Headed Home

Hello everybody,

All the Nehemiah Teams have begun the debriefing process today. We also bid farewell to our Filipino teammates this morning after a night of celebration, prayer and fellowship with them in Cebu City. Sally and Jetter were more faithful and encouraging teammates than anyone could ask for. Our team treasures their friendships and greatly desires to continue to be a part of God's plan for their lives in the future. We sent them off with our prayers and encouragement and great confidence that they will make huge impacts for the Kingdom.


This will probably be my last update while I'm in the Philippines because we leave Wednesday morning. Your prayers have made all the difference this summer and have never ceased to encourage our team. It is more than a blessing to have your support and I pray God has led you to a better understanding of His love this summer, too.

I'm excited to get back and share the stories of God's grace in Camotes very soon!! Thanks again!

Love,
Leah

Refocused

Hello everyone,

Thank you very much for your prayers up to this point! I can see how God is going ahead of us and moving in the Holy Spirit to draw people to Himself and it is a humbling thing to participate in the work of the Lord here in Camotes.

I apologize for the lack of updates. We’ve been much busier than expected and, to be honest, I’ve been a bit out of sorts lately. I came to the Philippines with preconceived notions of how this mission trip would play out and even of the things I would learn from it. God, in His usual way, has greatly surpassed my expectations, though. I can honestly say that nothing about the way I live this life has not been touched by the way God has moved in the past weeks. God has brought me to grips with the reality of His love and, ironically, what true love is – more than what we teach in seminars, it is “the art of losing myself in bringing Him praise.” I believe it is Max Lucado who says that the problem with a living sacrifice is that it keeps crawling off the altar. Dying to myself and letting Jesus Christ live through me is indescribably hard. It means counting myself a stranger here on the earth, both in West Point, MS, and San Francisco, Camotes. It means casting my strengths, weaknesses, fears and victories on the altar and realizing that they are useless to me in my own power. Gladly, it also means taking them up again and watching them become more than I could ever imagine in God’s power.

One of the first Bible studies I led here I began with 1 Corinthians 13:1-3 – “And now I will show you the best way of all. I may speak in different languages of people or even angels. But if I do not have love, I am only a noisy bell or a crashing cymbal. I may have the gift of prophecy. I may understand all the secret things of God and have all knowledge, and I may have faith so great I can move mountains. But even with all these things, if I do not have love, then I am nothing. I may give away everything I have, and I may even give my body as an offering to be burned. But I gain nothing if I do not have love.” God has used every Bible study I’ve led here to teach me something. In fact, it seems that I’m always the one who needs the lesson most. My team teaches True Love Waits seminars in local high schools and 1 Corinthians 13, as the renowned “Love Chapter,” has been our main Scripture reference. I’ve read it more times than I can count in teaching high school students and yet managed to miss what God was teaching me with it. A lack of enthusiasm for the work here and the conviction that my ministry was not what it should be led me to ask God how I had gone wrong even when our team has seen a fair amount of success in establishing Bible studies and seeing people come to Christ. The verses above were once again brought to my attention and I found myself guilty of being a noisy bell, a crashing cymbal, and a loveless laborer in the field of lost souls. As the verses affirm, I found myself with nothing when I was attempting to the do the work of the Lord in my own power. It was quite strange to feel so far from God while on the mission field.

God brought a song to mind in the midst of this turmoil by a band called Starfield that’s called, “Reign In Us.” Some of the lyrics are below:

Lord Jesus, come lead us

We're desperate for Your touch

O Great and Mighty One, with one desire we come

That You would reign, that You would reign in us

We're offering up our lives - a living sacrifice...

We cry out for Your love to refine us

Cry out for Your love to define us

Cry out for Your mercy to keep us blameless until You return

The Lord Jesus must reign supreme in our hearts if we are ever to be used as a blessing to His people. We must forsake all else in the pursuit of the desires of HIS heart if our lives are ever to count for anything. God, He reminded me, has loved me in a most amazing way and the love of God is something that flies in the face of human logic. Because this is true, there is no possible way to love people like God loves people without the help of God. In short, I am learning to lean on God for all things, to pray with expectancy, to love with His peculiar sort of fierceness and abandon, and to consider this life worth nothing unless it's spent testifying to the gospel of God's grace.

I'd like to leave you with some lyrics to one more song ("Shadowfeet" by Brooke Fraser):

I am changing

Less and less asleep

Made of different stuff than when I began...

I appreciate your continued prayers and I'd ask you to pray for the following individuals by name in the next few weeks:

Neda (church member whose neighbors are new believers)

Jacinto, Junlo, Jenny, Dinit, Reggie, and Linette (new believers among whom we are trying to establish on-going Bible studies)

Joey (a man who is truly thirsty for the truth and who has asked that we come speak to him about salvation!! Please pray for the Holy Spirit to draw Joey to God!)

Arnel, Alvin, and Reynold (young men in the church with great leadership potential among their peers)

Pictures!

All right, you should be able to go to nehemiahteams.blogspot.com, see a write-up on what our team's been up to lately, and click on a link entitled "Photo Album" at the bottom of the write-up to see some pictures of our team!!

Missing post from week 1

This is the post from the first week on Camotes:

We're in a little town called San Francisco, Camotes. It's a part of the province of Cebu and is about a two-hour boat ride from Cebu City. There is no, I repeat no, American food here except peanut butter, which is actually much better than American peanut butter. So we're dealing with that the best we can and eating pineapples like it's our job. People are having a surprisingly enthusiastic response to the Gospel and we're just trying to assess how much of it is authentic. I anticipate the majority of the summer to be spent really trying to edify the church here in San Francisco (and the neighboring town, Poro - where last summer's Nehemiah Team based their ministry) and establishing Bible studies among community members. As far as True Love Waits goes, Matt, SFBC's pastor's daughter Liza, and I went to Cebu City to see the superintendent of schools and ask permission to conduct the seminar in San Francisco. She turned us down for doing it on school days, but said it would be fine to do it on Saturdays. So the plan is to conduct five of them on the next five Saturdays, beginning the twenty-first. We'll be in three schools in Poro and two schools here in San Fran. The town is really laidback and the people are really friendly. This past Thursday was their independence day and there was a parade with about 8 drums and 5 bugles!! It was classic! There were also some pretty awesome dance moves. My team is really cool and we're having a great time. We're still trying to get on our feet and establish a steady schedule. We're finding, however, that it's useless to make a schedule most of the time. God is bringing out the best in each of us, I believe. I know we're all being pushed to the extremes of our comfort zones and are letting God use us in completely new ways. It's eye-opening and exhausting! I'm teaching Sunday school tomorrow to highschoolers and we're each responsible for a part of the True Love Waits seminar as well as the intermittent testimonies and Bible stories we're asked to share, so we're all growing!!

I love you guys and I'll talk to you later,
Leah



Our first True Love Waits seminar didn't happen because of the typhoon, but we'll have our first one this Saturday at a REALLY big school, so pray I can get my act together before then.

Nehemiah Teams blog

You should now be able to click on the title of this posting and see the Nehemiah Teams blog site that the media teams maintain. If not, the website is nehemiahteams.blogspot.com

Week 2 in the Philippines

**I meant to put up another posting before this, but I've somehow deleted it. So, that will be coming shortly. It explains where we are, what we're doing, etc. in further detail.

Hello!
We've been in San Francisco, Camotes, for a little over a week now and we definitely hit the ground running. God is moving in unexpected ways, as He always does. The team is really coming together and partnering with church members here to share the Word in many different ways. We've each had chances to share our testimonies and lead Bible studies with non-believers, new believers, and established believers here in San Francisco and the neighboring communities. One group is particularly special to me. They are the neighbors of one of San Francisco Baptist Church's members that meet on Wednesday mornings at 9:00 a.m. Three have accepted Christ since our arrival and we just had our third meeting this morning. Whenever we arrive, they are eager to hear what God has been speaking to us about and eager to pray with us as well. If you would, pray at 8:00 p.m. on Tuesdays (which will be the time of the group's meeting here) that this group would be truly experience the love of God and begin to grow in their faith.

There are many Filipinos whose lives have become intertwined with ours, but we've also encountered a few American men here who we're beginning to befriend. It's strange that God would bring a bunch of American kids halfway around the world to meet other Americans, but God's never been one to meet our expectations. We're hoping to show God's love to them in a new and powerful way and perhaps move them to seek His face. I'm learning, as silly as it sounds, that America is not all there is. There isn't an equivalent or even a comparison for everything America has here. It's been a challenge for our team to overcome the massive cultural barrier and be relevant in the lives of Filipinos. We've discussed and prayed as a team about finding a way to build real relationships with people and be faithful witnesses to God's grace in our lives. We are being led to serve people in somewhat more practical, physical ways in an effort to show our love for them. Please pray that God will receive the glory for the way He is moving here and that people will be undeniably confronted with His love through His body.

Leah

Greetings from the Philippines!

Maayong buntag! (Good morning)

I'm in Cebu City right now awaiting my boat to Camotes this afternoon. We're in this huge mall at an internet cafe. It's almost time for the kids to start back to school here, so there are little kids all over the place. Yesterday was our last day of orientation and we spent the better part of the day on a ropes course (obstacle course with bungee cords and harnesses and such). So that mainly meant rolling in the mud for me due to my abundance of grace. We're all SUPER tired, but we've had a great time and learned a lot. Part of my team's assignment is to teach True Love Waits seminars for high school juniors and seniors (15 and 16-year-olds here), so we've been in training for that for a few days and it's been a really neat experience. I think teaching about God's plan for us when it comes to love and talking about what true love is will be really eye-opening and surprising, like everything else here. My team members are Bobby (from Kentucky), Matt (from Mississippi), Kaylee (from Florida), Carly (from Alabama) and Lauryn (from Mississippi). Our Filipino counterparts are Sally and Jetter. They've been struggling to teach me some Cebuano words, but I'm getting the hang of it.

Quick story: there were floods in Davao City (where we did orientation) our first two nights. Nearly everything I brought got wet and a good bit of it is still wet. We woke up in our tent with streams of water flowing under us and everything! It was really ridiculous. That part of the Philippines is very mountainous and there are rocks everywhere. Before the rain, when we were walking around the camp, it was easier for us to avoid the hard rocks and walk on the dirt. But after the floods, you had to stay on the rocks or you'd be sitting in the mud. I found a spiritual equivalent, I believe: My baptism (as represented by the flood), or my salvation, causes everything in my life to change. After the flood, I had to hang everything out to dry, keep all my things in a different place, and other things that wouldn't normally concern me did once it rained. I had to seek out the hard things (the rocks) to stand on. They were the only things that offered any stability. When our salvation is true, when it is like something that floods through us, it absolutely must change everything about the way we live. It turns everything upside down. The things that were to be avoided before are now the things we seek out and the places that were easiest to walk in before are now the quickest ways to failure.

I hope this finds you well and that you're seeking to do the hard things God calls us to. They truly make a difference!

God bless,
Leah

P.S. There will be a blog about our team run by one of the media team members if I'm not mistaken. I don't really know anything about it, but you can probably find more information on the Nehemiah Teams website.

national day of prayer!

Tomorrow is the national day of prayer!! Click on the title of this post to go to the National Day of Prayer website and find an event in your area.

"[I]f my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land" (2 Chronicles 7:14).

I hope you'll remember the Nehemiah Teams tomorrow as you pray for our country and that you'll include the Philippines in your prayers as well. We know that without the power and guidance that come in prayer we are going into the mission field with a great disadvantage, but blessings come when we wrestle with God in prayer (Genesis 32: 22-32). When I was commissioned to go to the Philippines by my university's Baptist Student Union, a friend of mine said, "This can be the best summer of your life or the worst. Prayer makes the difference." For our country, for the nations, and for our own hearts, prayer is one of our most potent weapons!

Here are some specific things to pray for:

• Unity within our teams that will show the love of God


• Safe travel for summer missionaries


• Submitted and open hearts, minds, and bodies to be used any way God wants


• The fulness of the Holy Spirit
  
• The spiritual discipline of every missionary that will keep them close to the Lord as they prepare for the trip and as they go all over the world this summer


• The work God is already doing in the Philippines - for the seeds that have been planted and that the Holy Spirit is moving in the lives of Filipinos


• Filipino believers - for their boldness in sharing the gospel, for their growth in Christ

I cannot thank you enough for praying for all of us!!!! Please let me know how I can be praying for the way God is working where you are.

"When the spirit helpeth our infirmities, and our earnest and vast desires can scarcely find words to utter them, and we still mean more than we can express, then prayer is indeed wrestling with God. However tried or discouraged, we shall prevail; and prevailing with Him in prayer, we shall prevail against all enemies that strive with us. Nothing requires more vigour and unceasing exertion than wrestling. It is an emblem of the true spirit of faith and prayer."

-Matthew Henry

Groovy Updates!

So I figured out how to put YouTube videos on the blog. Last summer's media team did a great job on them and they are to the left.

Here are a few things you probably didn't know about the Philippines:

1. There are 7,107 islands that make up this archipelago!



2. The Philippines were once colonized by the Spanish and Camotes actually means "sweet potato" en Español.



3. The Philippine Islands have two official languages - Filipino (or Tagalog) and English - but Filipinos in Camotes usually speak Cebuano. Cebuano is one of twelve regional languages in the Philippines and is spoken by over 1 million people.

4. Filipinos are predominantly Roman Catholic (81%). 9% of Filipinos are Protestant, 5% are Islamic, and the remainder of the population practices Buddhism, pre-Hispanic indigenous beliefs, Hinduism and Sikhism. In the Philippines, Christianity is more like an influence and Filipinos usually worship pagan or Buddhist spirits, too.


1. 5. Filipinos are really into basketball. Who knew?

6. It's really hot and humid there, but it's still hotter in Mississippi. Of course.

Have a good one!

Zephaniah 3:17

I'm a summer missionary!

Hello!! I'm Leah. Welcome to the blog! I'm headed to the Philippines this summer on what is called a Nehemiah Team. I'll be on a team of four going to Camotes (group of four islands east of Cebu - see map below) to let God use us anyway He pleases! It's going to be an amazing experience! Go to http://www.nehemiahteams.com/ to find out more about what the Nehemiah Teams are and what they do.

If you would, my team greatly covets your prayers as we are going into the mission field. Pray that this will be a trip overflowing with the Holy Spirit's presence and that we will have the sense not to get in the way of how God is working. If you're a Christian, YOU are on mission, too (Matthew 28:19)! Accordingly, I'd like to pray for you - so let me know how God is working and ways that I can be in prayer for that work.

Not to be exclusive, I'd like to assure non-Christians reading the blog that prayers are being lifted up for you all the time. There are so many people who are passionate about YOU knowing this great Love that has found us in Christ Jesus. My prayer is for mercy to be poured out into your life, for God to show His power in your everyday circumstances and for all the glory to go to Him. Jesus loves you recklessly, completely, and perfectly (John 3:16)!

More good news! My friend, Rebekah, is all set for her mission trip to Ghana (in West Africa) this summer!! After much prayer, God has assigned two students to her team! Our God answers prayer (1 Kings 18:24).

"'Why should my face not look sad when the city where my fathers are buried lies in ruins, and its gates have been destroyed by fire?'...'You see the trouble we are in...Come, let us rebuild the wall[.]'...I also told them about the gracious hand of my God upon me and what the king had said to me. They replied, 'Let us start rebuilding.' So they began this good work" (Nehemiah 2:3, 18).

GO ON MISSIONS: There's an opportunity to serve in my neighborhood this very weekend!! Eight Days of Hope is a missions organization that began to aid the victims of Hurricane Katrina and hasn't stopped since. This organization would love your help in Tupelo, MS, anytime from tomorrow, April 16, until this Sunday, April 20. Their main mission is home building and repair, but they can use your help in all kinds of ways. Eight Days of Hope is serious about serving and they've truly moved mountains with their faith. Check it out: http://www.eightdaysofhope.com/

Peace

Colossians 3:14