Testimony of God’s grace

I am writing this in December of 2010. It is just less than 10 years ago that we sold our house, I left my engineering job, and we headed off by faith to begin training with New Tribes Mission to serve God wherever He would send us. At the time we had no idea we would be heading to the Philippines. We thought we would probably end up in Mexico, Brazil, or somewhere else in South America. It didn’t matter, though. We just wanted to go where God would send us.

Let me backtrack a little here. This journey that we are on, which has taken us halfway around the world to a people who still live a hand to mouth existence from the jungle, didn’t just happen on a whim 10 years ago. It was in the making long before that, though at the time I had no certainty that we would even get started on the path to missions.

The church I grew up in was an Episcopal church, very solid in its faith and commitment to biblical truth. It was not like some of the other apostate Episcopal churches today, who have departed from the Biblical faith and have adhered to the values of today’s society. The church I grew up in was not like that. Instead, we were one of the churches that took a stand on Biblical truth. The message that was preached on Sunday was about the Bible, God’s truth, and how to apply God’s Word to our daily lives.

The youth group I attended helped us learn to apply Biblical truth to our lives as it affected us in high school. High school kids often have issues that underlie the youth subculture of American society, and that is why a strong youth ministry in churches is so vital to helping kids grow in their faith. We were also encouraged to interact with the other Christians in our schools, not just the other Episcopalians. One year our youth group organized a ski trip, and many young people from our school attended. It was on that trip that I had my first experience with Christ.

It is so simple now looking back on it. We had a daily bible study with a counselor. One day we were reading through the parable of the sower. That is Jesus’ teaching on how the Word of God affects people when they hear it, and it is in the book of Luke, chapter 8, if you want to read it. After reading through the parable, the counselor told us that if we would ask God to plant His Word in our hearts, the seed would sprout and grow, just like in the parable. So I did that – I prayed in faith for Christ to come into my heart and grow. Somehow, something changed that night. It was very subtle, but it was just like the parable that Jesus taught. Over the next few months I began to understand things about God that I had never even considered before. I have often thought about why that one night had such a profound affect on my life. Many others who were there and said they also prayed the same thing, but I don’t know how their lives have turned out.

After that one event, as I began to read scripture, the meaning of scripture was becoming clear where it had never been clear before. And I understood one very important and vital truth – I was a sinner and in need of a savior. As I read through the book of Romans, I understood that my sin had separated me from God. I was only in high school, so I had not really done that many terrible things. But that was not the issue – the issue was that I was attached to this sinful entity called the human race, with an exhaustive history of errors, and we were under an indictment. We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). However, God in His infinite mercy and grace, sent His only Son to take the punishment that each and every one of us deserves. We deserve only one thing from God – His wrath because of our Sin. Yet God, out of His love (John 3:16), chose to pour out His wrath on His own Son, so that we could be forgiven and could become His children.

The prevailing philosophy in the western world today seems to be that our “traditional” idea of sin and morality is only learned behavior. We are bombarded by messages in the media pushing our society further and further away from the Biblical standard of morality. If you watch any TV show today, they treat it as an inherent assumption that if a man and woman like each other, they will sleep together. In fact, it is assumed that if you don’t sleep with each other, there may be something wrong with you!

Anyone who has tried to follow this philosophy ultimately discovers the emptiness and the error of it. At the end of the day, everyone who has chosen to live like this will find that they have been deceived. What God says is true in Scripture is an absolute truth that applies to all people for all time, whether or not they choose to believe it. It is far better to choose to believe God instead of entering and living the world’s philosophy. You will save yourself from a lifetime of heartache and emptiness. For those who live for the world their whole lives and only come to Christ towards the end, there is still forgiveness of course, and even the promise of a new beginning. However, there is often incredible pain in realizing that you could have lived for Christ, and helped the ones you love to do the same. No one can go back and do life over – we can only take life from this point forward.

Jesus once said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” All freedom stems from understanding the truth – about ourselves, our lives, our sin, our need for a savior, the love of God, our redemption through the savior, how to deal with our past, and how to live out the future.

There I was in high school, having learned all these things, yet perhaps my knowledge then was only like a seed and not yet mature. One thing I knew, though, was that this message of God’s love and grace was meant not only for me where I was in Texas, but for the whole world. I began to understand from the Bible how God wanted His message to get out to the places where it had never gone before, even if there were still people back at home who were hearing it but not believing it. So began my interest in missions. The first missionary I heard was an Anglican missionary from South America who came to speak at our church of his work among the poor. Then I joined a team going on a short term trip to Mexico to help construct a new church. I read books on missions. I grew intensely interested in becoming a missionary and started to set my life in that direction.

Unfortunately, many influential people had other ideas, and I was still a very impressionable young man. Many people tried to dissuade me. I was told several things which had a strong impact on my thinking at the time. For example,  

·         “You are good in your understanding of math and physics – it is your obligation to God to pursue a career that benefits the world through your understanding in these areas.”

·         “We have sent too many good people overseas.”

·         “I believe God is telling me He doesn’t want you to be a missionary.”

·         “It would be a waste of your talents to go to such insignificant people.”

·         “I don’t think you will really be able to learn another language. After all, you never became fluent in Spanish.”

The people who wanted me to stay were well-meaning and loving people. I do not fault them in any way for their attempts to dissuade me. They just did not understand what God was doing in our lives at the time. In fact, I would say that they are all pretty much very good people, and most of them were fellow believers like I was, who understood the redemption of Christ. That is perhaps one reason why it was so difficult to hear these words from them, and why for a time I believed them and pursued other interests, in particular an engineering career. I do not even believe that God’s love for me would have changed one bit if I had stayed as a full time engineer the rest of my life. However, the right thing for me was to go, because I knew that this was God’s call on my life. And so we did go, and this is how it happened.

I had been working for several years as an engineer after college. The church my wife and I were attending was often preaching a message about stepping out in faith. To many people, this meant trusting God with their finances and giving more regularly to the church. However, to us we felt like the Lord was telling us to trust Him, step out in faith, and become missionaries. We had learned about several mission sending agencies before this time, but I had never had the courage to actually go and do it. My spiritual life was stifled because I was not stepping out in faith, and I knew it. However, over about an 18 month period, we kept feeling the conviction that we were supposed to go.

We put the matter to a lot of prayer and sent in our application to the training school with New Tribes Mission. We prayed that if it were the Lord’s will, he would sell our house quickly once we put it on the market. We spent about 6 months fixing up little things on the house – no major renovations or anything because we didn’t have a lot of money to spend. We re-painted, fixed torn screens and broken window frames, and things like that. The next training session was scheduled to begin in August of 2001. We lived in Carlsbad, New Mexico, at the time, and it was a depressed housing market (this was before the housing bubble began). Houses had been for sale on our block and the block behind us for nearly a year without anyone buying. We knew that if our house sold in that market for what we were asking, it would have to be the Lord.

On Memorial Day weekend we had put an ad in the newspaper for an open house. We had been praying that the Lord would sell our house quickly if it was His time for us to go into missionary training. I distinctly remember that Saturday morning. I had my alarm clock set for 6 am, and I double checked it to make sure I didn’t set it wrong. We were getting up early so that we could do some last minute finishing touches on the house before showing it to the people coming for the open house. At 5:50 am, I felt something nudge me. Ginny was already up and doing something in the other room, so it wasn’t her. Then it was like I heard a voice. This is not something that has been a regular experience in my life. I have felt like the Lord spoke to me in some way from time to time in life through reading the Bible, a sermon, a book I was reading, or some other means. When that has happened, it is like a conviction, an understanding of some truth God wants me to know. This time, however, was different. It was almost as if I heard a voice, though there was no audible sound. That morning was the only time I can remember ever hearing something from the Lord that was so clear. The voice said simply, “It is time to get up, George.”

I looked at the clock and saw it said 5:50 am. I thought, that is strange, but I had some doubts and so I rolled over to snooze, knowing the alarm would go off again in 10 minutes. However, the alarm didn’t go off, and I cannot explain why, because I checked it afterwards and it should have gone off. Instead, I felt something nudge me again, and I heard the voice again. “It is time to get up, George.” I looked at the clock, and it said 6:10 am, 10 minutes after the alarm should have gone off. I thought that was really strange, but I still wasn’t fully believing the voice I was hearing was the Lord’s. I got up and went and got in the shower, and that is when I heard the voice again for the last time. While I was in the shower, contemplating hearing a voice and wondering why my alarm didn’t go off, it spoke to me again. “You have no idea what kind of miracles I am going to work in your life today.” That is when it hit me and I understood it was the Lord speaking to me. It was not any kind of special revelation – it was simply a Father talking to one of his children, and I treasure that moment beyond anything else I have ever experienced. I knew then that our house was going to sell that day.

I got out of the shower and we set about the final cleaning chores before the open house. Just before 8, Ginny took the kids to the park, I put the open house/for sale sign in the front yard, and then sat down to wait for the throngs of people that would come in to look at our house. And I waited, and waited, and waited, but they didn’t come. I started to have doubts, so I called some friends of ours in San Diego to ask them to pray for us. Then I waited. Finally at about 10 am a father and his daughter showed up at the house. I showed them around, but they really weren’t interested, and they left. I was wondering what was going on. Why weren’t the throngs of people showing up? Wasn’t God going to sell my house today? Ginny came back from the park around noon with the kids and I told her that basically nothing had happened. So we fixed lunch, and had just started eating when the doorbell rang.

A family came in and wanted to look around. They were new to the area. After we showed them around the house for about 20 minutes, they asked how much we wanted for it. I gave them my price, and they said they would take it! Bang, just like that, prayers answered! We were able to close all the paperwork on the house inside of 2 weeks, and that was it! We were on our way to the missionary training school!

This is the story God has given us. Since we began missionary training, it has been an amazing ride, filled with too many stories to put down here on a single web page. You can look through our old newsletters on this web site if you want to follow the story. In life I have found over and over again that God has grace for my failures, even for my failures to walk in faith. It is a story of God being glorified in the lives of his children, often in spite of themselves.

After missionary training, we were led to the Philippines where we studied the Tagalog language first before moving to the jungle to live with the Palawano people. We are now in the process of learning our second foreign language, the language of the Palawano. The people in our area still live in dark animism, in fear of the spirits and struggling to survive. We are working to help them, not only by offering medical care and community development, but also by teaching them the Word of God in their own language, which will be starting very soon. We want them to know and understand about God’s love and grace for them!

I hope and pray that you have been encouraged by this story to walk more deeply in your own relationship with God. He is real, and He is active in the world today!

Update January 2014

Those of you who may have been following our story will know that it did not end there. For reasons I cannot state here, we found ourselves needing to begin a new ministry in the Philippines, leaving the Palawanos under the care of our partners. They are still in our hearts, and Lord willing, we will be able to go back and serve them one day. Until then, I continue to serve as a missionary teaching the new missionaries how to learn language, while Ginny is teaching high school at the missionary kids' school. It has been an amazing journey, and we know that the Lord still has us serving Him here in the Philippines! Our work is still focused on bringing the Gospel to all the tribal areas where it has not yet been heard!