Bill & Noy Peeler: Threads

"The eyes of the LORD are everywhere, keeping watch on the wicked and the good.”  Proverbs 15.3 NIV

At any given moment day or night, in every square inch of human habitation, countless dramas are playing out, most of them ordinary and unremarkable, following predictable patterns and routines, while others can be totally unexpected, tragic, even catastrophic. At ground level, this myriad of events may seem unrelated to other events in the vicinity. People go about their business unaware of what others are doing across town or even down the road a piece. But if we could view them all at once as these individual dramas are unfolding, we would see that each is a thread of the same broad piece of social fabric. Sometimes, in the late afternoons, I ride my bike up Phnom Kraom, a hilltop from which you can view a large swathe of the Siem Reap tapestry. To the south are the farms, the rice fields, and the vast expanse of the Tonle Sap with its floating villages scattered across its sky-gray waters. In the other direction is the town with its maze of streets and alleyways, its tight-packed jumble of dwellings and the tireless movement of commerce, traffic, expansion and construction. From that height, one day looks much the same as the one before it. But if you could watch it in time-lapse sequence, you would see it pulsate, beating like a heart, spreading its arms in every direction on a trelliswork of earthen features laid out across a landscape fashioned by the mighty hand of its Creator in times long past before any human being ever existed. All this serves as a reminder that what we’re witnessing is a living fabric of sentient beings generating culture and a civilization, filling every available space with the business of human interaction, activity and the artifacts these phenomena produce...

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