In 2001 Wat Ou Poat was selected to be the Pagoda where we would build an HIV and AIDS clinic. It wasn’t my first, second, or even third choice of locations at the time, because The Khmer Rouge had destroyed much of it and some of the stupas, supposedly had even been used as holding…

In 2001, just as The Wat Opot Project was opening its HIV and AIDS clinic in Bati, Takeo, a young monk from the Wat Ou Poat Pagoda came over to observe the activities. He was more than just curious, he was interested in helping us out with the children’s program. As the program developed and…

Before there was time I existed, in a dimension far different than now. My whole world was self-sustaining, to no one I needed to bow. But a question arose from somewhere inside, ‘How different would my world be, If I didn’t know all the answers and the future were up to me?’ In a burst…

The Bible teaches us that whatever we ask for in prayer, if we believe, it will be given to us. I have tested this teaching at times in my life and can honestly say that sometimes it seems to work… but at other times it doesn’t. One might conclude, therefore, that the results are determined…

Have you ever had a chance encounter with just the right person, at just the right moment in time, or perhaps you made a wrong turn in your journey, but it ended up bringing you right to the place you needed to be? Coincidence or preordained… I tend to believe the latter. I had just…

To believe in a Creator God is to believe that mankind is of little significance within the Universe… an imperfect creation of a perfect Creator with no purpose other than to worship that Creator, while enduring the pain and suffering caused by the imperfections he has woven into our being… hoping that one day we…

I haven’t thought about self-fulfilling prophecies for some time now, even though I have had my suspicions that many of the major experiences in my life could have come about because I thought about them beforehand. A good example of this would be my Vietnam experience. Before I enlisted in the Navy back in 1966,…

It is not so much that I mind what people want to believe in, but I do sometimes get frustrated when they are unwilling to discuss why they believe what they do. I remember a time, a few years back, having a discussion with the then Director of Mission to Unreached Peoples. I had crossed…

Many years ago, I worked as a counselor at a youth center in the southwestern part of the United States. Most of my clients were of Native American or Hispanic ethnicity and were referred to me by the police. Occasionally, however, I would be asked by the local schools to see students from other ethnic…

ME: “Well, Claude, between the two of us, there is little doubt who is smarter. What has taken a lifetime for me to write, you can write in seconds. What do I, as a writer of human experience, have to look forward to when you could write a novel in just a few minutes?” CLAUDE…