Photos from Vietnam will be coming in the morning, but first things first.

The trip back to Phnom Penh had all the makings of an uneventful six hours, but such was not in the cards today, my friends. The ride itself wasn’t bad. The A/C actually worked really well, but the condensation from it started dripping on the German in front of me while the Russian guy behind me talked on and on about the going rates for girls in Asia and about opium and “happy pizza.” Otherwise the bus was fine.

The border crossing was what I didn’t account for. Since I am not just passing through Cambodia like most of those on the bus, I needed to get a business visa instead of a tourist one, which meant I needed to fend for myself while the bus company people took the rest of the passports inside in order to cut through all the red tape. I waited in extra lines and filled out extra forms. I was asked if I had a copy of my immunization record and as I did not, I had to pay a dollar, knowing full well that this was just an easy way for government officials to line their pockets. I looked the guard in the face and laughed as I handed him the dollar bill, shaking my head, trying to shame him a little bit. I went through an x-ray machine where the attendant was talking to a young lady and didn’t bother to glance up at me or my bag even once. But by the time I got through all of this and emerged outside, the bus was nowhere to be found.

Being stranded at the border with half your luggage, very little money, and no one who speaks English is a potentially very stressful place in which to find oneself. I stood there figuratively scratching my head, trying to conjure up a solution. A guard with no idea about much of anything motioned for me to walk down the road, and seemed to indicate that my bus was around the corner, but it was not. Finally, the bus company guy, the one we unknowingly paid off to get us through the border, came running up and instructed me to get on a moto, so I did and about a mile down the road the bus was pulled over, waiting.

We’re supposed to love our neighbors as ourselves, and we are even supposed to love our enemies. I know this, or at least I nod my head when people say things like that. Nodding your head is easy. Actually loving people is hard. Especially when you come face to face with corrupt border officials who can have their way with you and will do what they want, and the bus leaves you behind, or you hear a guy talking about getting “ripped off” when they charged him $40 for two hours with a girl. In these moments you wish you could just throw those verses of Scripture out the window and strangle some people or at least punch them in the face. I believe there is such a thing as righteous anger, but I guess I am just trying to figure out how to love like God loves and hate what he hates. And this is no easy task.