You can get there from here

The view from the mission house

“[Bilbo] used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. ‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,’ he used to say. ‘You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to. Do you realize that this is the very path that goes through Mirkwood, and that if you let it, it might take you to the Lonely Mountain or even further and to worse places?’”

“Three is Company”, chapter 3 in The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

This a post that I began a week after returning from my 19-day journey to the Philippines a year ago in March and now a few days before I fly out to Africa I’m attempting to finish. I don’t remember why I didn’t complete it. It probably had more to do with life interrupting than anything else but on the cusp of my next journey “over there”, the thing I was reminded of then remains clear in my mind now: you can get there from here.



Dibungko from the river

 Last year, I travelled to Baguio City in central Luzon to teach at the Youth With A Mission (YWAM) campus located there. I was there by invitation of friends, Duane & Lois Pederson, who were, at the time, directors of the Crossroads Discipleship Training School as well as part of the leadership team of the campus. (I wrote about this experience in a March 2011 post entitled The essence of discipleship). Following my week of teaching, Randy Waterhouse, one of the elders of our fellowship, joined me in Baguio and together we accompanied Duane, one of his former students, Freek, and his friend, Kees, both from Holland and Hazel our Filipino translator, to northeastern Luzon for a week of ministry in the Agta village of Dibungko.



Duane with friend Unoy

 Duane is about as low-key as they come. For a man who has been heavily invested in making disciples on the Pacific Rim for many years now, when he and Lois return to us when on furlough he hardly ever regales us with stereotypical missionary stories. He is soft-spoken and philosophically opposed to telling tales. But coax him into speaking of the Agta and there is a fire in his eyes that belie his dead pan delivery. The Filipino equivalent of Native Americans, the Agta were on the island long before the first Europeans arrived. For thousands of years they lived nomadically and only recently have they begun to settle more permanently in villages. Due to the work of SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics) and CMU (Church Mission to the Unreached) many of the Agta around Palanan town in Isabella Province have become converts to Christianity. Once considered an unreached people group, whole Agta villages have come to Christ and many Agta have become pastors and church planters themselves.



Baloi is a fierce Agta

 Former hunter-gatherers, the Agta have become farmers and due to their proximity to the forests and the sea continue to harvest from the bounty of both. They live simply in what is referred to as a nipa hut, an indigenous house made of bamboo and covered in nipa leaves (but for the more prosperous or fortunate corrugated iron gleaned from an NGO like World Vision is preferrable), and a whole family including assorted relatives may live in a hut half the size of my living room. They are pygmie-like in that the average height of an Agta may be five feet tall but all sinew, bone and muscle (I don’t recall meeting any overweight Agta.) In any case, short as I am I would be tall for an Agta man. They speak a dialect known as Paranan-Agta and while we were in their village, every night in chapel (chapel is held nightly in Dibungko) the few among them who have been trained to read by CMU read from SIL’s prototype of the first-of-its-kind Agta New Testament. All this to say that there are a plethora of differences between our world and the one the Agta live in. What business did a couple of guys from North America and Northern Europe have doing in a little jungle village like Dibungko?

We were there to minister at a gathering of pastors and church workers who had come together for three days of worship, prayer, teaching and fellowship. About eighty “low-landers” (who look like traditional Filipinos) and Agta (who look like they hail from darkest Africa) made up the congregation. Freek was the main speaker and with the help of Hazel or a few other local translators he spoke morning, afternoon and evening. He spoke on the family and on family-issues, standard Bible teaching on loving and honoring one another much as you would hear in most evangelical fellowships across the United States. While Freek preached, Randy, Kees, Duane and I were across the way in the mission house praying for numerous Agta and lowland couples. They stood in line for hours waiting for the opportunity to be prayed for and after the first day of ministry I had something of an epiphany: people are people the world over.

Hybrid Nipa hut

With the help of a translator, an Agtan or lowland couple would sit across from us, share their struggle or hurt and then we would begin to pray – Duane and Randy in one room, Kees and I in another. All afternoon and into the evening we prayed for couples who were not getting along or were having trouble with rebellious children. Truthfully that entire week we prayed for people I was struck again and again by the fact that save for the translator how normal it felt to be praying for these people. We didn’t speak their language and knew only a bit of some of the unique cultural nuances of Filipinos in general and yet the Holy Spirit was able to bridge the gap between us. By the end of the week, I was persuaded that if the ministry team at Refuge was so inclined to join us here, the hardest thing for them would be either the 17-hour airline flight to Manila, or the six-hour bus ride to Baguio or the six hour bus ride to Cagayan City or the 45-minute Cessna ride over the mountain or the thirty minute Bangka ride down the Palanan River or the steep climb up the hill to the village of Dibungko. This would be the hard part of the journey. By comparison, ministering peace and comfort to an Agta or a lowlander despite the language gap between us would be relatively easy.



Who's that big Agta in the front?

That’s what my week with the Agta reminded me of – people are people, sin is sin, hurt is hurt, pain is pain, bitterness is bitterness whatever cultural form it may take. In other words, you can get there from here – yes, even from mostly Caucasian Barron County. If you are willing to be a vessel of peace and friendship, the Lord Jesus can send a redneck from northern Wisconsin into the bush of northern Uganda and by the grace of God he can be culturally relevant. In the Kingdom of God, this makes perfect sense.
As I begin to pack for my next cross-cultural ministry experience, the same old fear seeks to reassert itself. Not of travel in strange places or of getting my pocket picked or of contracting some jungle disease. These are simply standard risks of traveling internationally. No, the fear is we’ll finally get to where we are going and I will be totally out of my element and be something even less useful than a tourist (at least a tourist has plenty of cash on hands to see the sights.) But then I am reminded of my week in Dibungko and recall that as crazy as it may be for a North American pastor to travel across the Atlantic and the Mediterranean just to bring a message or pray a prayer with a Ugandan national or hug an orphan (or ten) may not be that crazy after all.

After posting this Monday night, early Tuesday morning I read this from Chapter 8 of Katie Davis' Kisses from Katie entitled (appropriately for this post) "How Great A Distance Love Can Bridge":

I had learned while being “home” in America and away from “home” in Uganda just how small this earth really is. It was as if the two worlds I had been living in had finally merged a bit and I was discovering just how great a distance love can bridge. God really does have the whole world sitting in the palm of His hand. All of us are, literally, neighbors. With the simple purchase of a plane ticket, I can get from my house in the village to my parents' living room in twenty-four hours. And I could get back to Jinja from Brentwood in twenty-four hours as well. People tell me they miss me; they think I am so far away. But I'm not. I'm right here, on the same earth as everybody else, doing what I know to do to make it a little bit better...


...People are people. They all need food and water and medicine, but mostly they need love and truth and Jesus. I can do that. We can do that. We can give people food, water, medicine, love, truth, and Jesus. The same God created all of us for a purpose, which is to serve Him and to love and care for His people. It is universal. We can't do it in our own strength or out of our own resources, but as we follow God to wherever He is leading us, He makes the impossible happen.