Will I ever be the same?

I am closing in on one year in the Philippines. I don’t know what the future holds for me, I tell others that my appointment here is for four years, but I hope to stay for life. One thing I know, I have been changed forever.

From the small things: instant coffee is not so bad when that is all you have.

Rice everyday is tolerable, hey even can be enjoyable!

Yes, you can learn to drive here amidst the chaos, a friendly chaos, but chaos nonetheless. (I was reminded today of what it is like driving in America, when I was about to turn left across the oncoming lane, and saw a fast moving motorcycle, with an American on it, he hit his brakes, and then mumbled something that I am quite sure wasn’t a prayer for my well being.)

No, I am sure I will never be the same again. I see so many things that remind me of my pastor, who also spent four years here as a missionary, and say to myself, “That’s why he does that! Now I understand!”

I don’t think I can look at someone in America who says their poor, and really believe them when I have seen a mother of seven, who is married to man that has a second wife and family in Manila, that he is also supporting, living under a bridge in a 10 by 10 hut, finding out she is pregnant with child number eight, and who becomes so distraught about how she is going to feed the new baby along with all of the others, that she tries to kill the baby by taking too much medicine. (The baby survived and was born healthy, by the grace of God).

When someone was begging in America, cigarette dangling from their mouth and unabashedly asking for money for beer, I found it was easy to decline.

Here, when they are asking for money, skinny dirty faced kids, you know they are poor, and you ask yourself “But how many can I really help?”

Oh I know that we can feed the poor, visit the shut-ins, clothe the naked, encourage the incarcerated, medicate the sick, and work endlessly, while the world dies and goes to hell. These may be good things, but not the most important thing. They need Jesus.

I am sure I am different now. More thankful, I believe. After seeing families living in makeshift dwellings and little kids with no clothes and big bellies, (a sign of worms I’m told) whose main source of income (and main source of building materials for their homes) is the trash dump. Any job has got to be better than that! And I…I have the greatest job. To preach the gospel, and see lives changed. To hear what I heard a couple months ago “I have been searching for 59 years, but now I have found it!” Oh, I wish I could tell you that all of them who pray for salvation stay and are faithful, but there are some who do. Some, a band of men and women, whose hearts God touched.

Please pray with us, and for us, that God would continue to help us learn the language, and communicate the gospel to them, and that God would keep/make our hearts soft and help us to adjust, especially my wife while she is pregnant.

May the Lord Bless you!

The Devonshires

Follow @ddevonshire