I love the expression, “To paint a picture with your words”. To artistically apply a string of phrases together and sweep them across the page. In Australia I loved to encourage my students to “create a picture in my mind with your stories”. To skilfully add in adjectives, touch up the story with similes and variety and adding words with beautiful strokes. You need to be an artist to be a writer, filling your paint pallet with imagination and a chasm of proses.
Never being that great at word artistry I start to think, as I go home on the back of a moto through the streets of Phnom Penh, how to convey what I see here to those back home creatively and imaginatively. Taking a snip of this city and conveying it across the medium of the page (or be that screen) to the reader's mind far away. It is such a difficult challenge and so many pictures can be created, as Phnom Penh has many different angles to be explored.
If you want a more sombre pallet then browns, blacks and greys can come out with the dirt, rubbish and exhaust smoke filling the grimy streets of this noisy city. A grubby child is gently sitting in a rickety old cart filled with other people’s discarded things, waiting for a better life. Broken pavement, muddy puddles and the stubbornest dust that is ever to been seen, clinging to everything everywhere refusing to ever leave. Eyes down, hearts low, hope evaporated.
For those, however, who do enjoy the sunshine and a brighter light in their painting this can also be captured in the street of Phnom Penh. The colours of the marketplace as people are selling the freshest of fruits and vegetables. There is a rainbow of sweet smiling Cambodians strolling through making a cheerful chattering sound as they go about their daily business. Sun beams calmly glide down from the heavens onto the unbeknowing crowds. A mother, with a tender young child held closely on her hip, dances her way through the ocean of people to an invisible tune. Eyes shining, hearts brimming, hope rising.
I believe God is the master artist here. He is the only one that can take the ordinary and downcast and transform it into something beautiful. His brush is vigorously working through this country as hope and good news is being faithfully shared to the open hearts of the Cambodians. I want to see this country using the same painting techniques as our loving Father. To not be caught up and washed away by the negatives but to be captivated and encouraged with each powerful stroke of beauty. I long to see things through the Lord’s masterly eyes and to have a vision of where this painting is going. To see a great and eternal future for this nation.
