Thanksgiving…
Our Thanksgiving Day is tomorrow and we’ve been cleaning the house, getting the Christmas tree up and preparing for guests, the Longridge’s, on Thursday… today, we’re in ministry all day… LLCCES today and DP&BF tonight… and tomorrow is a no-work day… so we didn’t manage to get the pix up yet, but will.
The Longridge’s are here in Cebu working with the lepers, among various things, and they are musicians and composers… take a listen to their music and grab a copy or two of their CD’s… I have to say that I can recommend their music with joy! They are a great family – and he’s Irish and thinks potatoes are the important and vital missing 4th food group too! (ha!)…
HAPPY THANKSGIVING AND PRAISES TO GOD FOR ALL THAT HE HAS GIVEN!
…and it begins.
We mentioned in our most recent Newsletter that we needed all of you to pray for this country. Under a normal presidential election year, there is considerable violence… this election cycle we knew would see more bloodshed simply because the term limited presidential post is opening up a power vacuum that every faction under the sun wants to fill.
Today, sadly and tragically… this.
Cebu is undergoing a power vacuum as well… the current mayor is facing his term limit… and not only is there an on-going, extremely juvenile animosity between the mayor and the governor already, but the mayor has publicly rebuked and humiliated the vice-mayor, which means that any chance of continuity is pretty much gone. So now both the mayor and governor are bringing in family members to fill the vacancy. It’s already a mess and looks to get messier as the months roll on.
We hope you will remember us and this country in your prayers before God. And we can’t thank those of you who have continued to pray for us enough for graciously bringing us before our Lord…
On a brighter note, tomorrow we’ll have pictures of the past couple of weeks and we’ll tell you all about our great Sunday meeting… in spite of the terrible violence, our Lord is moving! PRAISE BE TO CHRIST JESUS!
Holy Communion Sunday…
Today, we will be having our first Holy Communion with the still-as-yet-unnamed Deaf Church here in Cebu.
Pray with us that hearts will be broken today and the Holy Spirit will bring all to the remembrance of what Christ has done and accomplished at Calvary… and that many will be saved today.
As I spoke to a hearing businessman yesterday, it was evident that post-modernism has truly incorporated it’s foul smell into everything, every worldview thought not of Christ… he’s sheepish – changes the subject and fidgets – when talking about the things of Christ, but our conversation yesterday was a good start. Truly, beloved, it’s a tragic thing to hear someone say or infer that they do not know if they are saved or not, yet profess Christ at the same time… I’ll be talking again to him soon and ask that you help pray for Jhonny R. and my gentle boldness to show him The Way.
Also, please pray for our health… we are all getting a bit wearied and Maddy’s been sick this entire week with an ear infection that the anti-biotics have been helping get rid of, but she’s still not 100%. Health is the most amazing blessing God has given us… keeping us safe and healthy… PRAISES TO HIM IN THE HIGHEST!
We Finally Got A …….
Where has that Round Tuit been? Well, as you can see, we found ours and we’ve done a little sprucing up just in time as we enter the Holidays… desk might look a little ragged, but things are easier on the eyes and, hopefully, it feels better to be here. Cleaned up some of the links at right and added a few that have been in our bookmarks that are important to see.
Pictures… we have been wanting bunches of pictures on the site and we’ll be getting quite a few up here within the next few days… will even have pictures of our first Holy Communion at the Deaf Church this Sunday… how about them apples! (smile). Incidentally, in case you didn’t know, we have a Youtube Channel that we’ll be adding to as well.
We’ll not post without a picture or thumbnail of somekind. AND… important… we’ll work at getting a post on this site at least once every seven days if our network allows it… and we’ll shoot for more posts than that.
Welcome, once again, and we hope that Syndication feed that you’ve subscribed to will actually get you something in your Reader box in the days and months ahead. We’re still weighing the ads and disads of a ministry Facebook site. Not sure we could possibly find the time to do all the communication tools available AND actually do the ministry Christ has called us to, but we’ll see about it. Well, let’s take it slow and sure… we’re back and thank you for your patience with us.
BELIEVE IT OR NOT… WE’RE STILL HERE!
You’ve probably been wondering if maybe we fell of the planet… well, sure, we’ve been busy, but for the past nearly two months we lost our ability to get into the blog. Just today, I had a moment and contacted our site server folks… HostM… great service and have had them for nine-ten years now… something like that… anyway, they got back to me right away and helped straighten it all out. Somehow, the administrator had been switched and the password was nothing I had… bizarre… but thankfully fixable and no damage done.
So, we’re back… been a busy last few months… and during that time, I finally forced myself to build a website/blog for Chessofia™ … we’ve been teaching Chess for well over a year now using our own Reality-based teaching curriculum which we’ve been developing along the way and finally have enough experience to put up a website. (Yes, we’ll get this site updated within the next few days or so to look as nice… promise… but without the latin – ha!).
Last week was busy, busy.
We traveled to Cagayan d’Oro on Mindanao for Deaf Sunday at 1st Assembly. Both of us spoke – Mindy in the moring service, Sterling in the evening service. We visited, encouraged the Deaf Church there, talked and got ready for the next stage of ministry. The following week, it was Deaf Awareness Week on Mactan and on Wednesday we had a school-wide Chess tournament as well as various artistic contests for the Deaf class. That evening, Mindy took the reigns for the Deaf Prayer & Bible Study while Sterling went home to get T-shirts screenprinted (that story will follow in a separate post). Saturday, we held the first Mactan Deaf Open Scholastic Chess Tournament and had students participating from Mandaue Deaf High School. We served a hot lunch to all the players. A long day, but the Deaf got to see a real and well-organized tournament, had serious fun, and we got to build on the all-important relationship with the young adults.
Sunday saw us at the Deaf Church at Bethel Temple AG… oh, that’s right, that’s happened since our last blog in August. We have moved up from the cell group meeting outside in a housing common area in the inner-city to a room at an established church not too far from there. The Deaf indicated they were ready to travel to church on Sunday… so we made the move, thanking God and the Church. We also wanted to be able to have a venue where we could minister to the hearing children of the Deaf adults… a couple of weeks ago, we had a puppet show to start the service. It’s slow in getting a consistent group coming, but we’re moving forward whether it be inches or yards at a time.
We have a very eclectic ministry, as you may gather. The best way to reach the Deaf is through education and direct, personal contact… in fact, we are moving to a more and more direct and personal approach even in Sunday meetings. We have discovered that sitting around a table in a completely informal type of environment is far more effective in getting the Deaf to focus on what you are saying. Fellowship time with some kind of merienda/snack is a vital part of any meeting… so much so, that we are inclined, as we said, to make the meeting more along those lines and less a school/professor kind of format where you “stand and deliver.” Even in Chess instruction, Sterling has found out the same thing. Focus seems to improve immensely when it’s like Jesus sitting under a tree talking with people, person-to-person.
And please don’t misunderstand… the teaching is just as focused and immediate as before, it’s only the way in which it’s presented is changing for us…
We will have our first Communion service at the Deaf Church this coming Sunday (we’re not sure if the name will be New Life Deaf Church or The Rock Deaf Church). We’ve had to wait to get some of the basics of Biblical Christianity out there, because many of them are so influenced by the works-righteousness approach, if you know what we mean… to get to a place where even the idea of the communion elements not being the actual blood and body of Christ has been a seemingly long road… it’s so hard to know exactly what the Deaf here actually know and believe, since their signing skills are so localized and bare. We’ve had to simply spend time with them to see what the Lord would show us concerning them… lots of time.
So, there’s more, but that gives you a good “gist of a beginning” as you might say. Now that we have the password thing out of the way and the latest Word Press update, we should be having no more trouble.
We’ll have a separate blog post letting everyone know what the National Deaf Fellowship and one great friend and supporter in Mount Vernon who’s been dealing with some very stern stuff this past year and some, has enabled us to do… that blog will come in a day or two. For now, God bless you all and may the riches of His inestimable glory and wisdom be yours today and in the days ahead.