I turned to Wendy and said, “Well, at least our ministry is going well!” At the time, I truly thought that; until … I went to the office the very next morning. That morning, the morning after I thought everything in our lives was in a state of disaster except the ministry I had as President of a small Bible college in Cebu City in the central Philippines, the most intense attacks against our ministry were flung upon us. The disappointing aspect of these attacks was that they came from the very Christian community we had come to serve.
We had returned to the Philippines just six months earlier after a two-year educational furlough. The decision to return was a real struggle. During our time in the Los Angeles area my mom had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease and came under our care since I was her only child. We did not want to leave her in a care facility half a world away from us, so we had only two choices. We could stay in the USA, abandoning our dreams of continuing in cross-cultural ministry, or bring her with us to the Philippines.
After much prayer and consideration, against the advice of most people, we moved back to the Philippines. From the time the plane landed in Cebu, life was consumed by one struggle after another. Our three young daughters had forgotten what life was like in the Philippines and they had a very hard time readjusting. All three of them struggled with the schooling situation, but one had a particularly hard time with a teacher who was quite abusive toward her. My mom hated living in the heat of the lowland city and fought the cultural changes that had been forced on her. We did not have a supportive church community and we had to start all over in building new friendships in a new region. But … the ministry was going well, we thought, until the barrage of intense attacks was initiated.
The attacks, mostly theological in nature, but also personal at times, grew fiercer over the next month until I decided to resign from the Bible College. I grilled God saying, “Why did you bring us here only to have it all fall apart in six short months? We could have stayed in California and accepted a very good job that I was offered. If we had done that, all of us — our kids, my mom, Wendy and I would have been much happier.”
The words of Psalm 55 sum up my feelings:
As verse 7 says, I just wanted to flee far away from the storm and give it all up. But we remembered that, just a few months earlier, we were convinced that God was leading us back to the Philippines. It did not feel right to give up and leave so quickly. We were determined to stay, looking for new avenues of ministry and trying to bring reconciliation with those who had opposed us. In spite of all our efforts, however, things just kept getting worse. As time went by, I became extremely distressed and discouraged. As Psalm 55 says, “I call to God, and the Lord saves me. Evening, morning, and noon I cry out in distress, and he hears my voice.”
For months it did not seem that God was hearing my cry. Eventually, though, we saw that He had been waiting for just the right time. About a year after the conflict began, we got a desperate call from Wendy’s parents, who were serving as missionaries in Baguio, a mountain city in northern Philippines. Their ministry had suffered through some moral failures on the part of members of their team and they needed more help. This call came just as our levels of distress had reached the breaking point, so we decided to move to Baguio and join their team.
The season of ministry that we had during that time in Baguio, was probably the best we had during our whole time overseas. We engaged in ministries that we loved. Our kids were around their cousins, even going to school with them. They thrived in the new environment. My mom, who was much more comfortable in the cooler mountain air, was very happy. Most of all, we were able to be present with Wendy’s mom when Wendy’s dad unexpectedly passed away just six months after we moved to the area.
It was easy to see during this time that God had us right where He wanted us. We probably would have never gone there, though, if we had not first struggled in Cebu City.
We learned many valuable lessons during both the years of struggle in Cebu City and the years of joy and fruitful ministry in Baguio — lessons that we have applied and shared with others in the 25 years since. The most important lesson, however, is probably found in the last two verses of Psalm 55:
Even when the timing is not what I would want it to be!