God,,,, you hold our vehicle!

The Inter-tribal is an annual gathering of single people. "Single" people, to keep away from classifying the group with a distinction such as young, professional, or adult etc..., includes all brackets, and does not matter whether the person is young or older. Single includes every unmarried Christian that participates in the gathering.

Going to the venue of the 12th Inter-tribal Fellowship must be one of our most unforgettable experiences in travelling to other places. I was taught by God to trust Him and not complain. (I have already asked forgiveness for having complained about the venue of the gathering. I also have asked forgiveness for having regretted going while we were on our way because of the difficulty of travel and distance:) ) Esther joined us. I wonder how she felt after the long travel. It took us almost 9 hours to get there. Almost everyone on the vehicle, a logging truck, were longing to see a light that would signal that we were near, but were not seeing any. Then I said, "Are we going to the end of the earth?" It was very far. I was trying to picture how difficult it must have been for Jesus travel a lot for the sake of the Gospel. At leat we were riding on a vehicle even if we were not that comfortably seated. Lord, how ungrateful our hearts were, after you provided a vehicle and people to ferry us to the place of the inter-tribal fellowship.

Everyone of us learned to trust in God even for the vehicle that tansported us. On our way to the place, the truck suddenly stopped in the middle of a long uphill road then moved backward a bit. The only thing to happen next was to go backward, endangering the lives of 63 people. I have to admit that I had to pray because I was scared of what could happen. I only breathed comfortably after we got off the tuck and walked about 20 minutes to where we could really be able to sit for real:)

We were surprised that about 200 people were attending in the church where we went. The tribe that hosted this year's gathering are the Bugkalots. The place was San Pugo, Nagtipunan, Qurino, Philippines. This tribe, just like us, was reached out to through the ministry of New Tribes Mission missionaries. Like us, whose tradition was to hunt the heads of people, these people have been changed after being taught with the Word of God. They just had their 50th year celebration of God's faithfulness in changing their lives...from darkness to light.... Most of the leaders in their community are believers, and support any activities that pertain to the spiritual development of the people. Every purok or sitio took a turn in cooking our food. There were 275 participants who attended.

What blessed me too are:

1) There were delegates (Bugkalots) that hiked for two days just to get to the place. One of the speakers shared that one Bugkalot was crying. He found out that, though this girl really wanted to attend, she had no money to pay for her registration, making her unable to attend.
2) The parents in the community had to cancel their work just to attend to our needs. They knew their investment was for eternity and not temporal.
3) The Lord worked out the perfect timing so that our main speaker, whom I was trying to call but could not, arrived the night before the day of his schedule. There were no trips going to the conference site, but that night, two who went out to go to the market met them and accompanied them all the way to the site. They arrived after four hours travel by motor boat, and an hour of hiking up the hill.