Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20The skulls were piled in layers three deep on each shelf, and the shelves rose one after the other almost to the ceiling of the tower. They faced out of the glass case, and many had cracks or holes where Khmer Rouge soldiers had bashed their victims’ heads with hoe handles before dumping them into mass graves. I was visiting Choeung Ek, memorial site for Cambodia’s infamous “killing fields,” just before Christmas of 2014. Between 1975 and 1979 Pol Pot’s Communist regime murdered about 1.7 million people through execution, overwork, starvation, and disease in a doomed attempt to create an agrarian utopia. From inside the Buddhist stupa I could see the grassy depressions that had once held thousands of bodies, and chankiri trees against which soldiers had smashed infants. I had been researching the Khmer Rouge regime for more than a year and knew roughly what to expect, but it was still ghastly. I was there to write about a survivor, a Cambodian Christian named Radha Manickam who had seen and endured awful things. To tell his story truly, I would have to describe gruesome deaths and cruelty barely imaginable. As a believer and a journalist, I had to ask myself, does telling this story glorify God? My answer, then and now, is yes. Manickam’s story (Intended for Evil: A Survivor’s Story of Love, Faith, and Courage in the Cambodian Killing Fields, Baker Books, 2016) ends well, but it would be worth telling no matter how it had turned out. The calling of the journalist is to help people see the world clearly, as it is. That means we find out what happened, try to understand what it means, and then tell the story. Until the Second Coming, sin and pain and suffering will continue to be a part of the world God gave us. We need not wallow in the gory details, but neither can we ignore the violence and cruelty that characterizes so much human life. To grasp how God wants us to live here we must understand this world as it is; to “walk in the way of Your truth as we wait eagerly for You” (Isaiah 26:8), we need to come to grips with the reality of evil. I never planned to be a journalist. I and Jennifer (Reimer) married in 1988 after our junior year at Briercrest, and we graduated in 1989. The most influential mentors in my life had been my coaches on the Clippers basketball team, Carl Hinderager and Stan Peters and so, hoping to become