The plane accelerated down the runway and lifted off. We looked down on Mindanao for the last time. We could see the checkerboard pattern of rice fields stretching out to the east, the rich farmland broken up only by coconut plantations and the Rio Grande River. This flood plain is home for one of the Philippines’ largest cultural minorities, the nearly one million Bahah people. In a short time it had become our home.
As Mindanao faded out of sight, our minds raced over the past four years: we came into a foreign culture and began to learn the national language. We learned how to laugh at our mistakes, passed the national language exam and started on the next language. We moved to Mindanao and began to adjust to life among our new local friends. Fresh in our minds were some of the barriers they face when confronted with the gospel, barriers such as basic ideological differences between their faith and ours, social pressure, fear, poverty and pride. We remembered too well the difficulties we had faced… sickness, isolation, shifting political situations, poor communication, travel, sending our oldest daughter to a distant city to attend boarding school.
As we sat in our seats that day, our first term became history. The joy that we felt was not dampened by the fact that our first term did not result in one local friend confessing faith in Christ. By God’s grace we had survived and by that same grace we had made progress in learning the language and culture. Four years earlier we were outsiders looking in on the Bahah. We knew their culture only as an anthropological case study and one of the thousands of people groups unreached by the gospel. Now we were leaving Mindanao as insiders, adopted members of a local family with a web of relationships. Real people and faces had replaced the coldness of case studies and numbers. It was no longer just a million Bahah without Christ, but our “family” and neighbors without Christ.
I remembered last Easter. All I intended to do was to see my language assistant for a few minutes. Then I’d head home for breakfast with my family.
I was greeted at his home with the smiling faces of his extended family. They introduced me to their visitor, a young lawyer. He wasted no time. I was put on the witness stand first. The questions came at me quickly. Who was I? Where did I live? What was my purpose in coming here? When did we arrive? When will we leave? What was the name of my organization? How many of us were there? Who financially supported us? What was our religion? My “quick visit” lasted two hours! But everyone in the house had an opportunity to hear Jesus proclaimed as the fulfillment of the very book they put their faith in.