Monday, August 06, 2012

Opportunities & Experiences

It's beyond understanding some days that we left Mindanao and Palawan for the last time. For the foreseeable future, these places will only be visited in our memories. We've had so many incredible opportunities, so many great experiences there, and it's gone for now.

One of the last things we did in Palawan was stop at a Vietnamese restaurant for coffee. Our waiter didn't speak much English, but he tried really hard. He told us he'd immigrated from Vietnam and had only been in Palawan a short while. Palawan, where so many of our friends are struggling to find work, the place quite a few want to leave because of lack of opportunity, is the place this man had chosen to immigrate to in hopes of a better future. It's all in your perspective, isn't it?! And our perspective is created by our experiences and our responses to them. They brought my coffee in this cool little handmade drip cup... how many people have experienced that?!

We've been in Manila a few days now, and we are enjoying our time here. We've said a couple hard goodbyes here already, but mostly we've been saying "hello" the past few days. We've spent a fair amount of time at the badminton court, doing our best to make good use of the opportunities God is giving us with friends we've met through badminton.

Tomorrow the northern Luzon NTM conference is starting here at the guesthome, so we get to see all our friends from Luzon! This means that in our last 2 months in the Philippines we will have seen almost every NTM family that is on the field. With the way our works are spread out, that is truly amazing! Orchestrated by God. A gift.

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