The Peace Meal

Paul and I with the four young offenders who stoned our windscreen. Beside me on the right is Remy.

Next to Paul is Uboy, and the young man in the red shirt is Imay and on the end at the left of this picture is Uyù. Two of the fathers are behind them.

We left for their village last Saturday morning without apprehension but with a sense of anticipation wondering what God purposed to bring out of the day. We started out as just a few, Paul and I, Ben (Leonie was not feeling well) and a couple of men who are related to two of the young offenders. Just down the road a bit, we picked up two of the village officials and finally, by the time we arrived at our destination, we were jammed inside the vehicle like sardines with about 8 people sitting up on the roof-rack besides!

The first thing that happened was that as we were getting out of the vehicle, the fathers of two of the young men, met us and with tears and eventually even sobs, he grabbed onto Paul and kept hugging him and begging him to please forgive his sons, and he kept telling us over and over, very loudly, that he was so ashamed at what they had done to us that he could hardly show his face in the village anymore and that even all the officials were angry with him because he couldn’t control his sons. But he kept saying to Paul, “I never, ever taught them to do any harm to you or to anybody else. I don’t know what to do with my sons and I don’t know why they are doing these things......maybe this happened so that they could learn a lesson and so that you could come here to our house and teach them. Maybe you will bring deliverance to my family.......maybe that rock that they threw will turn out to be the thing that knocked on your heart and brought you here to our place......”

As he talked and cried he was taking us into his house and once we were all inside, he kept talking for quite some time, while in the mean time, different family members started serving coffee and I started slicing the three big chocolate cakes that we had brought as a special treat for the children, but which were equally enjoyed by all the adults! I cut 90 slices of cake and it was just the right amount to go around!!

The meeting was very serious, with the officials present who represented both their village and ours. The offenders had been sent to carry cool, clean water from a spring quite a long walk away, as their Dads did not want us to drink the common water that they used in their houses. As the officials prepared to get into the serious talking, the four offenders sheepishly approached the house with the water and the crowd of on-lookers cleared the way so they could come through. Their wives and children were also with them as we had specified during the inquiry the previous week, but the thing that really stirred my heart was the fear on the faces of their gorgeous little children and I wondered what they were thinking and feeling. No doubt they had heard all about their Dads’ sin and no doubt they had heard all of the villagers and neighbours and their grandparents yelling at their Dads and threatening that they would end up in prison and here they were, having to appear before these foreign, ‘scary’ people that their Dads had sinned against.

The cake and our smiles soon won them over and when the serious talking began, they all gathered in the room with their mothers and their dads and they began to feel quite relaxed and happy as they listened to Paul teach and as they listened to all that was said. I watched them and took some photos while it was all happening (as surreptitiously as I could) and I think these photos tell a world of stories in themselves. 

The black at the bottom left of this picture is me, and this little girl, leaning against my side, almost immediately lost her initial fear of us and she leaned on me, holding onto the edge of my jacket, during the whole proceedings.

This is one of my favourite pictures. Can you read the remorse in young Imay’s posture here as he holds his head in his hands while he listens to Paul teaching them from the Word? His attitude brought tears to my eyes.

Here are two more of the offenders, with their children gathered around them and their wives on either side as they focus intently on what Paul was saying. 

The peace meal! Amazingly to us, they knew exactly how we took our coffee and knew that we didn’t like our soup too salty and they’d prepared everything suited to our tastes. They had done some detective work!

The story of all the events of the day would take too long to tell.....but the outcome was that the four offenders, their families, their relatives and other people in their village want someone to go there each week to teach them the Word of God! This is the very best outcome!! These four young men told us that they have been discouraged in life and have had no direction, and that the poverty and frustrations of their lives have made them want to find something ‘easy’ like crime. But they promised to turn from this life and they all said they want salvation and they want to submit their lives to God. So we wait to see what God has for them and their families and for their village of Mauswagon in the days and weeks, months and years ahead. 

The four young offenders called themselves the ‘surrenderees’. Please pray that they will surrender their lives to the Lord Jesus! Their names from left to right are:  Remy (Buling), Uboy, Imay and Uyù. They are all married and all have children.

At present they are a gang of thieves and murderers, but in the future maybe they will be a group of God’s children, maybe evangelists and bible teachers..........

Please join in the fight for their souls by PRAYING!

A home at last!

What if your roof was a bridge and your walls were pieces of rusty metal and bits of board that other people had thrown out?

What if one night while you slept, a huge wall of water poured in under the bridge you called ‘home’ and washed away every single thing you had to call your own in the world?

During the night of last December 16th, this is what happened in the world of many, many people living in Cagayan along the riverside and under the bridges. A massive relief operation involving the evacuation of 100,000 people occurred on the morning of December 17, 2011.

You might remember our account of the things we witnessed while we tried to help the victims of the flood.........young people like this boy on the left, trying to dig through the tangled rubble at the side of the river hoping to find some remnant of his home.

People finding their dead laid out in grotesque piles at the city’s morgues, people sitting on sidewalks dazed or weeping,  refugees in hastily erected shelters.....mud and debris and stench everywhere.

There were so many horrifying scenes, and even after we had come back home to Lapoc our hearts were back with the thousands we had seen in such tragic circumstances. We kept thinking about the faces we’d seen, the anguish and the hopelessness.

And then the Lord gave us a surprise and started to send in finances to help the flood victims and after He had provided the money, He then led us to some families who a pastor had been doing outreach with before the flood. This pastor had gone and found them under the bridge where they lived in poverty and started bible studies with them.

Now here they were, homeless, and refugees, a little flock of the Lord’s people who He brought to us out of the thousands. They were a motley sort of crowd. Some of them had been saved out of prostitution, one was an ex-gangster and the 13 other members of his old gang were all dead, others had grown up as street kids – just the sort of needy people that Jesus loves and that He would have been spending time with while He walked this earth as a man.

The building of homes for these families has been a 6 month long project that started on January 18^th and was finished just last week and we are so thrilled with the results and with this little community of families who have their own homes now – ‘real’ homes like they never even dared to dream they would have while they were still living in little hovels with the bridge as their roof.

God brought something good out of the tragic flood for these 13 families. Last week as we walked amongst them and looked into their eyes and saw them living in their new homes and saw the children just so, so happy.......well, it absolutely melted our hearts with joy and we wanted to share some of the photos and some of this joy with you!!

We praise God for His provision and we praise Him that we could be a conduit for Him to see houses built for these 13 families and all the children that are part of these families. Thank you to all of you as well who had a part in this – our partnership in this was just absolutely an awesome experience for us!!!

A rock out of the darkness!

Last Wednesday evening found us nearly home to Lapoc with our visitors when all of a sudden SMASH!!!!!

Out of the darkness came a BIG rock which hit us with enough force to smash our windscreen and scare us half to death.

Accompanying the rock were some shouts and the shadowy forms of men caught against the silhouette of our headlights.

We kept going as fast as we could and got safely home to Lapoc, albeit a bit shaken. Early the following morning there were village officials here at our door to ask what had happened and to assure us that they were looking into the matter and a few hours later they came back.

They had found the culprits who had ‘rocked’ us. They were young married men – all four of them – but two of them in particular were trouble makers. One had even been involved in killing and was a fugitive. We hadn’t been their only victims, they had also thrown rocks at a man on a motorbike in front of us and at a truck. There was going to be an inquiry held the next morning at the chief’s house and they wanted us to identify these men and to press charges, maybe even get them thrown in jail.

What to do? We didn’t want to be the cause of these young men going to jail or of their children having to go hungry with no dads to support them and their wives to be left to fend for themselves.

“Lord please show us what to do,” our hearts pleaded. We waited all day for direction, not knowing what we should do and then that evening in the middle of the bible study with the school teachers over at Ben and Leonie’s place, Paul leaned over and said, “God has told me what to do.”

So the next morning, the officials came to get us and escort us to the inquiry which was held in the next village where the ‘rockers’ live. We were surprised as we arrived that there were four men who stepped immediately up to us and put our hands to their foreheads as a sign of respect. The chief took us inside his house and the other officials gathered around – from both Lapoc and also their village. Then the four culprits were brought in and we discovered that it was the same young men who had shown us respect the minute we had arrived at the house. One of these sat down right next to Paul and the other three sat in a row opposite us.

The one next to Paul said to him, “Amay, I would never hurt you – I’ve helped you even – helped you dig your car out when you were stuck in the mud.”

Proceedings started.  We looked at each of those young men who had stoned our car with intent to hold us up and to rob us and we felt such compassion for them. It was so easy to see their lostness and their great need for a Saviour.  There was a lot of talking back and forth, and the young men confessed that they hadn’t recognized our car, that they had been very drunk at the time and didn’t know what they were doing and that they would never have done it if they knew it was us. At one point, one of them hung his head and wiped tears from his eyes. They promised they would never try to hurt anyone again and were willing to sign a statement to that effect that they took full responsibility and accepted fully liability.

Then came the part they had been dreading. They must be punished for what they did. They knew that they cannot afford to pay for a replacement windscreen and that the alternative punishment was imprisonment. The officials already had men in place outside with guns waiting to put them in restraints and take them to prison. The house was full of people watching their discomfort, blocking the doorway, blocking the pathways outside.

These four young men were so scared and looked miserable as they waited to hear what charges Paul was going to press. Paul leaned forward on his seat and looked at each one. He said, “Tell me what you think that I should do?” They said, “We don’t know.” Paul said, “Well, since you don’t know, let me give you two choices and you choose your punishment. I don’t want you to go to prison, but there are two other things. You could pay for my windscreen to be replaced, that would cost about 50, 000 pesos ($1,000+).” They said, “Amay, we don’t have money like that, we could never get that much.” Then Paul said, “Do any of you have a buffalo? Do you have a motorcycle? Do you have a pig?” The answers were, “No, no, no.” Then Paul said, “Do you have a chicken?” One of them said, “I have a chicken.” Paul said, “Do you think you could all get a chicken each and some rice?” They all said, “Yeah.” Paul said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. I will release you from paying for the damaged windscreen, but on Saturday the 14^th, I’m going to come to your houses. I’m going to bring my family and we want to have lunch with you and your wives and your children. We’re going to bring about 10 people with us and you have to prepare a feast and cook it for us and we’ll eat it together. And we’ll talk and I want to tell you some things.” 

This agreement finished and signed, the young men came one by one to us to take our hands and to ask forgiveness from both of us.

The officials who had escorted us were amazed and on the way home,  one of them who has been quite opposed to us, told us that he has served under 5 different chiefs and he has never seen anything like this: such compassion and such a solution to a problem like this. Some of the bible teachers came home early from their outreaches because their hearts were so burdened about this problem and they wanted to hurry home to see if it had been solved and when they heard the news they were amazed and praised God at such a great outcome. The believers were rejoicing last night as they gathered in family groups talking about the awesome ways that God works.  

This whole problem started with a rock and we hope to finish it with another Rock.  Romans 9:33  “Behold I lay in Sion a stumblingstone and rock of offence: and whosoever believeth on Him shall not be ashamed.”

Please pray for these four young men and their families, that this shattered windscreen will only be the beginning of a great work that God is doing to repair their broken lives.

Their names are Uyu, Imay, Buling and Uboy.