It’s Simple As Soap

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Late last summer and early fall, I had the privilege to get out with our eldest daughter as she engaged in the local bazaar community to feel out the market for a clean option of selling soaps, lotions, and such for all members of a family. As I was rounding up my time in the US at that point, she offered up a few samples of her efforts to bring to Cambodia and to use in whatever way I’d like to do that.

We arrived the first of November here and were soon into the Christmas season, traveling for a good chunk of six weeks prior, first to peruse the current church projects and stations to get a lay of the land, then we moved on to the season of Christmas celebrations in many of the small church communities where we, in each location, shared a meal with the community and then encouraged the church families during their programs. I must admit that, in each location all across this country, not any one was like another. Each had its own flavor of presentation, but each spoke clearly of the meaning of Christmas.

So getting back and settled in after the actual Christmas date meant that our gifts to our family/friends here were delayed for a while longer as we recouped from travel exhaustion.

But then the word was out that I was sharing forward ‘soap’ as a gift and each recipient eagerly accepted our gift, asking questions, feeling the texture, and of course smelling the fragrance. But then the real test came and they tried the soap.

Fast forward to sometime in March, probably early in the month, when comes this text to my phone ~ “Teacher, can you show me how to make the soap you gave me please?” (I’m always called teacher by this wonderful lady since the first day we met).

OH BOY! Was my fast reaction to the text. I thought to myself, how much had I listened to those previous months in the US as soap was made and was this even possible to do here came across my brain. Well, to no one’s surprise I might imagine, the challenge was taken forward and we began the process of breaking down our unknowing about this ancient process, but also incorporating someone else who knew far more than all of us together on this side of the pond.

Thank you God for the internet at this point. This is one time it is more than a blessing. Even in the midst of a crazy 12 hour difference and navigating lives totally of their own on both sides, and a very unstable internet full of delays and more slowness than pouring honey out of a jar, the process of learning this has slowly come around with all of us working as a team sharing our knowledge, our reading, and our memories of this ancient trade, while in Chicago sits one dedicated daughter who has engineered classes (with hubby as copilot) with notes and websites and down to earth advice, passion, and a vision to share forward what she herself has found to be a ministry platform in itself. Welcome to the 21^st century of learning!

This whole process is now beginning to show adequate signs of becoming a country wide ministry platform to share in the villages, not only the soap making process, but

also health and hygiene advocacies being reinforced along side. We are still working out the differences between here and there in soap making, realizing that each has its areas that are expensive here and maybe not there, and that here villagers know how to do things we could never have imagined. Their resources are so different from ours. As an example is the use of lye. I would go to the store to get it for making soap. In the village they will dry the banana peel, then cook it over a fire, and then process it (somehow) into their own type of lye. They will have colors and flowers that are home to Asia in itself. They have little to no money to spend on the investment of this, but their knowledge and their time may be their greatest asset by far.

So oft times we think of ministry ‘in a box’ sort of thing ~ in each of our own boxes most likely. There we are comfortable and content to think that God has all the details worked out for each of us in that way. But then the box opens in such a pleasant way that we don’t even realize how we are being used way back in the beginning (like when I was helping at the fall bazaars) to get to a point where God is taking us. He doesn’t ever plan for us to be content where our feet are planted today, or yesterday for that matter. He is looking ahead way to a tomorrow, or many tomorrows down the road, when all those yesterdays are glorified in ways we had not imagined.

Immanuel Lutheran Church is in the midst of a platform entitled “Stronger Together.” I’m thinking as I close this out that the soap making idea wasn’t in their list when they were strategizing their efforts to go into the community. While we as individuals may think of community being that around the church property itself, I can see that sometimes the property ‘around the church’ is perhaps stretched a bit in ways not even remotely considered. This is one of them. Thank you Father for such being such a wonderful pilot of the community in which we all live, yours and yours alone. Thank you for showing us what we can do with the resources and talents you have given each one of us in building a community, half a world apart ~ together.

Yup, God is so good ~ as always ~ again.

Jeremiah 29:11 “For I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.”

Photo 1: Facetime class teaching