OlsonPhilMission

Thus saith the LORD, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches: But let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the LORD which exercise lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness, in the earth: for in these things I delight, saith the LORD. – Jeremiah 9:23-24

Dear friends, family, and blessed co-workers in the Gospel,

We are so thankful to be here serving the Lord in the Philippines! Wow, it is hard to believe that we will be moving into the tribe so soon, as soon as this summer!

We are currently in the “mad dash to the finish” as we study hard for our final language exam on May 15, and Lord willing after we pass, we are free to press on to join a tribal ministry this summer! Of course, that means another 2 years of studying – this time the tribal language, but this time we will also be doing medical work, community development (as necessary) and planning and preparing materials to teach the scriptures in their own heart language! In all of our busy-ness, I have not been able to get out an email update for over a month, which is far too long. So please forgive us for that!

The big prayer items for us, right now, is that we will pass our language exams! We have no reason to believe that we won’t unless God has some plan for us to stay in Manila for another 3 months. However, that does not seem like that will be the case, and we are ready to press on!

We are also in the process of mailing out our newsletter, which usually takes about 2 or 3 weeks to process the entire thing from writing to printing to mailing. So by the time you receive the printed version, we may already have taken our language exams. For this reason also, this email will not include the full text of our newsletter, but instead it is posted on our website. You can go to that by clicking here or the links below.

When we go to the tribe, we will be home-schooling Sarah and Abby, while Isaac will be moving into the dorm at the missionary kids’ school. Please pray for our impending separation, and that we will still have good communication. Also please pray that all our kids will continue to grow in their walks with the Lord as we press on in this ministry as a family…

God bless you all and thank you all so much for being our co-workers in Christ to take the Gospel to the tribes!

In Him,

George for all of us

Newsletter portion:

For those of you who do not get our regular email updates, we have committed to go to the Southwest Palawano tribe and join a team of missionaries there that is right now in language and culture study. We visited this tribe last February for a week and I have included some pictures below. This ministry is on the island of Palawan in the mountains. The Palawano live in scattered settlements across the mountains through the southern half of the island of Palawan.

I would like to tell as much as I can about this people group in this short space, but there is so much more that we will know after we begin living with them and learning their language and culture.

Here are some facts we can share right now that we learned from our visit, to make a short summary: To read about this, click here to go to our newsletter page.

Another bit on the animism and spiritism faced here in the Philippines…

They were friends. Our grandmother got used to it; whenever he would come home, birds would accompany him. One day, he told our grandmother this story. He said, “The reason for these birds is they are sent to guard me by a lady on the mountain.” This kind of lady is called an Enkantada…

To read the rest of this story, click here.

If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith… For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.
1 Corinthians 15:13-14, 16-20

Our pastor had great point today. How many of you can take a guess what the very 1st Christian sermon ever preached was about? Love your neighbor? No. Be kind to others? No. Thou shalt not kill? No.

The very first Christian sermon ever recorded was preached by the Apostle Peter in the 2nd chapter of the book of Acts. It was about The Death and Resurrection of Christ. The same for the 2nd sermon, and the 3rd sermon, and the 4th, and the 5th, and so on. When Paul preached the Gospel in cities throughout the Roman Empire, he spoke about the Resurrection. The early church was established on the basis that Christ died, was buried, and rose again. If that event had not happened, it would never have been preached about, and Christianity would never have been established. Because of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, we too who believe in Christ have a certainty of being resurrected from the dead and the hope of eternal life with Christ.

(If you are wondering why the answer wasn’t the other things I listed, it is because when Jesus preached the sermon on the mount, that was technically a Jewish sermon and not a Christian one, since he was preaching to Jews about the Jewish kingdom of God.)

The doctrine of the resurrection from the dead is one of the foundations of our Christian faith. It is also what gives us hope in life’s uncertain times. Two weeks ago when I travelled back to the states for my Aunt’s funeral (thank you all for praying for us at that time), I thought a lot about the promise God gives us of the resurrection of the dead. Before we are resurrected, the scripture speaks of us being in “paradise” (Luke 23:43) and “being with Christ” (Phil 1:23). So for those of us who have trusted in Christ, we can be certain that these things are true. Yet we hold fast to the hope in the bodily resurrection of the dead as a promise God made to His followers through Christ, after our time of waiting in paradise.

Here in the Philippines many people have forgotten that Christ took away our sins once for all (1 Peter 3:18, Hebrews 10:17-18). So they resort to flagellating themselves at Holy Week, even tying or nailing themselves to crosses for the removal of their sins (not everyone does this, but there are plenty who do). Friday morning I rode down the street about 5 minutes to see where there was a man going through the “penitence”. My Tagalog friends here told me that the people who do this are usually people who have sinned big time, like murder, rape, thievery, or something like that. They are hoping that re-enacting Christ’s suffering will actually take away their sins.

Here are some pictures of the procession. They were beating him with the blue plastic whips they are holding. Click on the picture to enlarge!

Ascribe to the LORD , O mighty ones, ascribe to the LORD glory and strength. Ascribe to the LORD the glory due his name; worship the LORD in the splendor of his holiness. Psalm 29:1-2

We are back safe and sound from Palawan, from our trip to the mountains, and Isaac and Sarah had a fantastic time at the volcano! As always, God protected us from various hazards, and we are back in Manila in Tagalog study!

The trip to Taal volcano was really great for the kids, and we are very glad that they enjoyed it and had a good time. They got to see volcano fumaroles and swim in a sulfur lake and all kinds of fun things. If you want to get the complete story from them, you can email them from the email links below. Also, Isaac uses windows live messenger and his user id for that is jeffthegofer@hotmail.com.
Isaac’s main email: elendil_ike@yahoo.com
Sarah’s email: turtleslikejelly@reachthetribes.com

For Ginny, Abby, and I, we had quite an eventful trip to the Palawano tribal area in Palawan. We flew on a commercial jet down to Puerto Princesa on Monday morning, and then we loaded up the tribal airplane to get into the tribe. It is nice that this is available to us, because we can get into the tribal area rather quickly like this. If the airplane is not available, which is sometimes the case, the missionaries have to ride a bus for 8 hours and then hike over jungle trails for 4 hours to get to their area of ministry.

The missionary team there welcomed us and introduced us to some of the people. Most of the people in the village were not actually there at this time, because right now they are building their umas. An uma is the Palawano term for rice field. They clear a section of the jungle, chop down trees and scrub, burn it, and then plant mountain rice. This is a common practice in many areas of the Philippines. Then they leave that section to sit for 7 years or more before farming it again. In 7 years, much of the jungle grows back. These people do not know any other method of farming.

During the time of clearing land for their rice fields, we learned something interesting. They perform a ritual before they begin the clearing where they make a sacrifice and ask the tree spirits for forgiveness for chopping them down. In the ritual, however, they call the place they are chopping a secondary clearing, rather than an initial clearing. They said they do this in order to trick the spirits. They actually think they can fool the spirits. We pray that one day they will be delivered from this bondage of fear and deception regarding the spirits into the glorious freedom of worshipping the only true God.

We sat by a young farmer and talked to him a little while he was chopping. This was one of the few men in the village that actually spoke Tagalog (he had learned it when he went and worked in another town a few years back). This tree was very tall – it must have been 100 ft or so. He showed us how he built a scaffold around the base of the tree, using a split vine as rope to tie the scaffold together before getting up and chopping this tree. He also had the young boy with him take a few whacks at the tree. We stood in a certain area thinking the tree was going to fall away from us. As the time got closer to the tree falling, suddenly he yelled “Maguli! Maguli!” (which means Go back! Go back!) and we all noticed the tree start to sway. I looked up and it was coming straight at us. Ginny was already running ahead of me, and I ran to the right of where I was standing. Then Ginny turned left and ran up the trail the way we had come, so I followed, running hard. Suddenly we both tripped on roots and fell down. I looked behind us and saw the tree fall – right where we had been only a couple of moments before! (Later the guy chopping the tree told one of the missionaries that he was really scared when he saw us run because we ran right where the tree was falling, but then we turned out of the way just in time.) So thank you all for your prayers!

The other hazard that God protected us from was that where they had chopped the small vines and small trees growing out of the ground, they had chopped at an angle, so there were all these spikes sticking up all over the place where we walked. When we both fell, we could have easily fallen on one of these spikes! So thank you all again for your prayers – things could have turned very bad very quickly! As it was, neither of us were injured, and we had a good laugh about the whole thing! (By the way, Abby had stayed down in the village that morning to play with the tribal kids, so she was completely out of danger.)

Click here to see our google page of the pictures of our whole trip. I captioned most of the pictures so that the explanation will be clear.
You can also click here to watch a short (3 min) video of some of our trip. It is not really edited – just some video clips thrown together.

Now as for the tribal work, it has become abundantly clear to us what we believe the Lord is having us do. In fact, this is a real answer to prayer for us, as it seems we are finally a perfect fit for this particular tribal work. We have great fellowship with the missionaries already there. The team needs another family to come in and join the work. They have just started teaching literacy, and one family is still in language study. As a third family coming onto the team, we would be involved in language study long enough so that when the team begins teaching the Gospel and the scriptures, the burden will be shared all around.

This is an important time for us. We have to finish our Tagalog study, and the better we get at Tagalog, the better we will get at speaking the tribal language when the time comes for that. (This has to do with the fact that all Filipino languages are related). So we ask for your prayers for us to continue to press on in our study of Tagalog. We will have another set of evaluations towards the end of this month which will give us a better idea of the time frame we are talking about.

We would also ask your continued prayers for our relationships with people here in Manila. We intend to stay in touch with the people here and always come back and visit them when we are in Manila, which should be at least a couple of times a year as long as we are in the Philippines. Pray also for receptive hearts to the Gospel, and that those in bondage to sin will look to Christ alone (not works) to find their freedom and salvation, as the scripture says in Ephesians 2:8-9.