My family and I went together on a Mission trip to the Philippines. It has been my wife Tamari’s great
desire for our family to go and serve the needy together as a family. Although there have been a few isolated
times when we served together with Crossroads or Christian Action in Hong Kong, this trip
was different in that we were away from Hong Kong for a week, focused on serving
others. It was not like the previous cases when we worked for a few hours and then went home. We
were all together working hand in hand, and our two children also had fellow
ICS friends to work and to hang out with.
The trip provided many teachable moments and experiences that were not
necessarily communicated in words, but through sights, sounds and smells. We visited and served at two jails, one orphanage and a few communities. The jail cells were small, crammed with
many inmates. The homeless were
under the bridge, dirty, hungry, and without hope. Many children had little or no clothes on, and were not in
school. Some older ones had run
away from home, disconnected from family and from the world. The situations evoked feelings of
gratitude to God for what we have, and posed some moral and spiritual dilemmas
regarding the less privileged. It
was great for our children to see others, students like themselves, working
voluntarily and wholeheartedly to serve the poor. In addition, their hearts were touched by the Lord during
the times of praise, worship and prayer.
On the overall, I was impressed with how the trip went,
despite the initial problems encountered with setting it up. It provided teachable moments for the
students and us, but was also a reasonable service to the people we served at
Bohol and Cebu. It helped to
strengthen the bonds existing between the ICS and the people served, especially
at the Arms of Love orphanage and the St. Stevens Ministries. I was greatly delighted to see two
inmates of the District Jail, Bohol give their lives to Jesus during our
ministry time with them. One of
them had been in jail for five and a half years for a murder offence and the
other was convicted for drug trafficking, and had been in jail for a year and
half.
