Brother T

Sister R. and her teen-aged boys find the gospel

Our blog posts seems to just get farther apart, despite our best intentions.  I don’t think we have less time really, I think it is a combination of things: our blog, at the beginning seemed like our life line.  How could our parents and kids know what we were doing? How could we stay connected to those we were so yearning for?  How else could we supply the mandatory missionary weekly letter home that our kids had been so diligent in writing from their missions, except by blogging, so they could ALL get the details?

But then things evolved:  Heavenly Father blessed us early on to feel less yearny, we found ways to stay in touch by email, VOIP and Skype, we found that some didn’t read the blog anyway, we have been taking fewer pictures, which are really what add to a blog, and lastly, we often can’t seem to remember what we have and haven’t written, so, it all adds up to fewer blog posts.

But, letters and blogs really do offer a different level of communication—insights, reflection, observations and musings that don’t quite get through on a magic jack phone call that is all crackly and in which I am trying to do yoga with Rodney Yee on video (yes, I DO get the irony of that) while the son or daughter I’m calling is nursing a baby, packing lunches for tomorrow, biking home from work, surfing the net, or otherwise multitasking like I am.

So, I continue on this attempt to share what we are about here.  We hope you have time to read it.

Right now we are working with missionaries in three different branches which each has a former branch president who has been gone from the church for a number of years.  There is often 1 or more of these men in every branch! 

 Let me tell you of one. Brother T drove a truck all his life.  He says that his truck driver’s license was his ticket for traveling.  He would go to a new place he wanted to see, then get a job driving, and explore and learn about that place.  He has traveled all over the Philippines in that way and has taught himself several languages in the process.  His English is astonishingly good for a man of little education.  He is one of those people who has a particularly good ear for language, and who loves to learn, so he is self-taught at a level that is really astonishing.  His collection of books, collected from who knows where, is treasured, though tattered and moldy, but his scriptures he has protected in a scripture case, inside another cloth bag.

ya, we are happy doing this work

I should describe him physically.  He is slight, like many here, but muscular—the kind of round and bulging (rather than long and lean) muscles that speak of years of loading sugar cane trucks and that are incongruous on an old man.  He is 73.  He can only stand straight up if he is on tip-toe on one foot, because his right leg is several inches shorter than the other. So, to stand on both feet, he has to bend at the waist, push out one hip and twist over.  His pronounced limp and shriveled leg strangely do not diminish the dignified demeanor of this man, nor his overall mobility.
He incurred the injuries when the axle on the sugarcane truck he was driving broke, and the truck pitched over the steep hill he was cresting.  It rolled for a time with him in it; then he was thrown. The ball of his hip joint was poking out his back, and though he did eventually get medical care, the surgery was far from adequate. And yet he still works—cleaning, cooking, gardening, and repairing shoes. He is a soft spoken, gentle, wise man and his unique accent and his vocab when speaking English indicate he has learned both from books and from listening to foreigners of various accents.  His features are on the Chinese side of Filipino, his eyes weak and weepy with age, but bright. He takes in body language and nuances of tone, highly tuned in to details, spiritual, doctrinal and temporal that others miss—a fact you can discern from his reflections and observations. He is one of God’s more truly beautiful children, and his crippled body, weathered skin, next to non-existent teeth only highlight his beauty. Okay that sounds all poetic and lacking reality, but I wish you could meet this man.  When he glances up and smiles at you, making a comment that is astonishing in its profundity, you are taken aback.  Who is this guy?

Brother T joined the church late in life—back in 2003, after his accident.  First he, and then his wife listened to the gospel message, and he knew he had found what had been missing in his worship before. He said he had never been able to find answers to the questions that plagued him, but now it all made sense.  He embraced it fully.  All he had learned of languages and scripture and people and religion was finally contained in the one truth of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ.

Then came the tragedy—far worse than a sugar cane truck jerking your hip from its socket and crushing your leg.  It began when Brother T was called into the Branch Presidency shortly after his baptism.  Then, the Branch President “resigned” and after only 3 months as a member of the church, when he should probably not yet have even received the Melchizedek priesthood, he was called to be Branch President over a remote branch.

a lovely stretch of beach south of where we live

At that time there had been a tradition in the branch that the Branch President would give out rice to those who came to church.  Right after brother T became Branch Pres. the district leaders told him that this practice could not continue.  People should come o church to worship, not to receive a hand out.  Brother T was the unfortunate soul who had to inform the members of the policy and to enforce
it.  He took away their rice.  But they didn’t simply stop coming.  A very vocal member started a petition.  In not too long he had collected signatures from nearly every member of the branch to have President T. ousted.  I hope as you read that sentence you felt the sorrow and weight of it.  The members ganged up on this newly converted man and crushed his soul in a crippling blow much more consequential than his accident.

He couldn’t face going back.

Many missionaries have visited and taught him over the years—he loves their visits, saying they are the only friends he has in the church—but for some reason, the missionaries who are there now bought just the right Spirit at just the right time and he decided to return.  By the time we met him he had been back twice to church.

As he described the first time back he said that it felt very good to be there.  He also said, they still hate me, I can see it by how they move, but I don’t hate them.  This time weepy for another reason than age, he apologized that his eyes “can’t help but rain the drops of tears”.

We asked if we could sing a hymn with him before we left, and with great excitement he pulled out a notebook in which he had copied the lyrics to several hymns. Above each there were several measures of notes copied out also.  I asked him about the notes and verified that they were indeed the notes to the songs. He said that he was trying to learn about the music and find out their language and if the black notes were like do, so, la, and such. Ya, he was teaching himself musical notation. He sang out with us and Elder D. added a bass line and I the alto and we sounded like quite a little chorus in his cramped little cement block house, interrupted only by the delivery of a pair of shoes someone needed to have stitched and the rooster in the kitchen who wanted to join in.

Brother T’s wife has long since returned to her former church where she admittedly gets no doctrine, no direction for life, no real relationship with God, but where no one argues about rice and hurts each other. She could not reconcile the truth of the gospel with the way he had been treated. Go figure.  But he never went back to his old faith.  He knows where the truth is.  We only hope the members there, a decade later, can rise up to his level and greet him in fellowship.

We have encountered so many iterations of this. They all amount to members or leaders who are less than converted and less then well trained making mistakes, being decidedly wrong or hard-headed, or just being human.  We have wondered why it is so rampant.  Elder Cropper thinks it is like the early history of the church only without the weeding out process of mobs and forced moves.  In the early church in America, the saints had to make choices to stay on, to learn and to measure up or they stayed behind.  Here, many responded to the message of the gospel, connecting with the truth of it, but then they did not have the winnowing or the refining necessary.  So, ALL the people who joined stayed on the books, regardless of their level of conversion, and hence many of the members and even leaders were not, 10 years ago, at the level of understanding and devotion required for a lay church to function properly.

But, God knows all the whys and wherefores, and gratefully the outcomes will be according to His will.  Hopefully, brother T will continue to have the humility, faith, patience and courage to venture back to the true, though sometimes imperfect church and to us, its truly imperfect members.

we never get used to this daily sight

a small barangay pulls off an amazing parade for fiesta

to worship senor santo nino

There are elements from ancient pagan traditions

mixed with Catholic saint worship