There must be something in the air in June. I seem to always be examining life this time of year. This month, I find myself wrestling with many hard questions. I'm going to skip ahead and talk about Cambodia now… will return to stories about Thailand in the future.
The hard question I'm wrestling with in this post is the extent of God's grace and what true justice is.
On June 2, Connie, myself, and four others flew to Phnom Penh for the Cambodia trip. Another 9 people joined us there, and we dove into another trip. Connie led and I support staffed. The Cambodia trip is different from the Thailand trip because it’s more educational… a lot of meeting with NGOs to learn about what the reality of trafficking is in Cambodia and what’s being done to stop it. It’s missional living and ministry – and always fun to see what happens in those moments!
(the entire Cambodia team + Don, our friend and tuk tuk driver).
On the first day, the team went to Killing Fields and to Toul Sleng, the torture prison of the Khmer Rouge. It’s an extremely sobering day, to see the place where so many suffered and died, to hear their stories… to see their bones, clothes, and teeth still rising up out of the ground 30 years later.
I know I write about this every time, but I just can’t get past the horror. Can’t get past the suffering still evident decades later.
This time… we had a tour guide who had lived the story he told us. He escaped the Khmer Rouge… but his mother, brother, and other family members did not. They were killed in the very place where he worked. And when it all ended, he came back to help excavate the grounds (there are pictures of him in the museum on the property) and now leads tours telling his story.
*Photos by Connie Rock. The above photo is of the one in the museum with the excavating team. Our tour guide is second on right.
You can tell he’s still living it, every day. Living his pain. Telling his pain. Feeling that horrible pain where his family and so many of his countrymen died. One cool thing is that when we were about to leave, Connie asked if we could pray for him and for his country to our God, and he said yes. That was a really neat moment, to be able to pray for him.
He kept saying “Why did Pol Pot do this? He was crazy. He was crazy.” And would shake his head. He named others too, particularly a man named Duch, who was second in command under Pol Pot and ordered the murder of thousands at the Killing Fields we were walking.
*Photo on the left by Danielle Jacques.
It was only after he led us through the fields and took us to the museum that someone on the team noticed an annotation in one of the signs… where it talked about Duch. It talked about him on the stand, giving his confession (one I took a picture of and showed you last November)…. A confession he gave, taking sole responsibility for killing babies and children.
Because he’d become a Christian.
That was the third time I’d toured that museum, and the third time that I missed that statement… that Duch became a Christian.
You know that question you ask when you’re a kid? Do you mean that Hitler could have asked Christ to come into his heart before he died and he’d be in heaven right now?
This guy could be the Cambodian version of Hitler. And he gave his life to Christ. (From Khmer Rouge Torturer to Born-Again Christian).
When a teammate brought that up during debrief, my first thought was of indignation: He doesn’t deserve it.
He killed thousands. He ordered millions of thousands of babies killed by swinging them by the ankles and bashing their heads against a tree.
He doesn’t deserve it.
But neither do I.
So humbling to be reminded of my own sin in light of some of the greatest evil I’ve witnessed. Held up against it and found just as black. With the memories of these mass graves, implements of torture, and literal pieces of people still appearing 30+ years later… yet the ways I have sinned against my Lord are just as great. Just as terrible. One of the first verses I learned in Awana as a kid was James 2:10- about sin being equal in the eyes of God.
If Duch’s conversation was authentic, and may it be so (even though this article does express doubt), then we will see him in heaven.
I don’t understand it. I’ve wrestled with that a lot this week, with my selfish sense of justice wanting to know that there’s some eternal horrible punishment for this monster and all of the others responsible for the Khmer Rouge.
And then I think of how true it is that to be forgiven much, you have a much greater understanding of grace. And I’m not exalting myself here, for I have sinned in the eyes of my Lord and without His gift on the cross, I’d pay those wages of death for all I've done just as if I’d committed genocide, but if there’s a way to say this humbly… that despite the sins I’ve committed (and the acknowledgement of James 2:10), I think Duch has a much greater understanding of grace than I do.
Because he’s been forgiven of much.
And I don’t understand it.
But that’s okay.
