Visiting a flooded Church

The view from the roof of the church.











In a pre-school,waiting out the storm in a pre-school.














A car repair shop in the neighborhood. Someone is still living here.













The front yard with things from the pastor's family buried in the mud.













Pastor Ricky and I discussing how to use the funds that I brought to help the church, the community and the pastor's family. Thanks to the donors.














I was able to visit this church three weeks after it was flooded by a typhoon, high tide and the emergency release of water behind dams. The pastor and his family got on the roof of their simple, rented residence as the water rose to 7 feet deep within the house. They then fled to a neighbor and finally to a local daycare center. They have moved back into their residence and with the help of many, they have restored some semblance of normalcy to their lives.

Pray for them as they seek to minister to families all around them.

I want to thank the donors who gave so generously so this could happen.

Books and Students

Because the small school for missionary children closed because of a lack of students we had the fun task of distributing the materials, furniture and computers that were left.

These are few of the students from the college, where I teach, collecting some FREE items. Students all over the world love free things but these students do not get a chance to do this very often.

Thanks to the generosity of many, we had the joy of doing this! There are still many items which will be used in the future to help start several, God willing, Study Centers in the rural areas of this island.

People

This is a small portion of the association of churches that we work with. It was at a conference that I mentioned in the previous post. This group of seventy churches come from basically four regions in the Philippines. This particular conference is being conducted in the Central Visayas, where we live. This is a big advantage for us since that means that they predominantly speak the language that we understand.

Think of that for a minute, when these churches get together they have five languages they can choose from. Most people can speak three of the five (of course which three does tend to vary) so they are much more adept at these things than I am!

Currently we are seeking to move out of the large city we have lived in for the past 22 years and move to the much smaller city of Naga (80,000 population) but we are having a hard time finding housing. Please pray. We want to be there to help set up a Study/Tutorial Center that will enable us to supplement the education that the kids are getting in the public school. I just recently heard of one city's educational system with 40,000 students, 5,000 more than last school year, that has a student to teacher ration of 60 to 1.

We want to find a house that someone will long term rent to us, cheap! I know, doesn't eveyone, but we really feel like we could use this to find a way to meet observed and felt needs in the community.

Joys of Teaching

I have found that teaching is one of the things in life that brings joy. Not that I teach only for the joy that it brings but I am surprised by it (thanks to C. S. Lewis for describing that process). This past Wednesday I spent the day in the mountains with about 150 people from the churches that we work with in this part of the country. We sing, eat together, talk and listen to people encourage us in our walk with Jesus.

One of the other things that happens is that I get to talk to men and women that are working in these small churches, far from any large city or even a good sized town, but they continue to remain faithful. This is one of those young men, and of course his daughter. I cherish every time that we can get together and hear what they are doing. Pastor Marlon and I are sharing a different experience, we are both raising rabbits. He is doing it for a little money on the side and I do it so that we can demonstrate to others that it is possible to earn additional funds and provide extra protein for their diet at a very low expense.

Marlon was one of my students and now we talk to each other about theology and rabbits. It makes for joy.