October 11, 2021
Resuming Our Unfinished Work
An Alliance worker couple reflects on the unfinished stories of the unreached and overlooked people they have been called to serve.
Oh, how good it was to be in our American home for a while, enjoying our kids, ice-cream, snow, and Alliance churches! It has been an odd sort of year but also a good one, for which we are deeply grateful. The connections we made during home assignment are so very precious to us.
Today, we are back in our Cambodian home to do the work that we have been talking about all year! There is much yet unfinished—people groups unreached, students who need mentoring. We feel privileged to have received the field director assignment for this year. We look forward to working with our team to “finish our unfinished work . . . to do the things that we have thought of doing, intended to do, talked about doing, and are abundantly able to do”—in the words of A. B. Simpson.
While writing this, we were quarantined in a lovely hotel looking down onto the street where we could see normal life, hear it vaguely in the distance, but could not join it. Meals showed up magically on a little table outside our door, and dishes disappeared also seemingly without any people involved.
It was very different down below. Ambulances regularly came clanging down the street. Hospitals were full, schools have been closed, jobs have been lost. There were no little tables outside the homes of the people whose rooms we could peer into from our hotel room—instead, we saw struggle and fear. Oh, how we longed to leave this easy place to bring the hope that is within us to those whom we have come to love so very much.
We are now with our teammates in Phnom Penh, where we continue to work on finishing the unfinished. Several initiatives are just getting started—a tuberculosis program that will serve an unreached people group, a clinic for nursing students, and a sustainable living center to help families live in ways that are healthy physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
THANK YOU for all you’ve done to bring Jesus into the unfinished stories of unreached and overlooked peoples. You play a vital role in fulfilling the Great Commission by sending and supporting us and other Alliance workers as we seek to see our vision–All of Jesus for All the World–become reality!
by Heather and Jeff Williams, serving in Cambodia