One day I was flying a drone carrying a blood sample from one of our Kemantian mission clinic patients to a lowland team member who would take it to a hospital for testing, but the flight went awry. I lost contact with the drone, and it went down somewhere in a huge field.

After a quick prayer, I asked our mission school students to help me, and off we went down the mountain to try to find the drone. After I had been hiking for about 20 minutes, Ivan met up with me. He is one of our student missionaries, now in his second year in Palawan. He had heard what had happened and hurried to catch up. Together we hiked, searched, and prayed that we could find the missing drone. For about nine hours we searched with little to eat. I was so thankful for Ivan’s help that day. He cheerfully searched, even carrying my backpack for part of the day! Though we walked home without the drone that night, we were thankful that in Jesus’ parable, the shepherd found his lost sheep!

As many of you know, the Palawano Project has been ongoing for more than 25 years. Our team of lay pastors, teachers, student missionaries and career missionaries now numbers more than 30. Managing the mission requires quite a bit of office work. That has been one of my main responsibilities here, other than caring for patients. Here again, God sent Ivan to our rescue! He has been doing lots of bookkeeping for us. Thanks to him, we were freed up to do other important projects.

As for the drone, miraculously it was later found in a muddy rice field. And it still flies! However, student missionaries like Ivan are the ones who really give wings to the work here. Please keep them in your prayers. “With such an army of workers as our youth, rightly trained, might furnish, how soon the message of a crucified, risen, and soon-coming Saviour might be carried to the whole world! How soon might the end come—the end of suffering and sorrow and sin!” (A Call to Stand Apart, p. 66). Is God calling you to be a part of that army?

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