Table Of Contents:
- My first missions trip
- How God called me to serve in missions
- Start of my first missions trip to Northern Thailand
- Lessons learnt on my first missions trip
- After my first missions trip…
- Getting to know the Filipinos
- My second missions trip
- The turning point
- A strange request; a special gift
- Writing for God’s glory
- Planning my first trip to the Philippines
- Hindrances removed
- First time in Manila
- First time in the Philippines
What happened after my first missions trip in 1994?? I didn’t go on another one until… Sept 1998.
It was not as if the church was not involved in any overseas outreach work during those four years. Several of our Filipina girls went to bible school to be trained for full time service. There were more organized trips, to several countries.
The ones who came back from these trips showed slides of their adventures, and told strange stories which often made me go ‘Thank God I was not part of THAT!’ Talk about The Fear Factor! It was very real indeed!
In those four years, I travelled happily to all sorts of touristy places – the States, Australia, South Korea, Bali… i.e. and wasted money on the proper tour packages with the comfortable sightseeing (in air-con tour buses), the shopping and the nice hotels.
However, reflecting on those years, I am now pretty certain the Lord didn’t leave me to my own comfortable devices. He led me into a ministry which totally put me out of my comfort zone!
When I got saved and baptised, someone in the church was kind enough to inform me, the new Christian, that I should serve the Lord. I readily agreed. Nothing wrong with that idea… serving the Lord is good, and right. And I asked what I can serve in…
Well, you can serve in the Sunday School ministry…
Ulp!
Sunday school. You mean, teach kids? Children? No, no, no, no, no….! Children, to me, were hostile aliens from another planet. We Do Not Get Along. But of course I didn’t say this out loud… I simply er… declined politely.
Oh, ok. Well, the other ministry you can serve in is the Filipino outreach.
During those years in the early 1990s when we didn’t have our church building and we rented a small room for less than 100 members, we didn’t have many ministries. There was the Sunday School (with a handful of children), the Youth Ministry (with a handful of teenagers), and there was the Filipino outreach (with a lot of Filipinas)!
I would have nothing to do with children or teenagers, and so I joined the Filipino outreach ministry. It’s quite similar to the Sunday morning Street E that we now have. It involved our going out on Sunday afternoons to a certain shopping mall to hand out tracts and invite Filipinas to the Filipino afternoon gospel service which was in a house not far away.
I didn’t do very well in that ministry. I couldn’t even find the courage to extend my hand six inches out to hand out a tract, but because we went out in pairs, I had my bolder partner to do all the tracting and inviting while I stood aside, smiled and observed.
I was quite a diligent observer in those days. In fact, several months… um I think, years later, I was still sort of er… observing.
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