Padens in the Philippines

Dear Prayer Partners, Hope all of you have had a great month! I’m sure that many of you are busy preparing for school to start and other things that begin at the start of a new school year. It is the start of something new for us too. We have officially been here for one full year and this is the start of our second. We are excited about all the new things that are going to take place this year and we praise God for helping us through this first year on the field. We know that we could not have made it without all of your continued prayers, so again, thank you for your part in what God is doing with us here in the Philippines. I’ve been thinking back about one of our first prayer letters when we arrived here and what I quoted in it. I said “When interviewing retired missionaries and those still on the field, almost all said the first year on the field was the hardest of their lives!” I think that we can honestly say that it has been true for us too. We still have so much to learn and a...

Hi Everyone, It has been a while since you have heard from us and we apologize for that. The last two months have been hard ones for us, hardly an excuse, we probably needed your prayers more than anything. This is why we want to thank you for your continued prayers and support even when we don’t have the time, or energy to send you an update. I (Julie) have been having a lot harder time with this pregnancy than the other two. (If you are surprised that I am pregnant you maybe didn ’t read the last update!) Since we found out that we were going to have another baby, I have been in bed much of the time. After an initial one week of bed rest, then back and fourth to the doctor, and back in bed… some more, I still continue to have problems. That currently has me, as I write, back in bed yet again. As you can guess this has been hard on all of us. Gilmer has had to do so much more above and beyond (which he is doing a great job of, I might add!) and the kids keep wondering why Mommy has t...

Dear Family, Friends, and Partners, Greetings from a very, very hot Philippines. I just talked to my parents last night who live up in the mountains, they said it is very hot up there too. They’ve never been that hot before so I guess we are not alone. But the Lord is still good. We praise God for a swimming pool nearby. The kids spend much of their time swimming lately. They love to swim. LANGUAGE STUDY Julie is doing great. She has been writing a lot of sentences and stories. Conversation in Tagalog is still a challenge but she is understanding a lot of words now and is using them frequently. In fact, Julie is even correcting me of my usage of words since I only speak and understand simple tagalong. Not understanding and speaking the language is quite frustrating for her but she is making a lot of progress. MINISTRY I am still involved with the church planting ministry of the church we go to. It has been hard to find a Bible study contact lately (someone that is interested in studyin...

To Our Dear Friends, Family, and Supporters, We hope that this e-mail finds you all well! We have been busy but doing ok here in the Philippines. We continue to plug along in Language School and adjustments, and at the same time travel to different places in order to pick out where we will go this next year. I will share more about that below, but I really wanted to share with you some very interesting and disturbing information about The Philippines and its people. This is not the first time, of course, for Gilmer to be here at Easter time and I have even been here once years ago, but this year was new for both of us. We have included pictures and you are probably wondering why I would send such gruesome pictures to all of you! The fact is that, this is life here and is not abnormal at all. In some of the pictures you might see the crowd, notice the children of all ages that are there. Holy Week in The Philippines is probably the most important celebration of the whole year. We were a...