Update – Spring 2009

Dear LBBC Friends and Family,

The Lord has been incredibly gracious to Bing and I over the 10 months since we saw you last. Things have happened so fast that it's hard to believe that it's really been that long.

As you know, we spent our first few months in the US finishing wedding preparations, getting married, job hunting, and moving to South Carolina. During that time we found an apartment across the street from Bob Jones University (close to Edith & Maria!) and have begun to put some Filipino touches in it to make it feel more like home. I took a job as a 9^th grade high school history teacher and am reminded every day how blessed LBBCA is to have students who love the Lord. Yes, I remember well that they're far from perfect (sorry, guys!), but I often deal with students who are MUCH harder than ANY I ever encountered there.

Bing, on the other hand, is still looking for work.She occasionally has opportunities to babysit for some of our friends from church, but it's hard for her to do anything far from the house because she doesn't yet have a driver's license. We recently got her learner's permit, though – Pray for us and the people of Greenville!

Another way the Lord has really blessed us is through our church here in Greenville. When we returned to Greenville, Bing joined Heritage Bible Church. Because they were my sending church, there were many people who were very eager to meet Bing and we've made a number of new friends there. Shortly after she joined, we were asked to help lead a Sunday School class of young married couples. Right now there are about 20 couples in the class and it's still growing!

There was at least one major disappointment for Bing, though: The winter came and brought freezing temperatures (which Bing is NOT a fan of), but Bing didn't get to see any snow. We had almost entirely given up hope until early March when a major cold front blew through the South and brought freezing temperatures and SNOW! When Bing realized what was going on, she spent about an hour looking out the front window as the snow came down. It was bad enough that school was canceled the next day so Bing and I went outside and build her first-ever snowman. He wasn't very big, but we were proud of him!

So yes, we've had some great times since we've been back, but we really do miss all of our family there at Lighthouse. You all hold a special place in our heart and we look forward to being reunited with you as soon as the Lord allows. If you ask Bing, she'd like to bring a baby back to visit when we come. We'll see…

Thank you for your continued prayers and friendship!

Love,

Nathan & Bing Gallion

Proof that nerdiness is a spiritual gift?

Okay, so I have a confession. I'm not only a missionary and a teacher, but I'm also a computer nerd. Yes, it's true. I spend many of my fleeting free minutes cruising the web for cool programs that will help me more effectively.


What you might not realize is that this is done with a purpose: To glorify God. (Sometimes more directly than others, I'll admit) Recently I've come across a few programs that are great assets to my ministry here. Not all of them are equally exciting for the non-nerd, though, so I'll just mention one briefly today: Paint.NET

For a number of years the only option available to nerds to manipulate photos was an extremely expensive ($699) program called PhotoShop. Yes, it's a great program. I, however, am a missionary teacher who doesn't feel like plunking down that kind of cash for a program I don't even know yet. Because I live in the Philippines at present I could always take a five minute ride to Pirates R'Us and pick up a copy for about $1.25, but I can't do that in good conscience.



There's great news for guys like me, though: Freeware.



At present there are at least two PhotoShop-like programs available for free download: Paint.NET and GIMP. It's true that they lack some of the advanced features PhotoShop offers, but for the $699 price difference, I'm willing to make the sacrifice. Personally, I've been using Paint.NET for a little over a month now and have been loving it.



Instead of giving an extensive review of the program, though, I'm choosing rather to share some images I've worked with recently. Take a look. If you're patient, a little adventurous with the computer, and need to play with some images, give it a try!

www.getpaint.net

Why You'll Be Thrilled to Meet Bing...

(In case you missed it, a number of pictures of Bing are posted lower down on the page. Check them out if you haven't already, then come back and read this post!)

As promised: A second post within 24 hours (or so)!

And also as promised, it's about Bing.

I have to admit that when I first met Bing in 2005, I wasn't interested in her at all. Someone made a passing comment about me hooking up with the high school teacher as a joke right before I met her. When I actually did, I saw a very quiet girl who seemed very shy about having a random white guy walk into her classroom. (And at the risk of sounding extremely shallow, she had a haircut that wasn't my favorite. I have pictures to verify this so I remember it clearly.)

I've since learned that when I went back to the US that year, she got teased a lot by some of the people on staff at the school here about me since I was coming back to work in the school. She wasn't amused. In fact, she wasn't excited at all about the idea of marrying a foreigner. Why, they don't even know how to speak Tagalog, much less Ilocano! (Her dialect, in case you were wondering.)

When I arrived here I was teased a lot too, but still had no interest. So what turned things around? Simple:

I was assigned to work with her.

Bing and I were assigned to teach high school together. As most teachers can attest to, teachers see each other's real personalities. We see each other when we're nice, when we're upset, when we're just plain cranky, and everything in between. In addition to that, both Bing and I worked many, many long hours at the school. Sometimes we'd be there for 13-14 hours in a day working on various projects so we'd talk about pretty much everything imaginable.

During this time, I slowly started to realize that maybe there was more to Bing than I had originally thought. Yes, she was quiet, but there was a lot going on in her mind. In fact, she often disagreed with decisions that were made but decided some things weren't worth getting bent out of shape about. Had I mistaken silence for prudence?

I was also consistently amazed by her ability to remain calm and in control no matter what a student (or teacher, or administrator, for that matter) did. That in itself ought to win her some kind of award.

Bing would also even frustrate me sometimes with her frugality ,("What, you're only going to print on half of that paper?"), which is something considering that many of you have laughed at me about how frugal I can be.

In addition to these things, Bing was always kind, an amazingly hard worker, would always fulfill her promises, and was loved and respected by administrators, teachers, and students alike. Not to mention the fact that her hair had grown out.

Then one day I got a look at her and realized that she was beautiful in every sense of the word - both in attractiveness and in spirit. That was enough for me.

Obviously there was a little more to the process than that. For one, Bing had to get over the whole "dating a foreigner" issue, but I think that one is taken care of.

In short, I'm totally confident that if you know me well enough to be reading this blog, you'll thoroughly enjoy Bing. She's a high quality woman. Actually, I'd be more worried about whether or not I'm a high enough quality man for her. Now there's an entirely new question...

Thoughts? Questions? Comment away!

Bing Who?

Bing.

Many of you know her name, and that’s about it. Some of you even know that we’re seriously looking toward marriage, but that’s about it. I doubt that many of you even know her last name (not that it’s going to be the same in a year). This is my fault, but it’s intentional. Let me explain.

I’m currently a short-term missionary with GFA which obviously means that I need to abide by their rules and regulations. One of their policies is that short-term missionaries aren’t supposed to date nationals. Despite that policy, I was given an exception in order to date Bing, but decided to keep things quiet due to the facts that 1) Not all short-termers are given this opportunity and I doubt mine should attract undue attention, and 2) It’s probably best to keep things quiet at the beginning of a relationship just in case things don’t work out. (I know that’s not a policy I’ve followed in the past, but I decided to err on the side of prudence this time)

Unfortunately, all of this means that there are some of you who have only just recently learned about Bing and are a little bit in shock to learn that I’m very near getting engaged to her. I’ve received e-mails over the last month or so saying things like, “Nathan are you sure about this?” While I really appreciate the fact that you’re looking out for me, the fact is that we’ve been dating for almost ten months now and we’ve spent most of our waking hours together since I’ve been here. (We put in some looong days at the school) I didn’t just run out to Vegas and get hitched to a girl I just met or anything.

So while I understand that many of you have been caught off guard by this, but I can assure you that you’ll like Bing. Maybe even more than you like me after pulling this one…

Feel free to e-mail me your thoughts or add them in the comments section below. I’m eager for input on this one.

Within the next 24 hours I’m going to post again to let you know why I love Bing and why you should too. See you then!

Pictures of Bing!

Vacation Bible School = Another demonstration of the Grace of God

Imagine for a second that you are holding a microphone at the front of a room filled with 140 sugared-up children between 2-12, only about half of which speak English. Now try to make an announcement - lead a song - tell a story. Sounds like fun, right? That was the fun I got to have over and over again last week during Vacation Bible School. And yes, you read that right. 140. Let me tell you, that was some hard work. We had a great crew of teachers and helpers from the church here for the whole week, but it was all we could do to stay afloat. God is good, though, all the time. We saw His grace again and again as we faced such challenges as:

• Unscheduled construction being done on the rooms we intended to use
• Lack of providers for snacks (a major problem with 140 kids!)
• Occasional MIA helpers
• Language barrier (for me, anyway)
• The fact that I've never directed VBS before
• Etc., etc., etc.

The best part of the week came on Thursday. The lesson that day was about salvation so when one of our girls finished teaching her lesson she asked her class if any of them wanted to know more about how they could be saved. Every hand in her class went up (except for the two kids from our church. Either that means they're already saved or we need to be doing a little better on the home front. I vote for the former.).

As you can imagine, having 25 kids deciding they want counseling about salvation put an immediate strain on personnel, but it was a great strain to have. In the end, 8 of those kids make professions of faith and we saw a number of our students show up this morning at Sunday School.

At the end of the week I had a massive headache and slept in late the next day, but it was a very profitable week.

By the way, I should publicly thank Calvary Baptist Church of Willard for sending us their VBS material from last year. They also sent us their VBS offering from last year which was used in its entirety to fund our VBS here. Their kindness was yet another demonstration of God's grace to us. Thank you all!

And yes, believe it or not, I do play guitar now. Sort of.

Interesting

I ran across this online. It really doesn't have anything to do with the Philippines, per se, but I found this interesting.

***Your Linguistic Profile:***
55% General American English
20% Dixie
15% Upper Midwestern
5% Midwestern
0% Yankee

I am a little bit curious as to what living in the Philippines for two years will do to my linguistic habits. There are some rather unique ways of saying things here, such as:

"For a while" = "Hold on for a second"
"I'll just throw this" = "I'm going to throw this away, then come back"
"I'll alarm my phone" = "I'm going to set my alarm on my phone"
"They transferred" = "They moved (from one house to another)"

My personal favorite from this short (and woefully incomplete list) would have to be "I'll alarm my phone." I often laugh with my friends about this one by asking "Did you have to sneak up on it when you alarmed it?"

Language can be a really funny thing!

Mid-January Update

I promised in my last mass e-mailing that I'd try to post more pictures and a message from Crossroads as soon as possible. Well, ASAP over here means something more like "I'll try to get to it within the next two weeks." I know that it seems impossible that I could actually have THAT much to do, but it's true. As I type this, my to do list is sitting next to me and has about ten things that I need to do and at least five of them are major projects. Makes me wonder how I'm going to adjust when I get back to the US. Guess I'll have to teach or something. That always kept me pretty well occupied... Anyway, since many of you are reading my regular update e-mails there's no reason to rehash all of that information again on the blog. You might, though, be interested to see more of the things I'm doing and people that I'm spending time with. Hope they're at least a fraction as interesting to you as they are to me.


Ah, yes. The finer things of life: Friends and Starbucks. Or maybe Starbucks and friends. One of those orders. Recently five of us here at the church spent two days in Baguio, which is a city in the mountains a few hours north of here. Because of the elevation, Baguio is much cooler than Manila so I was actually able to pull out my fleece. Not much call for that here, but I'm glad I brought it. Anyway, the two girls in this picture are Bing (on the right), and En-En. I teach with Bing at the school and En-En is a doctor at one of the local hospitals. Nice folks and good friends. And since both like coffee, we can fellowship together with no trouble.

While we were in Baguio, we toured around Camp John Hay, which used to be an American Army base. These days it's used as a tourist attraction complete with golf course, butterfly haven, expensive resort, etc. I'd have to say that it's pretty impressive overall. One of the amusing things we found there was the "Filipino-American Friendship Garden." Nice to know that we can be friends, I suppose. Rob & I figured we'd celebrate with a picture.

Yup. butterfly haven. Pretty cool. They actually put one on my nose and I got a picture of it, but the legs are really, really strange to feel in your nose and my face lets that be known. That and the fact that it shows a huge double chin both contributed to my choice not to post it here. (Don't worry, I'm not putting on weight here. I've actually lost about 15 lbs since I came. Sweating does that.)

Here's the mini-golf. More importantly, I should point out Jorge. Jorge is the member of the Gallion-Asuncion household that you're probably not familiar with. He is Robbie's younger brother (15) and will shortly be heading to Canada to be with his parents. There have been some paperwork issues they've had to face in order to get him out of the country, but it's been a blessing because he's a good kid and a lot of fun to live with.


And yes, I am still ministering here. Life isn't all coffee, butterfly havens, and mini-golf. Occasionally, they actually let me do some real work . This is a picture from the Crossroads conference (as you can tell from the banner behind me). The first night of the conference I preached a message entitled "Glorifying God in Trials" from John 11. (I know some of you are laughing about my John 11 message, but I promise that I reworked it!) Right now we're in the process of planning Crossroads '07. If you're interested, I'm sure we can find a way to use you here. Make your plans for December!

Until next time!

More Pictures...

Well, it's happened. After doing pretty well for the first two months of being here, I've fallen extremely behind in my blogging. I suppose that this was inevitable because, after all, there are more things to do over here than there is time to do them. That being said, however, it is still my desire to keep in touch with those of you who want to keep in touch with me. It's true that you may not be quite as dark as most of my friends, but you're still my friends (and/or family) just the same.

There is plenty to write about, to be sure, but there's so much it's hard to know exactly where to start. Because of that, I'm posting a number of pictures this time around and commenting on them. Hopefully I'll be able to post (and e-mail) more information about life here soon.


One of the crazier experiences I've had as of late happened at the beginning of November. The high school was scheduled to go on a two day retreat to a camp a few hours away and the youth pastor of the church was scheduled to be the speaker. The topic of the retreat was "The Lordship of Christ" and the whole thing was designed to encourage our students to live their lives in light of the fact that Christ is Lord over every part of them.

All was well until two days before the retreat when Robbie (the youth pastor) came down with a serious stomach virus. Despite this fact, he decided that he was going to plan on attending and speaking until the day before we were to leave when he finally decided he felt too bad. At that point, the principal decided that I would be the (second)best man for the job and asked me if I'd be willing to speak at all three sessions. That led to a late, late, LATE night that involved a lot of prayer and caffeine.

Despite the limited preparation and the total change in plans, the Lord used that retreat in the hearts of many of our students. Many of them made decisions to get rid of things in their lives or to be more consistent in their walk with the Lord. God always knows what He's doing, even when it seems like things are totally out of control.


As most of you probably know, my primary reason for being here is as a teacher / troubleshooter at the school. This has kept me incredibly busy lately doing everything from speaking in chapel to counseling students to authoring documents related to school improvement. At times, all of this has been frustrating, but events lately have been very promising and it looks like I'll be able to help out a lot. Yes, I know that's vague, but I want you all to know that I'm really being given the opportunity to help without too many specific details. If you're really curious, you can e-mail me about this. I'll probably still be vague, but you never know...

Imagine that it's the middle of July and the temperature has consistently been somewhere in the 85-90 degree range. One morning you wake up to go to work and realize that your neighbor has put up Christmas decorations. Within a few days, the rest of the street has done the same and people are playing Christmas songs everywhere you go. Before long, you get caught up in the craziness and decide to join the Christmas cantata at your church even though the church will have to be air conditioned while it is performed.

That's pretty much the way that I feel right now. I know that it's December 21 today, but my brain can't accept that it's almost Christmas time. Everything is just...wrong. Now before you pity me too much, I should tell you that I am still celebrating Christmas and am doing just fine with this whole thing. That doesn't stop it from being strange, though.

My housemate offered to take me to a PBA (Philippines Basketball Association) double-header on Christmas day, but that would have just been a little too much for me. Instead, I'll be heading across Manila to spend the day with another missionary family (The Berreys, if you're reading this, Thad and Chaya) I don't know exactly what we'll be doing, but I'm sure it will be suitably Christmasish.

(By the way, the picture was taken after the Christmas cantata this past Sunday, in case you were wondering.)


Speaking of things that just don't seem right, the above picture was taken at a performance of The Sound of Music put on by - get this - a Filipino acting company. As I'm sure you are right now, I was intrigued when I heard about this. Imagine a musical that takes place in Austria in the 1930's put on by an entirely Asian cast complete with the accent and all. (Well, some of them still had their Filipino accent, anyway)

This may surprise you, but I have to admit that I rather enjoyed the production. It wasn't perfect and it was far from the Julie Andrews version, but it was also far from the worst production I've seen. (That honor goes to an all-white cast in an Ohio community theater. I blame the white people.) In short, I have to recommend that if an opportunity such as this one comes your way, you should take it. Now I'm waiting for the all-German version of Fiddler on the Roof...


Let you read all of this and think that I'm just sitting around and spending time with friends, going to musicals, and sipping coffee, I should take a moment to alleviate your fears. Let me say this clearly: I am totally swamped right now. I have more work than I have time to do it in. This week I've been at the church office until after midnight twice and there's a good chance that will happen again either tonight or tomorrow. Crazy situations come up frequently that nobody could have possibly planned for and threaten my time designated for the things I have planned for. Yes, I occasionally run out for coffee or something with friends, but not anywhere near as often as I'd like.

Still, even though these things are all true, I love being here. This is definitely where the Lord has called me to be and that fact encourages me daily. So yes, I need your prayers. Yes, your e-mails are encouraging, and yes, I still miss you.

If all goes well, I'll be sending an updated e-mail out shortly. It will probably cover many of the things posted here, but I want to make sure that you are all aware of what I'm up to. In the meantime...

Merry Christmas!