As Karens and Christians, we often ask ourselves why our people suffer such despicable atrocities and wonder how many times we have to turn our cheek — and if there is even any more cheek left to turn. Despite the years of sufferings, much of the literature available on the Karen people is based in academia and esoteric discussions on the politics and economics of the longest ongoing civil war, but the dearth of voices from the refugees themselves is rather deafening.
In the silence are voices that long to be heard, messages of faith and hope ready to break forth, expressions of love for their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the cornerstone of their day-to-day living. In Him, the sufferings of the Karen are not in vain.
We are Karen people.
We have not been forgotten.
God sees our pain.
God hears our cries.
God weeps with us.
We matter. Our sufferings matter.
The vision of the “Karen Devotionals: Karen Stories for God’s Glory” is to fill the void of the precious voices of the common Karen. But God-given visions are never a single-person mission, so God had ready an army of people posed in willing obedience to share their stories. This book is collectively written by 343 people across all walks of life, from the layman to the learned. The common thread is that they are all willing to be part of speaking up for God’s glory.
These stories are a mere trickle in the huge reservoir of the Karen experience, but with every story told, God offers meaning and healing to those who have shared their stories and those who step into these moments of suffering, no matter how brief. Because within these pages hold the Karen stories that speak of God’s glory.
ဒ်ကညီခရံာ်ဖိတဖၣ်အသိး, အါစုအါဘျီ ပသံကွၢ်လီၤက့ၤပသး ဘၣ်မနုၤပဘၣ်တူၢ်ဘၣ် တၢ်တူၢ်ဘၣ်ခီၣ်ဘၣ် တၢ်မၤအၢမၤသီပှၤ ဒိၣ်ဒိၣ်ကလဲာ်လဲၣ်. ပဆိကမိၣ်စ့ၢ်ကီးမ့ၢ်ပကဘၣ်ဃၣ်န့ၢ်ပမဲာ်လၢအတခီပှဲၤဘျီလဲၣ် — ဒီးမ့ၢ်ပမဲာ်အိၣ်ဒံးလၢပကဃၣ်န့ၢ်အဂီၢ်ဧါ. တၢ်တူၢ်ဘၣ်ခီၣ်ဘၣ်အိၣ်တ့ၢ်ဝဲအနံၣ်တဖၣ်အနံၣ် ယံာ်တ့ၢ်မးလံဘၣ်ဆၣ်, လံာ်လဲၢ်တဖၣ် လၢအဘၣ်တၢ်ဒုးအိၣ်ထီၣ်ဝံၤတဖၣ် အါတက့ၢ်ဒုးနဲၣ်ဝဲဒၣ်ထဲ တၢ်မၤလိမၤဒီးအဂ့ၢ်တဖၣ် ဒီး တၢ်ဂ့ၢ်တဖၣ်လၢ ပှၤအါဂၤနၢ်ပၢၢ်ကီ လၢအဘၣ်ထွဲဒီး ထံရူၢ်ကီၢ်သဲး ဒီးမုၢ်ကျိၤဝဲၤကွာ် အဂ့ၢ်အကျိၤ ဘၣ်ဃးဒီး ထံလီၢ်ကီၢ်ပူၤတၢ်ဒုးတၢ်ယၤလၢအယံာ်ကတၢၢ် ဒီး အဆၢတတဲာ်ဒံးဘၣ်န့ၣ်လီၤ. မ့မ့ၢ်လၢ ကလုၢ်တဖၣ်လၢ အဟဲ လၢပှၤတူၢ်ဘၣ်တၢ်ကီတၢ်ခဲအနီၢ်ကစၢ်အအိၣ်န့ၣ် အတသီၣ်တသဲ, အိၣ်ဘှ့ၣ်အိၣ်ဘှီၣ်, အိၣ်ဃိကလာ်ဝဲန့ၣ်လီၤ.
လၢတၢ်ဘှ့ၣ်တၢ်ဘှီၣ်အပူၤ အိၣ်ဝဲ – ကလုၢ်တဖၣ်လၢအဆၢဘၣ်တၢ်နၢ်ဟူဘၣ်အီၤ, တၢ်စူၢ်တၢ်နာ်ဒီးတၢ်မုၢ်လၢ် အတၢ်ကစီၣ်တဖၣ်လၢကတိဖျိသီၣ်ထီၣ်, တၢ်အဲၣ်အတၢ်ဒုးနဲၣ်တဖၣ်ဆူပကစၢ်ယ့ၣ်ၡူးခရံာ်သးဘိအအိၣ်, ဒ်ခရံာ်မ့ၢ်လၢၢ်သနၢၣ်ထံး လၢကိးမုၢ်နံၤပတၢ်အိၣ်မူအပူၤန့ၣ်လီၤ. လၢခရံာ်အပူၤ, ကညီဖိအတၢ်တူၢ်ဘၣ် ခီၣ်ဘၣ် တမ့ၢ်တၢ်ကလီကလီဘၣ်.
ပမ့ၢ်ကညီဖိ
ပတဘၣ်တၢ်သးပ့ၤနီၣ်ပှၤဘၣ်.
ယွၤထံၣ်ပတၢ်တူၢ်ဘၣ်ခီၣ်ဘၣ်.
ယွၤနၢ်ဟူပတၢ်ဟီၣ်တၢ်ယၢၤ.
ယွၤအမဲာ်ထံယွၤဃုာ်ဒီးပှၤ.
ပအိၣ်ဒီးပလုၢ်ပပှ့ၤ, ပတၢ်တူၢ်ဘၣ်ခီၣ်ဘၣ်အိၣ်ဒီးအခီပညီ.
တၢ်ထံၣ်စိ ဘၣ်ဃးဒီး ‘‘နီၢ်သးအတၢ်ဂံၢ်တၢ်ဘါလၢတၢ်ရ့လိာ်သးဒီးယွၤ လၢတနံၤဘၣ်တနံၤအဂီၢ် – ကညီဖိအတၢ်လဲၤခီဖျိ လၢယွၤအလၤကပီၤအဂီၢ်’’ မ့ၢ်ဝဲဒ်သိး ကဒုးသီၣ်ထီၣ် ကညီဖိတဖၣ် အကလုၢ် လၢအလုၢ်ပှ့ၤဒိၣ်တဖၣ်န့ၣ်လီၤ. တၢ်ထံၣ်စိလၢယွၤဟ့ၣ်တဖၣ်န့ၣ် တမ့ၢ်ထဲလၢပှၤတဂၤထဲဧိၤအတၢ်ဖံးတၢ်မၤဘၣ်. အန့ၣ်သတး, ယွၤပာ်လီၤအသုးမုၢ်သံၣ်ဘိတဖၣ် လၢအသးအိၣ်ဒိကနၣ်အကလုၢ်ဒီးဟ့ၣ်ခီဟ့ၣ်နီၤလီၤ အတၢ်လဲၤခီဖျိတဖၣ်န့ၣ်လီၤ. လံာ်တဘ့ၣ်အံၤ ဘၣ်တၢ်ကွဲးအီၤလၢ ပှၤအဂၤ ၃၄၃ ဂၤ လၢအလဲၤခီဖျိဘၣ် သးသမူအတၢ်လဲၤ ခီဖျိအါကလုာ်, ဒီးအမ့ၢ်ဝဲသရၣ်သမါဆူပှၤပတီၢ်မုၢ်တဖၣ်န့ၣ်လီၤ. တၢ်လၢ အစၢဃာ်ပှၤဒ်တၢ်တမံၤဃီ မ့ၢ်ဝဲ သးလၢအဆၢစံးကတိၤထီၣ်တၢ်လၢယွၤအလၤကပီၤအဂီၢ်န့ၣ်လီၤ.
တၢ်ဟ့ၣ်ခီဟ့ၣ်နီၤတဖၣ်အံၤမ့ၢ်ဒၣ်ထဲ တၢ်လီၤစီၤတဖီးဘၣ်တဖီး လၢပှၤကညီအတၢ်လဲၤခီဖျိထံပာ်ကီၤအလီၢ် န့ၣ်လီၤ. သနာ်က့, လၢတၢ်ပာ်ဖျါထီၣ်တၢ်လဲၤခီဖျိတခါဘၣ်တခါအပူၤ, မ့မ့ၢ်ဝဲတၢ်ပာ်ဖျါလၢအဖုၣ်ဖိထဲလဲၣ်ထဲလဲၣ်ဘၣ်ဆၣ်, ယွၤဒုးအိၣ်ထီၣ် အခီပညီ ဒီး တၢ်ကူစါယါဘျါ တဖၣ်လၢ ပှၤလၢအဟ့ၣ်ခီဟ့ၣ်နီၤတၢ်သ့ၣ်တဖၣ်အဂီၢ်, ဒီးလၢပှၤလၢ အဟဲလီၤနုာ်လီၤလဲၤသကိးတၢ်လၢကညီဖိအတၢ်လဲၤခီဖျိအပူၤ န့ၣ်လီၤ. အဂ့ၢ်ဒ်လဲၣ်န့ၣ်, လံာ်ကဘျံးဖိ တဖၣ်အံၤအုၣ်အသးလၢ ကညီဖိအတၢ်လဲၤခီဖျိ လၢယွၤအလၤကပီၤအဂီၢ်န့ၣ်လီၤ.