Our sweat streamed, and our muscles strained as we lifted bucket after bucket. Here on Palawan, you can’t order a truck filled with cement ready to pour. So making cement was our job! Men, women, and children filled buckets with 40-70 lbs. of rocks, sand and concrete powder and poured them into our mixer. Luke helped fill the buckets with rocks. Sonya added the water to make sure the concrete mix was just right. Then we carried the wet concrete to where it was needed. Lily sometimes stood on the bull float to help Pastor George smooth out the concrete for a nice finish. It was hard work, but we had fun. This last month, by God’s grace, we mixed and poured two 20-by-60-foot sections of concrete!

We had prayed and worked toward this building event for more than two years. Our container has finally arrived, and its contents include many medical supplies for our mission clinic. It also held our metal-bending machine, which we will use for building projects, such as our mission schools. Native Palawanos helped us with the project, and we enjoyed starting our work with worship.

There was another spiritual blessing this month also. Many of the native Palawanos have cell phones now, and I have been praying about developing a digital resource of the Palawano Bible and Christian songs. God answered that prayer this month, and I was able to create memory cards that people can play in their phones.

Last Sabbath, I looked up a verse that had been going through my mind while I worked on the concrete, but I couldn’t remember all of it at the time. It begins: “A stone is heavy, and the sand weighty”—we could give a hearty amen to that as we picked up those heavy buckets! The verse then continues, “but a fool’s wrath is heavier than them both” (Prov. 27:3). In these end times as the nations are angry, may God fill us with His peace and use us to be messengers of His wonderful invitation to the thirsty and whosoever will, to “come” and “take the water of life freely” (Rev. 22:17).

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