How can I summarize my recent trip to visit AFM missionaries, Kent and Leonda George? I think the best way is simply to say that I have been in the company of lovers: a man and a woman who have moved beyond looking at the Palawanos as if they are bodies to be counted in a baptismal tank. No, these missionaries are of a different caliber. They have moved to a deep sense of solidarity with the people God has called them to serve and to love. And it moved me to witness their love.

I hiked from the lowlands into the mountains with Leonda. It was steep and rough and dangerous. Leonda wasn’t feeling well, and we had to stop often. From time to time, she was overcome with dizziness and nausea. Her physical heart struggled with the extreme effort it takes to hike into Kemantian. And yet she pressed on, driven by a strange compulsion to be among her people. She has loved and nurtured them for 13 years now. She has delivered their babies, taught them to read and write and ministered to their spiritual and physical illnesses until her heart has become wrapped up in their welfare and their destiny. She is a lover.

Kent has been struggling with many things, too. Life is hard in Kemantian. I couldn’t help but shed a tear when he told me the following story. It ends with smile, but it began with suffering. Kent was in a distant village. While there, he received word of a Palawano woman who was desperately ill deep in the mountains. Asking person after person, he found no one willing to go with him and help him, so he struck out on his own. Arriving at the hut, he found the woman dying from the measles. Having no one to assist him, he hoisted her onto his back and carried her for three hours down one mountain and up another to the little mountain clinic in Kemantian.

Can you imagine that? Why does he do things like that? Why did he go through such exhausting effort for someone he didn’t even know? For someone whose death wouldn’t cause the merest ripple in your world or mine? He did it because he saw that woman as a sister—a human being who needed his help. Christ died for her, therefore she has infinite value in God’s eyes and in Kent’s.

Several days later, after the woman had been evacuated to the hospital, Kent went to see her. He found her sitting with her head down, shy and withdrawn. When he stepped around her, she slowly looked up into his eyes—and smiled. That smile said it all. A woman saved from death because a 55-year-old man was willing to put her on his back and carry her for three hours on some of the most forbidding terrain on earth—all for that smile. And Jesus was glorified. And the gospel was proclaimed. Not in empty words ringing out from some pulpit, but in love and action; in spirit and in truth.

I left the Kents’ project with a deep desire to love more and to care and to relieve pain. I want to be part of a community that sees the loneliness, longing and suffering in the world and actually ministers to it in practical and sacrificial ways. I want to be like Jesus . . . and like Kent and Leonda George.

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