Journeyman learns about love and suffering through ministry to Waray
The sound of a motor roars from the back of a boat as the vessel speeds along the Oras River, a body of water cutting through the island of Samar in the Philippines. Nearly 30 people sit clumped together on the boat’s wooden slats, holding their possessions while a bag wiggles and clucks on the floorboards. The motor whirrs too loudly for conversation, so the passengers sit in silence, watching children play by thatch huts on the banks.
Esther Tallbott* sits three seats from the back of the boat. She clutches a pen and underlines sentences in John Piper’s “Stand,” a collection of essays on endurance. This moment sums up Tallbott’s last two years as a journeyman missionary for the International Mission Board — thatch huts, whirring boats and endurance.
“Jesus’ compassion moved him to action, and my pity for the people didn’t lead me to do anythingEsther Tallbott,* journeyman
The 25-year-old single woman spends several days a week riding down the river to reach villages on this island of Samar that are so deep in the jungle that no roads reach them. Sometimes she knows people in the villages, but most often, she doesn’t. She shows up on a dock with her Filipino ministry partner, Charity Malinao, and asks where they can hang their hammocks.
Then, the two share the Gospel with the kind family who takes them in for the night. As they play with the children and hang out with their hosts, the ministry partners gently unseat the mixture of Catholic and animistic traditions of those interested in Biblical truths.
“My greatest joy has been to see baby believers who don’t know they are baby believers start to walk around … to see the Gospel set people free like it’s set me free,” the journeyman shares.
Love and Suffering
Tallbott loves the Samar people, with their big hearts and their cultural willingness to welcome strangers into their homes. She loves riding down the river early in the morning with nothing but a thin blanket and an iPod full of worship songs.
However, the missionary finds life on Samar difficult at times. There is, of course, the loneliness that comes with being the only American or ex-patriate in the community. The main difficulty, though, comes from something she works hard to make happen — building relationships. As people open their lives, she’s allowed to see beyond the façade, noticing and feeling the intense suffering of her people.
One friend still breast-feeds her five-year-old daughter because the family doesn’t have enough food to feed the child properly. A 14-year-old friend disgraced her family by having an affair with a village man and turned to prostitution. The list goes on and on …
In the beginning, Tallbott didn’t know what to do when friends suffered — after all, she came to teach Bible stories.
“I wasn’t prepared for that,” she says. “I wasn’t prepared to see girls that I couldn’t help and I couldn’t protect, and I wasn’t prepared to see children who were starving or babies who had skin disease and open rashes and bleeding wounds.”
She’d never seen or experienced a world with starvation, illness and sexual depravity. The fact that the Waray people endured all of this angered her.
One night, after a very poor family shared everything they had with Tallbott and Malinao, her broken heart filled with doubt. This family had endured so much, the death of a child and now starvation. She told God she didn’t know if she could watch others suffer like this every day for two years and know she couldn’t help them. She felt like giving up.
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“I don’t think I can do this,” she prayed that night.
To find solace, she opened her Bible and studied the ministry of Christ. As she read, she noticed that Jesus never built a medical clinic. He never started a community program or taught about sanitation and good health habits. Jesus traveled from place-to-place to tell people about Himself and to offer them forgiveness.
Tallbott realized she didn’t come to build clinics either. She also admitted that she didn’t come to be the Waray’s savior. They had no need for two rescuers. Her job was to go from place-to-place and tell people about Jesus.
“Jesus’ compassion moved him to action, and my pity for the people didn’t lead me to do anything,” she says. “Learning from His example, do I really believe the Gospel? And if I do, am I humble enough to let Christ be their only Savior and not get any glory for trying to rescue people who don’t necessarily want to be rescued and don’t realize they need to be rescued?”
Spiritual Growth
After two years of riding long hours in boats and sleeping under mosquito nets, Tallbott sees God beginning to remove one family’s deep-seated Waray beliefs about idol worship. She sees Him turning her painful term in Samar into a small spiritual harvest.
In Tallbott’s favorite village, Balingasag, Lionita Alegria recounts Bible studies with the journeyman. The Waray woman lives with her husband, Amador, and their family, in a small, simple home. The woman spends many hours talking about Christ with the missionary and Malinao. Tallbott explains on every visit that Christians must worship God alone and cannot pray to saints, Mary or images of either. Yet, an idol of Christ as a child remains in the Alegria home.
This day, however, the village woman seems to grasp Tallbott’s lessons.
“We worship with our idols and we worship with our carvings — it’s because we don’t know the proper way,” Alegria says. “Since we’ve got the Bible study, we’ve learned how to pray to God directly and how to praise Him and how to worship Him.”
Astonished, Tallbott has never heard her friend discount the power of idols before today.
“I didn’t realize that she had taken it to heart and the Bible uprooted deep seeds of tradition that had been planted a long time ago … that was huge for me,” the journeyman says. “That was a miracle – that God used the truth to set her free.”
During the boat ride back to her home city, Tallbott smiles to herself. The journeyman knows that during these last two years, she has grown in the knowledge of her Savior. Alegria has grown as well.
Soon, Tallbott will fly back to the United States, leaving behind Samar and its beautiful people. A year ago, she worried about leaving the Waray behind with no one to take over the ministry and “rescue” them. But now, the thought doesn’t even cross her mind.
Tallbott knows God will use all of the Bible stories she shared for His purposes. After two years, many along the Oras River have been introduced to Him, the only person who can truly “save” the Waray.
*Name Changed
Volunteers spread Gospel on island
Evelyn Riviera has a question for the five American university students gathered around her front door.
“Is it true that Americans don’t eat rice?” she asks. “They just eat bread?”
Her visitors laugh. Sitting on wooden benches under her thatch awning, they make small talk, chatting about American culture and Filipino food. In the course of conversation, the University of Mobile, Mobile, Ala., students tell Riviera a story about Christ healing a cripple. She’s never heard it.
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The volunteer mission team’s approach to sharing their faith is simple. They don’t hold Vacation Bible Schools or medical clinics. They don’t attract crowds with music or spectacles. Instead, they arrive in a village and they ask to stay for several days, building relationships and hanging out.
The team of five live as the people they came to minister to live. They sleep in hammocks, take bucket baths and wash their clothes in pans of water. Whenever they travel from village to village, they huddle in boats and ride the Oras River. They visit people who live so deep in the jungle that no roads reach their homes.
This method of witnessing allows villagers to open their homes with true Filipino generosity.
Hanging Out
In the first village the team visits, they stay in a family’s home. They chat with the parents, play with the children and become part of the community. Team leader Megan Hunter, Cullman, Ala., says she cherishes the time hanging out with several Filipinos outside their home. They relax and laugh and talk about Jesus.
“It was a lot of fun to study the Word of God with them, to hear their questions, to see it kind of start to click with them,” she says. “But most of all, (I loved) just the community that we had there with those people—all crowded in that one little room around a light bulb. We didn’t have a TV. We didn’t have games. We didn’t have any of that. We had each other and the Word of God.”
As the team members travel from village to village, they find most people will listen to stories from the Bible. However, the villagers rarely comprehend the Gospel message.
Most of the country’s population adheres to a mix of Catholicism and animism. In many of the homes the team visits, there are calendars depicting Mary and Jesus and shrines containing idols of the Santo Nino or Christ as a child. In the Filipino belief system, people earn Heaven. They believe they must compensate for their sin by giving to the poor or helping those in need. They can’t easily grasp the idea that God would give anyone salvation as a gift.
Getting to Heaven
After visiting Riviera, the team encounters direct conflict with the area’s traditional belief. In the cinderblock home of another villager, Adam Morris, Bayside Baptist Church, Harrison, Tenn., explains salvation. The student tells a man that one must ask forgiveness from and dedicate their life to Jesus Christ to receive salvation.
“Because Jesus is God and because He is perfect, He is able to forgive sins,” Morris says. “Does all that make sense or do you have any questions about it?”
The man does have a question.
“If I ever want to go to Heaven, what do I need to do?” he asks.
Morris repeats that the man simply needs to ask for forgiveness, but the villager wants a more involved answer. He says he always prays. He is always nice to his neighbor. What more can he do?
Samantha Parrott, People of Mars Hill, Mobile, Ala., says most of their listeners ask the same question. What can they do to get into Heaven?
Hunger for Gospel
Nicole Hill, Chunchula, Ala., says she feels resigned and learned to relinquish control to God. They shared the Gospel. Now, God will do the rest.
“We could tell them all day long what we believe, but God is the one who will help change their perspective,” she said. “I trust God that He’s going to do that.”
Although few seem to understand the message, the Alabama students see signs of hunger for the Gospel in their listeners. Jacob Fowler, Capshaw Baptist Church, East Limestone, Ala., shared a Bible story with a man who immediately asked to hear another one. Morris adds after one Bible study, an old woman said she had never heard such a message in all of her 60 years.
From conversations with these people, it seems to Morris that the villagers simply feel honored the team traveled so far to share a spiritual message.
“The fact that we cared enough to come all the way around the world to share this message with them that we believed so strongly in — that in itself, spoke to them,” he says. “Through that, we got to share the Gospel with them.”
