Banging! Banging! Banging!

Why all the banging?

It is the sound of building, building and more building!

Please PRAY for the ongoing building projects and PRAISE for the newly finished ones!

We built 2 covered assembly areas for the schools of Lapoc and 
Lirongan, which open onto a stage area with a back stage area 
as well that doubles up as a small classroom. The above is half way
 through building and the finished product is below. 
They were just completed last month.

Projects like these promote good-will

towards the Gospel in these remote

communities!

As a result of the relationships we have with the schools, we are able to teach almost 4,000 kids from the Word each week – HUGE!!! Many of these kids have been saved and many are now filtering into our church youth group and meetings. The kids also have infrastructure to learn in which is a real blessing to them. For example in these 2 schools they did not have much shelter or anywhere to have their lunches or hold assemblies. Now they do J.

As well as having recently finished these two building projects for the schools with the help of a work team from Australia (thanks so much guys!), Paul has also recently finished another school room for the school in Colawingon and he still has four major building projects currently on the boil – a new clinic in Cauyunan and three church buildings for the believers in Lantod, Masimag and Tinongtongan.

Phew! What a marathon! Four more major building projects to complete over the coming months and all the massive effort these take in terms of planning and getting the building materials onto the building sites over extremely rough and boggy (at times) roads.

Please pray for wisdom for Paul as he oversees these building projects, and also for strength because each building takes a chunk of his time and gives him its own unique set of headaches: like the vehicle delivering the roofing and cement to Cauyunan for the clinic getting stuck two days ago in the middle of the river crossing and in danger of being washed away if the rain came before it could be dug out. (Thankfully God held back the rain!)

Paul needs your prayers:

·         For wisdom and strength.

·         For safety for his teams of builders.

·         For safe delivery of all his building materials.

·         For rest and peace of his busy mind even in the midst of busyness.

·         For wise division of his time amongst his various ministries.

·         For freshness and joy in his leadership of our missionary team and discipleship of the church leadership team.

·         For time to play. (Mostly with his almost 14 year old son! Sometimes with the grandkids who will soon be 4!  Yes! Jen is expecting our number 4 grandchild!)

·         For refreshment from the Word.

·         For hours needed on the translation work.

I can SEE!!!

Recently we helped this lady, Lola, have cataract surgery and after years of blurred vision, she can now see.

When her eyes were first opened – after the surgery – she looked around in wonder and said, “I can see the mountains.....I CAN SEE YOUR FACES......I can see EVERYTHING!!”

What excitement!! What joy!!!

We can only imagine the difference this must mean in her life.

Next week there is another group of people who will
 be given their sight!

A group of criminals are hearing the Gospel for the first time!!

In a place called Talid-talid, a hide-out for criminals and one of the

furthest outreaches from Lapoc, this group have been listening

to the preaching of the Word since Feb 17, 2012.  

Truth after truth, verse after verse has been expounded to them,

replacing all the lies that they have been believing all their lives,

showing them that from the beginning, before the world was even

made, God had them in His heart and made a way so that they could

have a relationship with Him. They have gotten to know the 
Lord Jesus and have been learning about His life.

Next week they are finally at the foot of the cross and are 
ready to hear about everything that happened

 to Jesus on the cross so that 
He could pay for their sin.
 Some have already been able to see that Jesus is their

Saviour and they have believed. 
Others are just on the brink of being able 
to clearly see the truth.  

What a wonderful thing to be able to SEE!!!!

Chocolate Cake

Chocolate cake speaks volumes in any language – especially to kids!

These kids had never seen us before and they were scared of us at first but we won their hearts by taking them chocolate cake.

Now we are praying that Jesus will win their hearts with His love as His Word has just arrived in their village and their Dads and Mums are hearing the truth about God for the first time in their lives. Pray that light will flood their hearts and that these children grow up being children of light and not children of darkness.

These kids need something of far more value then chocolate cake. They need life without end, they need truth, they need to know that Jesus loves them and gave His life for them.

While my arms were wrapped around the little girl leaning on me in the above picture, I could feel the amulets that her parents had tied around her waist in a vain effort to ward off evil spirits. Their trust is in the powers of the witchdoctor and in their own efforts but we need to pray that they will be freed from this terrible oppression and darkness and will come into freedom and life! 

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!!!