Happy Valentines Day

Belated Happy Valentines day!!! And belated Gung Hai Phat Choi for that matter.  Gotta love all the red splashing around our island of late.

From 9 yr old girl

People in the Philippines love both holidays and there have been signs and decorations in the stores for some time.  We received a few Valentines of our own from the Ablen kids—beautifully hand-made and written, and one from our little friend Vincent in the branch.  Elder Cropper took me out to celebrate the day, and the restaurant had a special menu.  They served nothing from their regular menu—just 3 choices of “for two” meals.  It arrived artfully plated on one platter from which we shared and it was very yummy—pasta, salad, and batter-fried seafood. Strangely they even turned people away who were not in pairs!!  Like they were not willing to make the platter for two into a plate for 1 or 3. Funny.

Ya gotta love the art work

Six yr old girl

It is Vincent's 8th birthday next month. He asked me to baptize him

11 yr old boy

Over our time here, a few family members have talked of visiting us during our stay, but we have really discouraged them.  Travel here is grueling—like way farther and way more flights than you can even imagine.  When you travel that far, you want to stay a while, but we can really only take off a couple days, and the rest of the time would be missionary stuff and training that is not that fun for any one else (though we love it like it’s our hobby, not our job). Then there are the tropical diseases which are a very real and likely threat and which can’t always be avoided even when careful—yet another missionary, this time in our branch, just came down with Dengay fever last month and was oh so sick. All that said, we were surprised last year when Tanner and Taylor tacked a jaunt down here onto their business trip to China, and we had a great few days with them.  Then, last week Richard and Sharon came to see us in conjunction with a trip they made to Thailand!!  They too were only here a few days, but it was so great to have them here.  It makes us second guess ourselves about being so adamant with others about not coming, but the reality didn’t change—it is dangerous here and they were lucky to get home without fever, dysentery, or amoebas—I don’t know about Thailand, but it’s a jungle over here.

Yummy mangosteens.

At the flower market in Dumaguete

Elder Cropper's favorite mango stand. Mmmm good!

Chicken Panda.  Deep fried chicken in banana leaves.

Over the river again on a new bridge. Teaching the gospel.

They of course will come home with tales of how lovely our home is, how nice the city near us, how lush and paradisiacal the surroundings and vegetation, how exotic and idyllic our setting, how delightful the people, how well run our branch.  And that is all true.  Our circumstances here are beyond what we could have imagined.  At first they were all so foreign and frightful we could hardly breathe, but now, we are really at home here.  We know where things are in our favorite grocery store.  We know the short cuts through town when traffic is bad. We know the names of every child in our Branch Primary.  We know where to get a Magnum bar or the best mangoes (a stand on the way to Valencia). We know what spray to use to eradicate the latest ant colony from our truck engine (they usually end up carrying eggs into the glove box before we notice they have returned). We have an emergency plan for black outs, floods, and storms. Our armed security guard is mostly friendly.  We get a text when someone is happy or ill or gets good news.  We are included. We feel at home.

Whale shark. Biggest fish in the world

 Richard and Sharon saw and heard some bugs that most people only see on discovery channel, and they were greeted by our resident gecko dropping from the door frame as we walked in, but those things are old hat for them having lived in Brazil for 3 years.  They were not too fazed by the wildlife, but even their stomachs took a lurch when we walked them into the fish market in Dumaguete.  The smells in there are indescribable.

No fear Sister C. twenty foot long shark.

Toaist Temple in Cebu. Elder C saw it 40 years ago while serving in Cebu

We snorkeled one afternoon and discovered gads of beautiful fish—don’t picture a reef off a resort on Palawan—this was a toothless lola collecting a fee at a “nature reserve” that consisted of a few bamboo tables, some bouys to keep us enclosed, and a shower after from a hand pump, bucket and dipper.  We golfed one day (well the men did) on an overnight  trip with Pres. and Sister Schmutz and his brother, Steve and his wife Becky. We shopped for baskets at a little spot so remote we can’t believe Sister S. could find it and there we discovered a mini-factory of hand weavers. We swam in the ocean with whale sharks!!  They were close enough to touch!!  We hiked into a tropical water fall (the hike was a test of our pluck that is for sure) where we really felt Tarzan-esque. We ate a few really great meals  (actually too many for our own health)  including one lovely one at the Schmutzes’, and one at an ultra-Filipino restaurant where we ate banana flower salad, sinigang soup,  pork pata, pork kare kare, chicken tidbits in banana leaves, and a sweet chili chicken dish.  And we ate on banana leaf plates. We saw aTaoist temple and Magellan's cross and a museum full of Cebu history, pre-colonial to post-independence.

The best part of having them here, as Sharon said in an email yesterday, was so they could be witness to the work we do here.  It makes our experience here more real, less surreal-like it's not just a dream, unconnected to our "real" life.  They came with us to our branch, and met the people here who we have loved and who have loved us.  They met our mission pres. and his wife who have become our family/life line/mentors/partners.  They taught with us in members’ homes and shared the light the gospel brings.  They became sentimental about their own missionary service, and were able to counsel us on the reality of leaving this all behind and returning to the real world.

These big guys were so cool to swim with! As long as a bus.

Richard with the shark

We really wish all our family could have come to visit.  But the thought of your safety loomed much larger than our yearning for you.

One of God's magnificent creation.

On this Valentine Day, we are more conscious than ever of the power and source of all good things— God’s love.  God’s love for us, our love for Him, our love for others, their love for us:  those forms of love that emanate from Him and that are our gift from Him empower, animate, and enlighten everything.  When I write that it sounds so trite, so commonly stated, but I know it is true, and I did not come here with as firm a conviction of it as I have now: God loves His children, and his plan of happiness includes our being buoyed up by the power of that love. While here, we have seen first hand more of what some might call evidence of God’s neglect than we have ever before seen, but at the same time, we have seen the awesome power of God's love that turns darkness into light EVERY time a heart opens to it.  Love (not in its maligned, pip-squeaky and often twisted worldly version, but in its Godly purity) really does conquer all.

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

 

Reminiscing 2012

We are loving it!Really!!

 One of the greatest and most memorable years we have ever spent just ended.  Several experiences stand out as defining for us. Here are a few.

 

We have learned and seen how living the gospel of Jesus Christ changes peoples hearts, minds and even physical appearance.  One of our focuses has been to rescue families and leaders who were not enjoying the blessings of the gospel.  Most of these individuals we have worked with have been hardened by the world with some bitterness toward someone in the church. They have let the spirit and power of the atonement slip through their fingers and have held fast to what was left; grudges and bitterness.  In many cases the softness the gospel brings into a person's life was replaced with worldly vices and thinking. They could remember the gospel was still true, but they found that God would not strike them dead if they stopped coming to church, so they got comfortable and slipped into their old life style. You could see a reluctant edge in their eyes and hear it in their voice. We could hear them thinking, "if we invite these people back, they are just going to ask us to come back to church and we am ok with how things are going in our life."  They had forgotten. Brother and Sister G. for example  They had been baptized as early pioneers in the church and had become leaders early on. They worked hard as their testimonies grew, sacrificing family time and recreation for service in the Lord's kingdom. After years of service they were eventually released with little thanks and with a few unresolved conflicts.  At first they just took a vacation from church activity, then soon, going back to their old life became very easy. After fifteen years there with old friends and vices it was a distant memory.  We learned the power of inspired questions asked in love, consistency, offering apologies and persistence. They both have callings now and are getting ready to return to the temple. They have remembered the strength,power and truth they had left behind.

I had the blessing of working with two missionaries this year who wanted to return home because they felt that a mission was not what they wanted.  Forty years ago I was experiencing the same feelings.  What am I doing here? I remember a call home I made from the mission president's office to inform my parents I was coming home, and to arrange to return to the States.  But instead I had a spiritual experience while on the phone with my mother.  I was allowed to physically feel the pain that I put into my mother's heart when I told her that I was coming home.  There was an immediate change in my desire to serve and thanks to my mother and God I stayed on my mission. My life changed for an eternity!  This experience is even more meaningful since my mom passed away this year. What a gift she gave me that I was able to pass on to two struggling missionaries. Using that experience and the power of having served a mission, I was able to encourage both missionaries to stay and now one is a zone leader and the other a district leader and both are loving their missions and their lives will be changed forever because of my mother.

Always on some jungle path

This year as we taught the gospel to less active members, we asked them to remember what the gospel and church had meant to them in the past.  The stone around their heart began to break and a spirit of love began to replace the spirit of pride. Tears replaced the glares. We knew that for those who had made covenants with God and were not keeping them, the time had come for them to return.  We have learned how merciful and loving God is even to those who have forgotten him.  We have seen members return after years of not tasting the fruits of the spirit, and as they returned it was such a  great joy to see other members put their arms around these brothers and sisters and welcome them back.

We are all God's children and all have the same access at the table of the Lord and can feast with each other as we all feel His love. Because the focus throughout the Philippines Area, and in our mission in particular, has changed from proselyting to rescuing, all the missionaries are working to find those who have left the fold.  In Amlan Branch alone, the attendance has gone from an average of 60 when we first arrived to last week there were 120 in attendance. 

What a difference a year can make. Sometimes we sit in church before the meeting starts and watch the members arrive and remember how we have listened to these wonderful saints talk of why they stopped coming to church and stopped reading their scriptures. In their homes we prayed with them and taught them the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We have been there as the spirit has filled their hearts.  We will miss these wonderful saints. We have been working in another branch just north of us, it is Tanjay (tanhi). It is the hub of the district. At the beginning of the year there were two missionaries and mid-year  two more were put there.  At the beginning of this year there were about 80 in attendance. Now there are

Amlan branch Elders Quorum shaking it up

about 140-160 attending.  The record is 174. Members are returning to church and to the temple. Many other branches are similar.

One of the powerful changes we have seen in this mission this year is the higher level of spirituality of the missionaries during.  When we arrived there was a culture that had developed of disobedience. I believe we have addressed that in a previous blog. The mission president has done such a marvelous job in rooting out the old rebellious culture and replacing it with a culture that makes  missionaries want to be obedient, be sanctified and work hard. We are witnesses to the fruit of obedience to God's commands, faith and hard work. The Cebu mission is consistently ranked 1st in many categories of all the missions in the Philippines particularly in returning less active members.

A sleeping baby on the shoulder is pretty heavenly.  Cassandra T.

Last item, one of the greatest things that we love so much about being here is the happy nature of the people.  If you smile at any Filipino they will smile back at you with the most beautiful smile you can imagine.  Even if their house is full of mud and there is no food for them to eat they will smile.  The large city just to the south of us, Dumaguete, has a large number of foreigners living there.  In almost all cases, when we pass a foreigner on the street and look and smile at him, there is no response at all.  It is like we just we passed a mannequin. We are in love the the Filipino people who are warm, loving, resilient, happy in the face of trials, family oriented, with fathers and grandfathers taking care of little ones, and the list goes on. There is a part of heaven we feel in the hearts of these people that is easily manifest by their happy countenance.

One of the most powerful lessons we have learned is that we worship a God of miracles and we are in constant awe of how we works in the lives of so many people including our own.  We have seen that nothing is too great for the Lord.  He is in control and this life on earth is a perfect place for us to come and experience exactly what we need to progress and return to Him.  We have come to love our Savior Jesus Christ in ways we thought not possible. Our lives will never be the same.

Family transportation- Can you find all 7?  two brothers, one with two kids in front of him, the other with one in his far arm and his wife and daughter behind him.  Who needs a suburban? Who needs hands on the handle bars?

We have loved the year 2012. We have experienced heartache and joy.  We have missed our family greatly, but technology is amazing, and they have been great at staying connected and supporting us. And they have thrived with out us. We are changed--a miracle in itself for a couple of old people who were pretty much fully cooked--or so we thought. A year that we will always remember as one of our very best!