Brother N was the first--a tale of brothers in the gospel

 Probably our final meeting with the N family. Forty years ago I taught and baptized the woman in the hat, Sis C.  who is visiting Cebu from Sacramento where she now lives.  Her brother and his wife are in front.  I taught him, Bro N., who now serves as a sealer in the Cebu Temple and was made a Patriarch last year.  We have such love and respect for this man and what he and his dear wife have made of their lives. They are now our eternal friends

Bro N's son Bishop N who is a second generation member with his wife and two sons. The oldest one "H" was just baptized. A third generation member. Born in the covenant. They shared with us a video of him singing at his baptism with his lolo (grandpa) on guitar. So tender.

We are with Dean Edward, Bro N's son named after me. Wow!

We were visiting with one of the branch presidents and he told us of a missionary couple in his mission who were on their 7^th mission!!!.  Yikes!  They were both in their late 70s and he said they lived in a place where they had to fetch (haul) their water! He had some endearing stories of their kinda cute limitations, like her sight wasn’t very good so she would always mix up the missionaries unless she could actually grab their name badge and sight in on it. But still he had great respect for them.  Heck, I mix up the missionaries and my sight is just fine (ya, with my glasses on). So who knows if we will still be doing this in another 2 decades.

They just received their mission call from Tanjay branch.

We will be home in 3 1/2 weeks, and we have the proverbial mixed emotions. We know that asking "why" is rather futile and often dangerous--why me? Why now?  Why this?  But we find ourselves asking it anyway, only not on the murmuring side, more on the stand-all-amazed side.  Like why did we get to live in this house, why did we get to use all our skills and still get challenged, but not too much?  And why did we get to be involved in helping so many people find the joy of returning to their Savior?  Not everyone gets all that on a mission.  We know that.  And not all joyful, rewarding experiences can be numbered or measured or compared.  Certainly God has his reasons, but whatever they are, we are grateful—grateful that we can look at a list and write down actual names and count up the souls who are now remembering their covenants to always remember him and reaping the blessings of doing so.

An FHE at Sis B's. We baptized her last year

You should have heard them sing for their teacher!!

In addition to Bro. T, from our last post, and more than a dozen others from throughout our mission, there are 3 men in particular in 3 different branches who we are grateful for of late.  Each of them has a different story, but each has a couple things in common. They had all separated from the church, and they had all served as branch presidents in the past. These are men who knew and understood the gospel, who had studied the scriptures and the handbooks of instruction and who were converted enough to accept this rather daunting calling.  They were men preparing for or recently sealed in the temple when satanic disaster struck.  One transgressed, drinking with the boys at Fiesta, and his repentance and disciplinary process was not well handled and he slipped away for 10 years.  Ya, ten!  One was behind on his tithing. He went in for settlement, intending to clear it up, and his temple recommend was taken away.  No one has been able to resolve his concerns for the last 5 years.  One was just about to preside over the open house of the chapel he had worked so hard to oversee the procuring and building of, when he was accused of some kind of financial impropriety. He too has been gone almost a decade. All the details didn't come out.  No need for that.  We just listened and loved, and helped them remember who the Savior is, and how to return to Him.

Need we say more

Each man attended church for the first time within a couple of Sundays of each other, and all three bore testimony on Fast Sunday in three different branches in 2 different districts unbeknownst to each other.  Imagine!!   

As an element of our visits with them, Elder Cropper would ask if they wanted a blessing, and they each adamantly did.   Then Elder Cropper asked the husband if he would like to join him as he gave a blessing to the wife.  For the first time in years, each man felt the love of the Savior as a fellow priesthood holder placed his hands on his head and called down the power of Heaven to comfort and strengthen him.  Then each man stood and for the first time in years and exercised the long atrophied power of the priesthood which they still held. The first time this happened, and I watched the man in tears of relief and joy, I expressed to him that I really knew now the reason we left our home and family.  I know now the answer to our grand daughter's question, "Grammy why do those people in the Philippines need you more than we do?" God doesn't always let us know the reasons why, but he has been most bountiful in His allowing us to know.

Brother F described his experience thus: “your message has awakened the yearnings in my long dormant heart”.  Now that is a man who was prepared to return.  He began reading his scriptures again, asked a few doctrinal and historical questions that had plagued him over the years and that his buddies would torment him with, and he began to repent.  We visited him one Sunday, grateful he had attended in his branch as he had promised (we had asked the missionaries to watch for him, welcome him and report back).  We asked him about his experience there.  He told us that he had quit drinking a week before so he could be prepared and feel ready when he got to church.  Because of his preparation, his experience was really powerful.  Apparently he had been drinking every night for most of the last decade, but he gave it all up overnight in order to feel the Spirit again.

One of our favorite families. The father baptizing his daughter-in-law

Sis. B's daughter's baptism

 His wife is still hesitant, waiting for him, busy in the end of school whirlwind that teachers all experience here, and plagued with a virus that has kept her feverish and coughing. But she has wept for joy at the changes her husband is making, knowing he so badly needed the gospel in his life. She has not yet had her own mighty change of heart, nor invested the effort he has. They both acknowledge that she waited for him to lead out when they were being taught the gospel, and now, she is waiting for him to lead out on their return.  We attended their branch last Sunday.  Sister F was home sick, but there he was in white polo, with his little girl happily sitting beside him. As we taught this man each week, we saw him change physically and spiritually.  His questions were more thoughtful, his repentance more evident, his thirst for scripture and doctrine more pronounced.  It was a joy to help awaken his “dormant heart” and see him figuratively yawn and stretch and then dig back in to his spiritual labors. 

It’s a miracle.

Stay tuned for the next 2 episodes--if we don't run out of time :)

The senior couples of Cebu Mission with Our President and his wife front and center. Great people!!! Are YOU ready?

 

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