I sat down to breakfast in the Manila guesthouse where we stay when we’re in the city.  At the end of a spartan dining hall, perched between dark polished parquet floor and an overhead ceiling fan, sat Chad – his head bowed over a bowl of oatmeal.

Awkwardly humble, painfully shy and courteous to a fault, Chad is one of the godliest men I have ever met, but we’ll get back to Chad in a minute.

Some of you read the news, and some of you read the scriptures; but for those of you who read both, don’t you see parallels between events once foretold and things that are now unfolding?  These are seismic events across the geo-political spectrum, wars and rumours of wars, the earth: its atmosphere, land and oceans – all groaning under the weight of over eight billion people.  How is this good news?

For Lib and I, the plight of man is in our faces daily as we wander through Asia on mission – it’s especially stark in the isolated islands where we document the delivery of medical and dental aid to communities desperate for physical, emotional and spiritual help.  So great the needs, so few the workers, so short the time… it really can get overwhelming.  

Is there hope? And where does it come from?  Probably not Chad.

Last weekend, I was invited to a birthday party.  James, one of the guesthouse grounds crew, was turning 30-something and many of the regular guests were invited to attend. The matron, Joy invited me; although, I’m pretty sure it was my good wife Lib, who was out of town at the time, who had asked Joy to include me and keep me from boredom. Still, I was grateful for the invite.

Knowing very few people in the crowded room, I scraped together a plate of food from the buffet and picked a seat at a round table in back of what usually functions as the communal kitchen. On my left was a young family from Papua New Guinea with a sick child needing proper care from good doctors of the Philippines. Across from me sat Chad.

Clement and Delilah’s daughter had received a good diagnosis from a Filipino doctor. The little girl did not need the chemotherapy that PNG doctors  had prescribed; instead, she was now responding well to the nutritional cure of a dietary problem. It brought us great joy to hear Clement’s story and Chad was visibly moved, which is saying something, considering that Chad struggles hard with cerebral palsy that crippled his movement and mobility dramatically.

Chad was otherwise very quiet.  What more would you expect from a librarian and archivist for an international linguistics group?  But knowing he was a devout man, grounded in the translation work of dozens of bibles, I changed topic and redirected the conversation toward him to ask for his take on the trajectory of current events from his biblical standpoint.

“You know,” he said with a muffled voice and a thoughtful pause, “there are still almost 100 bibleless languages here in the Philippines that have not been translated… and 1000’s more elsewhere.

The Bible says, ‘…this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.’

So, there is still a lot that must happen before all this comes to pass.”

Chad’s head shook slowly, uncontrollably as he surveyed the rest of us seated at the table around him.  It was a good word; one that left us all with a renewed sense of hope and of mission.  There was work to be done and a purpose for all.  

And on that note, we all had birthday cake; confident that tomorrow would come and that there was still much to be celebrated.