic or anything to help you with that one. But it's K-R-A-L-A. You can pronounce it however you want. Jesus will know who you're talking about. Pray for this little village. There are several different krung villages that have groups of believers that have no leadership or the leadership is very weak. And because of the kind of variedness of our ministries, we're not able to really focus down on one place and spend an entire week there with them. But on weekends, we go out and we spend with one of these churches. And right now, the first term, we were there with a different church, and now we This past term we've been with the village and will continue on there for at least the next couple of years working with this village and trying to encourage them and set up some biblical leadership there in that village. So we worship together with them. This is not a church building. This is just one of the people's house. And we worship there every morning. And then we have kind of a, I don't know, you call it a love feast. We eat together with these guys. Everybody's involved in the cooking process. All right, here's some pictures of the people in our church. This is Bo and his wife, Ngao. You don't need to remember these yet. I'll give you one more name. This is Nua. Interesting thing about Nua here. He is the son of the first pastor of this church who had to be excommunicated. And he has come to faith in Christ since then. And so in spite of the fact that his father has now left the faith, his son has chosen to believe. And she's really quiet. I might have mentioned her in our updates every once in a while. Her faith is amazing. And there's some other interesting stories I'd love to tell you about her. But she has incredible faith. In fact, sometimes I wonder if she's got the strongest faith of any of the Krun. Now, this is Saruan. This is the next name I want you to remember. This is the last one. Saw Ruin. You can think of saw like you saw things and then ruin like something's been ruined. Saw Ruin. Saw Ruin. Saw Ruin and his wife. probably the guy that would be the best fit for a church leader for this village. This is his village, and he's a very intelligent guy, and his character is very good. He's young, he's still in his mid-20s. Pray that he will grow into maturity, and that he will welcome this opportunity of leading and shepherding this little flock here in Kralaa village. So pray for us as we minister here in Kralaa village. and in these various ministries that I've mentioned to you this morning. OK. Well, that was a lot. And there's still many other things I could tell you about, but I want to give you some opportunities to ask questions about things that you want to know about Cambodia, about our ministry, so that you can pray for us. Yes, sir. Exactly. Yeah. That's why there was no written language because nobody wanted to read any books. Nobody could read any books. The Bible was the first book being produced in the K'urung language. Now, they did produce some other little readers and things like that to teach them to read. But the reason they taught them to read was so that they could read the Bible. And so the couple who worked on the Kurung Bible translation, they're the ones who developed the orthography, or as we call it, the alphabet. They developed the orthography for the Kurung people. The ones that have been translated here? No, well, they weren't available in Khmer, which is the national language. J.D. Crowley was involved in the translation of those materials from English into Khmer. And there's translation and there's adaption. As happens with a lot of materials that you translate, you realize that all translation is not just words. Some of it is ideas. And you get things like you use illustrations from American culture. You can translate them into the right words, but they still don't mean anything. So sometimes it's swapping out of entire illustrations or examples and putting something more culturally appropriate. And you have that freedom when you're talking about lesson materials. Whereas in the Bible, you've got to stick with the same things, and you need explanation. That's what you need with commentaries and whatnot. Yes, sir? Well, we have two different religions in Cambodia. One of them is Buddhism, or it's more of a folk Buddhism, broadly in Cambodia. And that's the Khmer. They're going to be Buddhists. Most of the minorities that we work with, in fact, I think all of the minorities are animistic, meaning they're spirit worshipers. So the idea of a god who created everything to a Buddhist, if he's a pure Buddhist, he's probably not going to really think that there's a creator god. A folk Buddhist is going to think more of a created. created world. So it depends on who you're talking with in the Buddhist category. Amongst the animists, to believe that the world created is not a bizarre thing, to believe that there is one God who is over everything, that's a little bit more brand-new. So defining what you mean by the creator God who created absolutely everything and thus is the Lord and Master of everything, It's very difficult, especially at the beginning. There are stories with a lot of cultures. There are remnants of the truth left in there. But most of them have been so badly twisted. that to try to use those stories almost perverts what you're trying to teach them. I mean, they've got a flood story, but the flood story happens before the first people. And after the first people, there's a woman and a dog left over, and everybody descended from them. So, you know, you can't really start from there and get anything close to what what we believe. Now they even laugh at their first stories. I mean, it's kind of bizarre to think that everyone came from that. But so, yeah, in translating, I showed you the picture of the Bible, and it's called the book of the pap kredei. Kredei is the God of the sky. Krei means sky. And so it's the God of the sky. And he is generally looked upon as a strong being who is benevolent. But he's not really interactive with the people. They don't know him. In fact, they don't worship him. They don't even offer anything to him. I mean, this is Mars Hill. It's the god you don't know. They know all of the spirits that live in the forest and live on the hills and what not that you offer sacrifices to basically to keep them from doing you harm. So you offer a sacrifice to the village to keep them from bringing sickness on your village. But why worry about Kredai? He's benevolent. So you don't need to offer him anything. He's not going to do you any harm. So yeah, and the process of finding that word was interesting in itself. I talked to you about the community checking. They initially used the word brah. Brah is related to the word preah, which is what the Khmer use for God. That's the word they use for God. So when they were first translating into K'rung, they found out that K'rung had this word brah, which is related. And they said, OK, so this must be the word. Well, then they were doing community checking with it. And when I was there in 2002, they were reading through this. And they were reading the story of Hagar in the wilderness. And she cries out. And God makes the water spring out of the desert. And so asking questions to this guy, who made the water come out of the desert there, out of the wilderness? And I said, oh, well, it was the water sprite. that sent out the water. And so it's like, eh. And this was one of many evidences that whatever this being was, it wasn't the right word. He was a very weak being. So then they started searching around for this different one and happened upon this other being that nobody worships, but they know who he is. So yes, ma'am. Okay, Nye is a believer. The other man that sits there, I pay him. Yeah, that's his motivation. It's just fascinating. I mean, yeah, it's money, but it's also interesting, too. I mean, they're not against listening to something new. I mean, these guys sit around and talk about everything. So to sit around and talk about a new religion, hey, why not, you know? Actually, there is a little bit of a hang-up because if he spends too much time with us, then everybody in the village starts to give him a hard time saying that he's become a Christian. Nye does a good job of this. He makes it known in the village that this guy who comes to meet with us is not a Christian. He's just coming in to compare. our religions and see what's different. And that puts this man at ease to not feel like he's going to sacrifice his status in the village just to sit with us. But we hope that in the end, he does become a believer. We tell him that, too. We say, we hope that you come to see that this is the truth in the end. So yeah. So Ngai is a believer. But the man, Prolong, that's the other guy who was sitting with us, he's not a believer. If you want to remember him, you can. Pralong. P-R-A-L-O-N-G. I guess that's how you'd spell it. Yeah. And you can pray for his salvation as well. Yes, sir. Sure. Okay. All right. Here we go. I add some of this stuff at the end because it might be interesting to some people or it might not. So I didn't want to make the presentation too long. Okay, Romans 10.9, because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. Okay, this is Romans 10.9 in, whoa, back up. There we go. They look like the same one. You'll notice that the writing, the letters, are going to be the same in both these languages. This is Khmer, which is the national language. This is what ostensibly everybody speaks in the country. That's Khmer. And that's what the majority language is. This is Krung. Do they sound different? Okay, yeah, so there's a lot of different sounds that mix in there. It's not, I'm glad it's not. Yeah, I might be doing something, that's just my inflection in there, but no, we got Vietnamese and Thai and Laos, all three of those right around us, they're all tonal, but we were preserved. Now actually, never mind. If you have more questions about that, I'd love to talk to you about linguistics. Okay, first question is with respect to the government and the different language groups and that dynamic. As with almost any country, the majority group basically wants everybody to be unified using the same language. It's simpler. When you have different cultures, they tend to You tend to have conflict. So they're trying to homogenize everything. And that was the major influence in the past. It still exists today. And that was what a lot of these Bible translators had to fight with in order to be able to make an orthography for these different languages. Because at the beginning, the country didn't want these other languages to be taught at all. So they have relaxed in that somewhat, in allowing some education to be done in these languages now, and materials to be produced. As minorities are in almost every country, they're looked down on, they're backwards, they're second class, and probably even more so in Cambodia than even in America. I guess. I don't know. Maybe in some senses we still do it here, too. But it tends to be the way it goes. And their interactivity together. In the past, they were warring tribes and they would fight with each other. The Kurung and the Brao, which I said, you know, we kind of work with them together. In the past, they would fight with each other. the Siamese, the Thai, they would come in and take slaves from these groups. So they would fight with each other and give slaves, you know, you would take the captive slaves and give it to the Siamese in order to keep them from taking people from your tribe. So that was their history. And it's basically gone now. There's not much animosity left. I mean, they've been so oppressed from the other groups that it's kind of like, you know, why fight amongst ourselves? kind of thing. And there's such small groups now that it's not that. But it's still there. And it's still cool to see these guys worshipping together, especially in light of that fact that there's these diversities and these guys getting together and working together in spite of that. Okay, second aspect of your question was? Dark resistance. Spiritually, yes. And notice it, especially when you go into villages, that the gospel hasn't been at all. Don't know how to describe it, other than the fact that you know you're not wanted there. Sicknesses and things that happen that I mean, God is sovereign. He's in control. But you know when Satan is involved in a place, he has a certain measure of power that he can wield in an area, and he likes to do it. Yes and no, but primarily we're free to do whatever we want. The Constitution allows freedom of religion and they're pretty lax about that. The only people that I ever get outright bold confrontation from is Europeans. And that's the only person I've ever been cursed out from for sharing the gospel was from a European. So they're the only ones. Anyone else? Is it good questions? All right. Well, I think time's about up anyhow. Now I'll turn it over to, I don't know, whoever. Okay. All right. Well, let's close in prayer then. Father, we give thanks to you for you are the great missionary. You sought us when we were when we had gone astray. You left your throne of glory and you came down to earth. You became man. You are the penultimate missionary who brought yourself as the very gospel, the very good news for all of us. And we praise you for that. We rejoice, God, at what you're doing in the nations for the sake of the name of Jesus Christ. We exalt your name, and we want you to be lifted up. We want your name to be hallowed. And we pray that you, God, would continue to do your good work in Cambodia, in Russia, in Africa, in Europe, in South America, in North America, here in Georgia. And in this community, in the communities that each of my brothers and sisters here live in, that you would draw out a people for your name. We ask God that you would continue to meet with us as we have gathered here today to rejoice in you, to worship and praise you, to listen to your holy word preached to us. In all of these things we pray in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.