Over on this side of the world, the winds and seasons are shifting and changing. Habagat, Monsoon season, is here. The air is hot and stifling, Close as we would say in Pennsylvania, and the rains and storms are moving in. 
Almost every night, lightening tears across the sky in jagged flashes, reflecting off the sea below our home. 
Across the Bay, we can see a thick haze that is settling low and dark over the mountains, a volcanic cloud of sulphur dioxide from Taal Volcano, that has been threatening to erupt since last year. Twice last week, small phreatic eruptions happened as magma rises.
The earth has been shaking, quaking, groaning. 

The last several months have been full. I look back and see, spilling and overflowing from the edges of our life, goodness. So much goodness.
Our team has been going deeper into the heart of the Father this year, learning God's love so powerfully. The Holy Spirit began to speak to so many of us individually that He was shaking things, moving, bringing in a new season where He would pour out His Spirit. We felt as the shaking began, and the excitement and joy was immeasurable. He began to forge in us a ravenous hunger for more of Him. 

At the end of April, many of our teammates as well as Francis and I, contracted Covid. My case was moderately serious, and Francis was severe. Most of our team felt mild symptoms and recovered quickly. 
Francis was in bed with high fever for 18 days, and did not leave the bed for 21 days...he cannot remember any of it. As I sat in bed beside him, treating him, watching him struggle to breathe, and saw the gravity of his condition, I heard the Holy Spirit say,
"Worship. Even this I am using for good. Worship."
Francis could not speak, and rarely could respond... when He made a sound, it was "Abba", 
God rescued, He brought us through, but before He did-- He held us and poured out His presence and spoke in the dark. He always speaks in the dark..
We are still weak, and having many residual Covid symptoms months later, but getting stronger.

For the past several months we have also been walking beside a beautiful family as the wife/ mom battled cancer. Rowena was a dear friend of mine, and when her breast cancer recurred, we walked through every part of the battle with them. Her children are 10 and 4. She was only 37. 
I had the profound honor of sitting with her and walking through inner healing of her heart, breaking of bondage from the past, and reconciliation with her husband, family, and the power of releasing blessing and love over her children. 
The week before her death, each day was filled with powerful times of connection, love, reconciliation, healing and freedom. She held my hand and shared that Jesus had released all the pain and heaviness in her soul and brought her freedom so miraculously.
We had been praying for healing of her body as well, but one day before her death, she looked at me and her face glowing, said that she knew Jesus was calling her home with Him. He had healed her in so many miraculous and powerful ways... He had healed the things that will last. He had healed things that were eternal. She was ready now... 
We provided palliative care in her home where her family could surround her with so much love.
A friend and I sat with her and provided oxygen, IV fluids, pain medicines, and facilitated an environment of worship, peace, and grieving together, blessing and releasing her to take Jesus' hand as she took her last breath. Rowena went with Jesus last Thursday. Our hearts grieve with peace and hope.

There is no palliative/ hospice care in the Philippines, and we are often called to help families as they walk through this difficult and sometimes frightening time. 
We provide medical care, but mostly offer Jesus... His love comforts, blesses, and holds us up. We cry, hug, pray, worship, and facilitate a space where nothing is left unsaid, where love and blessing are released. 
We feel profoundly honored that we get to be present and serve others as they go through birth, and some as they walk through the valley of death.

 As our team has been growing hungrier for God's heart, Holy Spirit began to pour out powerfully... Many people are coming to our fellowship each Sunday, and each Sunday, and throughout the week there are powerful breakthroughs, Inner healing, physical healing, deliverance from demonic spirits... God is taking orphans and making them Sons and Daughters, and people are walking in their identity as God's children. Many are choosing to be baptized.
We are in a season like no other... There is shaking, and new, fresh wind is blowing though this place.

 One pastor and his wife walked though powerful healing in their hearts and were able to experience God's love more fully in the past month. They sat at our table yesterday and cried, sharing that for the first time, they are now able to connect with their 20 and 18 year old children, and share affection and love. They are able to forgive those who have hurt them and walk in freedom. Their children are beaming, crying, celebrating the love their family now has.
The Holy Spirit is healing the hearts of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. He is filling His children with His love and freedom.
There is nothing, nothing, that I love more than to see people set free by the love of our Father. Ever single thing He tells us is true... He has so much love and freedom for His children.

As the earth shakes, the winds blow, we are setting our faces excitedly on Jesus, and so grateful that we get to live this adventure  and walk with Him.

Our children Julia, Avea, and Justice are growing and flourishing. They climb mountains beside us and bring so much joy to our hearts. 

We have been able to fund expensive medicines, medical tests, dialysis treatments, and hospitalizations for more than 100 people (like Rowena) who could not afford it on their own, in the past couple months alone, as well as provide home health care, and continue to buy truckloads of rice every 1-2 weeks to distribute to the hungry. We're thankful for all of you and your generous hearts that give-- God is using you as you pray and give, to fill hungry bellies, help sick bodies, and show people the love of the Father.

We're so grateful for you! 
Grace and Peace,

 

​  It’s evening in Mindoro, and the mosquitos are out in swarms, beating against the screens with lusty fervor. Sounds of barking dogs and crowing roosters fill the silence. The roads are empty.
A mandatory 24-hour quarantine has been in effect for our province for over two weeks now, but the rules change almost daily, the guidelines becoming stricter. 
No one is allowed out of their home unless it is for food or medicine, and then only when approved for a pass, once a week, and just to travel within their immediate barangay/ township. There are armed military and police guards at every checkpoint, and threats of prison or even being shot if people do not comply.
Francis and I have government-granted passes as we are health-workers, which allows us to come and go more freely, and for this we’re so grateful. 
The government has supposedly empowered each Barangay Captain to distribute food to each family, but only a small fraction are actually receiving goods. It has become a political power-play that is punishing those who have not registered or voted. The health care situation is similar, and in many ways our hands are being tied about how we are being allowed to care for our community. It is only driving us to pray harder and become more creative in the ways we serve.
We’re not surprised by the corruption, but we wrestle with anger,  are grieved, and pray we can be instruments of change at the root level of these issues.

We have been having meetings with local leaders, trying to love them well, challenging them to serve without agenda, and coming alongside them to get food and care to every family.
We are personally buying rice, soap, and other food in bulk, and taking them to local pastors to distribute, as well as bringing to Mangyan tribal families, many of whom have escaped high into mountains to rebuild their huts and have no access to food.
This week alone we bought 900 pounds of rice, that will be gone in days. Yes… 900 pounds. 
We’re being called to homes to do checkups and provide medical care as well.


Over fifteen doctors in the Philippines have now died from Corona virus, some of them from PGH, the Covid-Center Hospital in Manila, and also Francis’ Alma mater. Francis has received an email beseeching alumni to come and help in the overflowing and under-manned hospitals in manila… we have grieved, cried, prayed together much over the devastation and loss of life, and asked for clarity of where best he could serve. For now it is here in Mindoro, as we are not only providing health care, but helping to be a voice for the tribal and overlooked peoples.
Our hospitals here are all overflowing with untested and undocumented cases, and all medical personnel are stretched thin. 
At the moment we have a friend staying with us as she recovers from surgery and is also in early labor. Please be praying for a safe and beautiful birth, as transport to a hospital would be very difficult.


No matter where we are in the world, our prayers are rising up and mixing as one as we face the same battle. I realize that right now, we as the church have a powerful opportunity to be of one mind and heart-- to take our collective pain, the unknown, the raging global virus of sickness and fear, and with laser-focus turn it all to breakthrough, fervent prayer.
We get to join our heart-cries, become a tidal wave of power, bind and loose things, and see glory break through. We get to release hope and peace where there is none, into places where people are desperate and dying for what we carry.


I hope this changes us forward and forces our roots to depths we've never known, that the power and pressure of this storm reveals the power of The Spirit within us that many have never begun to understand. I hope we will never be the same
More than ever before, it is crucial that we be intentional about our focus; for what we focus on, lock our gaze and hearts on, will fill and change us into its likeness. We become like what we behold. If fear is your compass, you will be consumed and devoured by it. Fear, control, self-preservation is the low-hanging fruit that temps us when evil and danger press in close. 

In this time of crisis, as we quarantine and wait with breathless prayers of protection over our families, I pray we rally and rise up to find our eyes glued to Jesus, that we cling to Him like a rock in the tempest.  He is making paths in the wilderness, rivers in the middle of this desert and wasteland, doing new things, and I can see it. (Isaiah 43:19)


My prayer for myself is that my love for Jesus be measured by how I love those around me, by how I pour myself out as He does.
We want to be found at the end of this pandemic to be carrying out the radical love and generosity of The Father. We want to be found thriving and advancing with faith and hope in the One who holds all things together. He is still holding on to us.


Look for how He is moving, for the new things He is doing, and look for ways to join Him in loving others well.
We are so grateful for you, and are praying for you as you pray for us!

  We’re five days post-Christmas and my heart and mind are still overshadowed and full, nearly overcome with collisions of emotion. I’m filled with peace, gratitude, joy, and also feeling an aching weight that is not my own, but carried by those I love.
There is a stillness in my spirit as I think of and pray for the many people I love who are walking through shadowed valleys of grief this season, thick in the messy middle of life-altering pain, hardship, loss.

When you’re on the under-side of joy, just waiting to surface and breathe again, you want to back away from the offensive jolliness of this season and be woken when it’s over. Like treading water in a sea of grief, the only focus is keeping your face above surface and surviving.

This Christmas Day a massive Typhoon tore up many homes and lives very close to us in the Philippines. Our family is still muddling through grief at the too-soon loss of our sister from cancer. Friends have lost children, are walking through broken marriages, being consumed with fear as Cancer is devouring their bodies, and many are locked in prisons of soul-crushing loneliness and they long that someone would see, know, and understand them.

If this is in any way a variation of your story, then Christmas in its deepest, truest form is for you right here, right now more than ever.

My mind is on The Father, and what the conversations, the emotional climate, of heaven must have been that first Christmas Eve between He, The Spirit, and The Son. They had always been together…. until now. This is a Father who intimately understands what it feels like to say goodbye to His child, to watch his beloved suffer, to be gutted by grief. And He did it for us.

Jesus’ coming to this broken, dark place was not an afterthought, a last-minute ditch effort after the Law, the prophets, the other plans didn’t work out. This was the plan since that dark day in the garden when the bottom fell out of perfection, when death dug his nails into all of us and decided to re-write our story.

Genesis 3:15 tells of the coming One who would undo and destroy the works of the Serpent and death-bringer,

“And I will put enmity (hostility) between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”

That snake-head-crusher? He is The One who came to make untrue all of the deepest pain, the filth, that has defined us, and to take the pen that writes our story back again. He wants not to distract you from your loneliness and grief, but to be with you in it and walk you through it.
He is The Rescuer who came to bring you freedom from your prisons, take your burned-out ashes and give you beauty instead, who came to take your coat of heaviness and soul-shattering grief and exchange it with Joy that drips off of you like oil.

To the head that is so far bent-low with heartache that it feels it cannot be held high again, He will lift your head up and hold it there. He is not a religion, a theology, an idea, but a SomeOne who came to be with you in the middle of all of this. Emmanuel. God stretched on skin and came into your world to be with you, for you, in you, to taste and know and meet with you in the depth of your heartache and be the remedy.

He offers all that He is, and asks for the gift of our broken shards and pieces... He asks for us.
​
“There will be no more gloom for those who were in distress..….
The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.
For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. -Isaiah 9

Peace. Shalom. Literally meaning “Broken pieces becoming whole”. Jesus came to undo the works of the snake, to crush his head, to take death and give us life, and to exchange our shattered pieces for wholeness.

Let God With You sink in to the darkest, most gated-off places in your soul and remember that pain and death do not have the last word. Emmanuel does.