Phnom Penh Pals: Team Helm in Cambodia

Per google, syncretism may be defined as "the amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought." What would American Christian syncretism look like? What about Khmer syncretism? Cameroonian syncretism? Syncretism is easier to identify when you aren't involved in it. It also is explicit when the mixture is a pagan religion and Christianity. It is more subtle when culture or politics become the lens by which we understand morality and truth, and the lens by which we interpret the Bible. And it is more subtle still when we give ourselves ultimate moral authority and interpret scripture based on our own personal biases and preferences. The Bible is the ultimate source of truth. If anything supercedes the Bible, we must pause. And such pausing is healthy, because we all place things above the Bible. Whether we are American, Cambodian, Cameroonian, Indian, Korean, or Chinese, we are ethnocentric, and the way we view the wor

  Ethan took the three older kids to a tiny-pandemic-birthday-party-in-a-big-space this afternoon. This is the first time the kids have left our apartment complex since mid-February, aside from visiting their brother in the hospital and attending a required interview at the Embassy. They were pumped. Like composing a tune and rocking out on the futon and/or sitting near the door with socks and bugspray on ready to go (personality-dependent division). The relative silence of the past hour turned me into Superwoman. I’m listening to classical music while eating baked oatmeal and writing a blog I had time to think about during my uninterrupted workout. Our baby is sleeping in front of our industrial-sized fan. The 90 degree-heat and unmentionable humidity can’t hold me back. I remember watching mothers of more than one child in utter amazement as a first-time mom just eight years ago. Did they have extra arms? Extra hours in their days? How did they do it? In the hospital last month

Lust isn’t always about bodies. Lust is about our eyes — where we set our gaze. We covet what we allow ourselves to linger on, especially in regards to others’ possessions and experiences.  Any scroll through social media can bring up those desires: good books on a soft carpet in front of a warm fire. Wide open roads in a spacious vehicle and trips to beautiful vistas. Kids frolicking in the snow. Feet in the ocean.  Summer is my least favorite season, and it is always Summer here. Aside from the oppressive heat, Summer stretches on in an unchanging monotony of yellow and green and brown. No real temperature fluctuations. Little to no wind. Plenty of bugs with no winter to kill them. Not much  scope for the imagination nor hint of change on the horizon.  The antidote for lust is to flee. Close our eyes. Turn away. Set our gaze on something else, something more likely to remind us of how much we have already been given.  Employing the “snooze” on friends’ feeds is a powerful way of turn

Before we left the US, I bought some necessary and splurge items at Wegmans (arguably the best grocery store in the world) with the remainder of a gift card from some very generous friends. Looking at what I was able to track down within ten minutes blew my mind; in Phnom Penh, finding a single item often means trips to at least three different stores. Life is different here. Perhaps because things I want are so much harder to get, I find myself more appreciative of what I have. It also means I don't bother trying to find some of the things I would impulse purchase in the U.S., especially during pregnancy (do I really  want a chicken finger sub badly enough to spend an hour in traffic to make some sub-par version of it?).  Let me tell you about being a Western pregnant woman in an Asian city. In my first three pregnancies, I gained about 40 pounds each time (slightly more than the recommended ideal). But I worked out daily throughout and after pregnancy, and was able to reach my pr