I went into Sunflower Cafe a few months ago to spend some time alone while trying to prepare myself to leave the Philippines for the first time. As I looked around this little coffee shop, I realized that they sold Bibles in all different translations and languages. One of the places that I really connected with was the county jail and the men inside those walls were truly beginning to be transformed. There was one problem with this: as the transformation was happening, there were no Bibles to keep a daily connection with these men and the word of God.
So in the limited Viscayan I have, I asked the guy at the counter if they had any Bibles in the local dialect that I could purchase. He told me I needed to just sit down and wait. So I obeyed. About 30 minutes later, a well dressed man with a big smile sat across from me and asked how many Bibles I needed. There were no introductions given or needed, so I just asked for a dozen. Without a response, he got up and left only to return 10 minutes later with a stack of Bibles in Viscayan!
He told me he was always willing to distribute Bibles and would supply me with all I needed for free because he was a pastor and had connections with Bible distribution. I also found out that Pastor Mike owned the Sunflower Cafe and he saw it as another ministry opportunity for people in his church that couldn’t find work. The shop had just opened two week before I walked in the doors.
Pastor Mike then asked me my story, why I was there, and what I needed the Bibles for. I told him about the World Race and my heart for the orphans here and how the men in the prison had also attracted a lot of my attention. I told him of our plan to have a Sunday worship service with all seven cells and that two had already begun the services and daily Bible studies. He wanted so much to help this ministry, but since I was leaving in a day, he didn’t think it would be a good opportunity to try and “take over”.
Flash forward two months to yesterday, and my return to the same prison walls. As I was teaching the men of cell 2, in walked Pastor Mike. When I finished, I rushed to greet him and find out what his connection was with the men he was speaking to. He told me that when I left, he made it his goal to get every prisoner a Bible and look into doing weekly counseling sessions with some of the cell leaders. However, he had ignored that until yesterday when he heard I was back in town. He was there for the first time to offer his service in training the leaders of each cell.
My goal with any overseas ministry is to work myself out of a job so that the locals can become the answers to their own prayers. I told myself I would take three months to work myself out of this ministry. However, with men like Benhard and Pastor Mike, I may be unemployed much earlier.
God is doing a mighty work in those prison walls, and there are many stories to come…
