Due to my tardiness in the month of January, it hasn’t been quite two months since my last letter, but enough has happened to fill two or three letters. The problem is that I have a really neat soul-winning story that I want to share as well, but it’s really long. So, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to give the highlight events in bullet format without any additional commentary. Hopefully, that will leave sufficient space for my excessively long soul-winning story. 😊
• Thank you to those of you who have been praying for Ruth’s pregnancy. She recently completed the first trimester and is doing very well.
• In the month of January, God answered our prayers with an incredible support spike. This spike allowed us to move forward in the month of February with two projects to improve our new church property.
o First of all, we were able to add some much-needed additional fill dirt towards the back part of the property.
o Secondly, and on a more exciting level, we were able to extend the room we use for our staff children’s schooling by walling in the front porch of the house and then tearing down the old walls inside. This nearly doubled the size of our schoolroom, opening up a world of possibilities for the future!
• Thank you to all of you who have prayed for our Visayan Songbook project. We were able to finish our fifth (and hopefully last) edition this past week. We have now begun the process of putting the Visayan lyrics into sheet music in order to create a true Visayan hymnal.
• Also, in the month of February, we were able to have our annual married couple’s Valentine Banquet. I am so thankful for the staff that God has given me. Without their help, the banquet never would have happened with everything else that was going on at the same time!
In the 2½ decades that I have been a soul winner, I have learned that the doors God closes in soul winning are just as important as the ones He opens. However, a couple of weeks ago on Friday, February 28, God had to teach me this lesson again. I had just finished leading our soul-winning meeting when the leader of the construction crew remodeling our school crossed the street and asked if the electrician would be working that evening. The construction crew was ready to pour the concrete in the new portion of the schoolroom, but the electrician had not yet laid the PVC pipes for the wires to pass under the floor. I’ll be honest; I was tired. At that moment, there was no zeal bubbling up from the depths of my soul. I was going soul winning because I was supposed to go, and this new distraction annoyed me immensely. Fortunately, my assistant Jedie was close by and offered to call the electrician for me. The electrician explained to Jedie that he was planning on working, but he would need 3 additional PVC pipes and 20 PVC connectors. This news did not improve my mood! At this point, it was 4:00 p.m. I knew that all of the hardware stores would be closed before we finished soul winning, but if I didn’t purchase the materials, the entire building project would stall until the following Monday! I was stuck. On one hand, I’m the one who drives the church jeepney, and everyone was waiting for me. On the other hand, we REALLY needed to get the schoolroom finished so that we could get back to school! Ultimately, I decided to transfer my partner to a different group and drop the soul winners off at the Dapitan City Plaza on my way to the hardware store. If things went quickly at the hardware store, I might still have a chance to do some witnessing. Unfortunately, nothing went quickly! When I arrived at the hardware store, there was no parking available on the main highway, so I decided to turn down a narrow road that is USUALLY very quiet. Upon making the turn, I was stunned to see motorcycles filling every possible inch of parking space on both sides of the road! It was chaotic; I could hardly fit the jeepney between the motorcycles! Then it happened – a police truck came around the corner, and we were stuck! We couldn’t pass each other, and neither had space to turn around. My soul-winning time was evaporating, and I hadn’t even reached the hardware store yet! Eventually, we found a way to squeeze past one another, and I continued on around the block. I then decided to go to another hardware store a little up the road where parking was a little easier. This hardware store had the PVC pipes that I needed . . . BUT NOT THE CONNECTORS. AAAAHHHHHH! Ultimately, I ended up back at the original hardware store, where I was finally able to purchase the clips.
By the time I got back to the plaza, I had less than 30 minutes left before I would have to drive the soul winners back to the church. I parked the jeepney and said, “Lord, You’ve got to help me find someone quickly who wants to be saved.” As I got out of the jeepney, I saw a street vendor across the street from the plaza sitting by herself without a customer in sight. I approached her and started a conversation. She turned out to be very open to the Gospel, but then a customer arrived . . . and then six more. I walked away in disappointment. I crossed the street with about 15 minutes left of soul- winning time. There I gave a man a tract, but he wasn’t interested. I turned away just in time to see a young boy sit down on the raised garden wall that surrounds the plaza. I approached the boy, greeted him in Visayan, and offered him a tract. He looked up at me with a friendly face and said, “I can speak English.” When I responded in Visayan, asking him where he had learned to speak English so well, he just stared at me blankly. He didn’t speak Visayan at all! I was stunned! As it turns out, he was half Micronesian and half Filipino, BUT HE ONLY SPOKE ENGLISH. It took me a while to really shift gears into English mode, but once I got going, he was one of the easiest people I’ve witnessed to in a long time. About 15 minutes later, a 12-year-old boy from Micronesia bowed his head at the Dapitan City Plaza and put his faith in Jesus Christ. Only God could work the timing out so perfectly!
Yours for souls,
Mike Morrissey
