Rainbows and freedom......

Love this picture!

In the Talaandig and Higaonon beliefs here, you weren't allowed to point to a rainbow or your finger would rot. You hid the kids in your house in terror whenever a rainbow appeared.

What freedom in Christ to know it is His gift - this is one of our new bible teachers pointing with lots of fingers to the rainbow who is now in total freedom!

How Satan tries to defile the rainbow in different ways in different countries!

Man ai Video

First meeting in Man-ai.....!

Wonderful news and wonderful answer to prayer!!!! 

God did amazing things last Saturday in Man-ai!!

People started arriving as early as 7 am, and by the designated starting time of 9 am, the church building was pretty packed! There were over 100 new adults who came to hear the Word and many, many youth also and many children who all sat down the front and were so excited! All up there were about 250-300 present.

It was a thrill to watch their awe as they saw the Word of God up on the power point in their own language and listened to Paul speaking in their own mother tongue! It was also a thrill watching the two young missionary families serve and care for all these people who they had been visiting and building friendships with since they first moved to Man-ai in August.

Seeing the finished product of the last 5 months of building was a real thrill for us! The church meeting hall is upstairs and the downstairs is the two apartments for our new missionary families so that they can take advantage of the rain water off the roof that is collected in the tank.
There is more news and a video Lord willing to follow soon….but please keep praying for Man-ai and for Jerrum and Aybi and also Nonon and Jie-jie, the missionaries there. Every Saturday at 9 am, they will be teaching Gospel lessons to the people of Man-ai. Pray for a great harvest there for the Lord!

                    Thank you for your prayers!!

Some of the past month in pictures......

A computer seminar was held in Lapoc which was a great help for the administrators in our churches to acquire new skills which will stream-line their work!

Johnny is at a hospital along with about 6 other children needing corrective surgery like his. Please pray for him and for wisdom for us as we help.

And the ladies in the churches continue to do acts of kindness and hospitality…..!! Cooking and helping and feeding lots of people.

These things, other things and lots of translation work have filled our month!

So humbling and amazing......

We serve God who is the one who alone possesses immortality, who lives in unapproachable light, whom no human being has seen nor is able to see, to whom be honor and eternal power. 

(1 Timothy 6:16) 

This is so humbling and amazing – that we of all people can be His servants.

Three big things happened last month:

 #1 My grandpa finally went home to be with the Lord at age 96. I miss him a lot. He was a good, good loving Grandpa, and he was the first one in our family that we know who went to be a missionary in a foreign land.

#2 We were extremely tired and needed a break.

#3 It was our 34th wedding anniversary and God gave us the opportunity to take a break for 2 weeks and go away with some dear friends. We got back really refreshed and thankful for that time and for 34 years of marriage.

Back ‘home’ means here in Upper Carmen, Cagayan, not far away from the old city dump site, very hot days, lots of homeless dogs and cats up and down the streets, 4:30 am starts to the day in the office working on the translation, buying our vegetables at the local market and eating literally bundles of green swamp spinach and sweet potato greens every week…..getting freshly harvested rice sent out to us by motorbike from Tumpagon….daily text messages, skype calls, phone calls…..from brothers and sisters all over the mountains, scattered from one end of the work to the other.

Some calls are very sweet like: “Amay and Inay (Dad and Mum), we’re praying for your loss of your grandpa, crying with you….our hearts hurt along with yours. We love you very much…..” or ….. “Inay, are you asleep yet? What has your day been like?” or “Amay, Inay….a motorbike is coming out today, we’re sending you some rice…..” And sometimes the messages are devastating like: “Amay, Inay….please pray for Monica, she just gave birth and the baby has a heart problem…..” or challenging like: “Amay, Inay…we’re making big inroads in building relationships in this village, please pray as we prepare to start teaching the Word here…..” We LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this role God has given us with oh such a big, big family – HIS FAMILY – who He has entrusted to us as shepherds to His lambs.

Oh and we get to have some really fun times and laughs together. Like taking Nonon and his wife out to eat a meal of shrimp and crabs and the fun we had of getting in with bibs, eating with our hands and making a big mess. Nonon is part of the new missionary team to Man-ai and he is very homesick which can be sooooo hard to bear. Please pray for him.

The revision of Mark, Luke and Acts is going great: Mark is finished, up to Luke 12 now….. we are on target to get the NT to the printers in March/April next year. PLEASE KEEP PRAYING!

Paul and Deb's August Update

This month started off with a real ‘bang’ in Lapoc with over 70 pastors and ministry leaders from every corner of our work coming together for teaching and fellowship. The photo above was taken at one of the meal times and we were singing a rousing Happy Birthday to Wing-Wing and Richard whose birthdays coincided with this conference!

Paul thoroughly enjoyed sharing the Word: one topic was why we have different verses in scripture enclosed in brackets with a footnote that says, ‘Some of the earliest manuscripts do not include these verses,’ and about the Textus Receptus and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Another beautiful topic that he taught on from 1 Cor 8 was about stumbling our brother.

Man-ai is filling us with anticipation! This is our newest mission field and the Tumpagon and Tinaytayan churches are very excited to be jointly sending out the first missionary team to this area!! Paul and Ronnie have been overseeing all the building and I must say that this building project has really exhausted Paul, but it is coming to an end Lord willing within a couple more weeks. The two new missionary couples have been coming to our place weekly along with their pastors, and we have been doing missionary orientation with them. It’s been funny, interesting and helpful as we’ve tried to put our 30 years of mistakes and experiences and lessons into a nutshell to help these two young couples as they head for this new field. They are excited, apprehensive, are aware of their fragility and brokenness but know that they can be faithful ministers IN Christ!!!

Jubab just arrived back from Japan yesterday and is being debriefed at the OMF headquarters and will head back for his last semester at Bible College at the end of the week!!! He had an amazing time!!

We are blessed beyond by your prayers and partnership!    

Recodo Baptism Clip

Planting Trees.....Visiting the sick.....Jubab's time in Japan.....

Planting Trees!

This past week we have been planting some trees with our family in Tumpagon: a very special time of  building memories and bonding with our family!

Thousands of fruit trees planted in the Tumpagon and Cauyunan areas which the Lord provided years ago, are now mature and this year they are just bursting with flowers promising a great harvest in a few months’ time.

There is a time to plant and a time to harvest and this is true not only on the farms that our brothers and sisters are working so hard on in this planting season, but also out in our Lord’s field which surrounds us wherever we go.

Visiting the Sick…

Not only have we been planting trees and seeing the blooms promising the hope of a huge harvest, but we have also been visiting the sick, the weak and the heartbroken….. Over this past weekend, we visited four households, held their hands, hugged them, wiped tears, prayed with them: two families who have family members who are housebound because of strokes, one family who had a death, and another family with a young Mom who is suffering heart problems due to recently giving birth.

Olivia, Jubab’s girlfriend - who is here with us for a month - came with us on these visits and God used her to bring comfort and encouragement to Minda (front, second from right in the picture below) who has been housebound now for 3 years and is partially paralyzed from a stroke. Before we left, we joined hands with the whole family and Olivia prayed for Minda and the family. There is no language barrier with prayer! Minda’s face was beaming after Olivia prayed for her. 

Jubab’s Time in Japan

Jubab is loving his time in Japan and is seeing a lot of the ministry and is feeling more and more like Japan is the mission field that God is calling him to after Bible College. Please pray for him as he looks to the Lord for direction and wisdom over the remaining five weeks he has there.

2018 Talaandig-Higaonon Ladies Retreat

Talaandig Translation Clip

Tinaytayan Mission Church

Anelia's Miracle.....

We asked for a miracle for our sister Anelia, and God answered our prayers. Her miracle was her first sight of our Lord’s face and of heaven yesterday afternoon about 2 hours after this photo above was taken.

Anelia’s dear doctor told us that it would be better for Anelia to discharge her from the hospital and to take her home as he had done all that could be done for her. The hardest thing was telling her husband Tony, and her daughter JenJen and JenJen’s husband Jimrel, and to see their grief and tears as we hugged them and watched the nurses unhook the machines, tubes and needles and prepare Anelia for her trip home.

About two hours after her discharge, as she lay in the back bench seat of our vehicle, with cushions and blankets beneath her and with her head in her husband’s lap, in a very peaceful way as the familiar mountain scenery rolled past the windows, she was ushered into our Lord’s presence. Her daughter and son-in-law were right there with her, and she went in a quiet moment and without a struggle. God’s plan for Anelia’s time to step into timelessness had come and it was good.

Her daughter JenJen, and the whole family, are so thankful for your prayers. In their grief as they wept, they found great comfort in Philippians 1:21, which we read together in the hospital and talked about during the hours when we were processing Anelia’s discharge from the hospital.

Arriving back home with Anelia’s dead body was not the outcome they were hoping for but they accepted it as God’s plan and the church family there is rallying around them. Her body is laid out in her home as the custom is here, and all the family and neighbours are there helping. The coffin is being hand-built by friends and neighbours as we write this and the grave is being dug by these same friends and neighbours. People are cooking rice and feeding all who are visiting and helping with the work…..and when all is ready, her body will be laid in the ground. Probably sometime later this afternoon.

Death is a harsh and bitter reality in our earthly lives…..but our HOPE does not disappoint. It is a living hope through the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead. 1 Peter 1:3

Thank you for all your messages and emails and prayers – they have been sustaining us through these days!

Please pray for our sister Anelia......

As we were leaving the place where we went to teach the Word last Sunday, we stopped by to visit our sister Anelia who we had been told only just that morning was suffering an illness. We were totally unprepared for the sight of the skeletal, pain-racked version of her usual vibrant happy self who we found when we arrived at her house.

She has been suffering and bedridden for nine months in spite of two different trips to local hospitals which left them with no answers.

The tears and grief that I was trying so hard to hide from Anelia, prevented me from even finishing my prayer for her and as we left, Paul pressed everything he had in his wallet into her husband’s hand. He’s never done that before, but before we even saw her, that’s what the Lord had already told Paul to do.

The next day we contacted a brother in the Lord who is a highly respected Doctor in town and who had recently offered to help us with any patients we had. He told us on the phone to bring her straight in to him even if it was after hours. So we immediately got to work to bring her out and take her to the hospital to be under this dear doctor’s care.

It turns out that Anelia has schistosomiasis (a snail-borne parasite) which has caused cirrhosis of her liver. She is hugely anemic and is currently receiving a blood transfusion and also treatment for the schistosomiasis. We told her last night that we are going to ask our brothers and sisters all over the world to pray for her that she will recover. Will you please pray? Anelia really needs a miracle to get through this.

Mom Ellen Passed Away Today......

Our beautiful Mom Ellen passed away today. How badly we already miss her beautiful smile and the love she poured into our family! And how all the kids in our family will miss their awesomely fun and wonderful Grandma.

Thank you for all the prayers you have prayed for her since the news of her brain cancer was first known. She really, really appreciated all of those and she spoke of God's love for her during her last days.

In her last days when our sister asked her if she had trusted Jesus as her Lord and Saviour, she nodded yes, and this is our great hope and comfort as we go through this huge loss.

More News From Paul and Deb......

Please PRAY for our Mom Ellen, Paul’s step-mum!

She has been battling with cancer for a couple of years and we know many of you have been praying for her but we just really value special prayer for her right now as the effects of her cancer are really escalating. We are so thankful that Jubab was able to spend Thanksgiving with her last November and they had a really precious Grandma-Grandson time together eating great food and crying together in sad movies. 

Ever since Paul’s Dad passed away 21 years ago, Mom Ellen has continued to be a really great Mom to us. She’s visited us here in the Philippines and in Australia, been so loving to us and especially to her grandkids, and built great memories with us through-out the years. She’s such a brave and beautiful lady, and never complains.

Paul’s sister who’s over there with Mom Ellen right now, was messaging us this morning that Mom had a very bad night last night.  So our hearts and minds are very much over there with Mom Ellen right now.  

We’ve been praying for and with Inay this month as well. Inay is our mother from Cauyunan.

During our very first days in the village of Cauyunan as brand new missionaries and very young, inay and her husband took us under their wing and protected us from people who didn’t want us there, shared meals with us and took Paul into their hearts as one of their sons. That was twenty-nine years ago! Inay has been a widow for quite a while now as Tatay has gone on ahead to heaven, and many of the years since she was widowed she comes and stays with us for a month or two at a time. She’s been here with us almost a month now, and we hope she’ll stay for at least another month!

She went through a very stressful time last year with her youngest son in prison (he has now been released) and she almost wasted away. So we are thankful we have this time to encourage her and nourish her both physically and spiritually.

Inay loves Paul and loves to boss him around even though she is only a third of his size!

We’re currently working on Matthew chapter 17. Only 13 more chapters left unwritten in Talaandig. The completion of the Talaandig New Testament grows closer every day!

The Talaandig bible app is now available on iTunes!!!

This is a screen photo of the app on iTunes and it should be easy to download if you are an iTunes person!

Already in the past two weeks we have had 20 of our brothers and sisters over here in ministry being able buy new phones at a price they could afford because of a huge discount the Lord provided for them and they are now LOVING reading their bibles on their phones. We have twice already been able to pass notes on the scriptures back and forth between different ones. And in the next few weeks we are working on helping a lot more of the people in the churches get phones up and going with the Talaandig Bible App.