Archive for the ‘The Higaunon Church’s testimony: From Fear to Faith’ Category
Posted by Lance and Laura Ostman on Friday, March 30th, 2007
“We are the Higaunon (he-gah-oo-non) people. Our name means, “out of the water ones,” which is referring to the mountains that we live in being up “out of the sea.” Our spiritual name is cah-he-lau-one which means, “The unripe ones.” This is referring to when the first Higaunon man and woman were being created by the gods and an evil god came along and stole them away before they could be given the eternal life force.
As a result, we all remained mortal and when we die we go to the place of the evil god who owns us when we die. We are not sure what it is like there, but it is said to be a really terrible place of fear and pain. Death is the most terrifying thing for us.
Our only hope is the tee-noo-mah-nun which means, “THE FULFILLMENT.” This is when one of us receives a dee-wah-tah spirit guide who tells us what laws and rituals must be fulfilled to gain favor with the creator gods. If we can fulfill everything they give us to do, they promise that we will not die but be shown a pathway from this world into the eternal world where the creator gods live. This could be by a basket let down from the doorway in heaven, or a stairway up the side of a rainbow, or even an opening that appears in the side of a mountain.
“Only one person has ever been said to make it to heaven without dying, but he was sent back because he complained that there was no work for him to do there. In many ways, we fear the tee-noo-mah-nun because of what the spirits tell us we have to do, like having to sacrifice our seven year old children to them and going without food for long periods of time. They would have us go on long pilgrimages through the forest in search for a promised pathway to heaven. Many of our ancestors have died during the tee-noo-mah-nun, but we have no other hope. Mostly though, we end up not doing right what the spirits told us to do and so we are told by the spirits that we have failed and won’t receive the promise. But what else can we do? There is no other way!”
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Tags: doorway to heaven, faith, fear, forest, fulfillment, Higaonon, Higaunon, hope, Mindanao, Philippines, river, The Higaunon Church's testimony: From Fear to Faith
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Posted by Lance and Laura Ostman on Friday, March 30th, 2007
“We also fear the bahl-bahl spirits. These are wicked demonic spirits that live in the rocks and trees.
The bahl-bahl are the cause of all sickness and we have to be very careful about what we do so as not to offend them.
Our ancestors told us all about the different things that can make the bahl-bahl spirits angry enough to make us sick. We have to be careful about everything, even what foods are taboo and what foods must not be eaten together.
There are signs from the birds too, which warn us not to do certain things. Some of the old people have dreams which are warning signs of impending danger.
When we get sick, the shamans in the family can tell what spirit made us sick and they know what kind of divination to do to determine what will pacify the spirit and restore the person’s health. “It is really difficult to cure sickness because we don’t have many pigs and chickens which are needed for the sacrifices.”
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Posted by Lance and Laura Ostman on Friday, March 30th, 2007
“If you ask me, we find sickness especially hard to deal with, especially if we have a lot of children because they are always getting sick and needing to be sacrificed for. This is because children easily annoy the spirits by breaking the taboos. It is not always the person who breaks the taboo who gets sick either.
“We are really scared of sickness because we have so much of it. We do not name our children until they are about 2 years old because we know that they will have constant sickness and be likely to die before that age. Sometimes, in order to obey the taboos, we have to bury our children at birth.
For instance if a baby has its umbilical cord wrapped around its neck at birth, that is a bad omen and the baby must be buried. We have to crush up some ginger root and stuff it down the babies throat and then place it in a shallow grave under the house. We don’t like doing this because many times we hear the baby screaming from under the ground for a long time.
“We also have to worship and obey our ancestral spirits because they control every part of our lives. They are the ones who control our crops and give power to the tribal leaders and who also help us catch wild deer and pigs.
Without their help our crops would not grow and we would experience floods, storms and earthquakes. They also help us defeat our enemies and keep away warring neighbors.”
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Tags: ancestral spirits, crops, earthquake, fear, ginger, obey, sacrifice, scared, sick children, sickness, spirits, storm, taboo, tribal, umbilical cord, war, wild deer, wild pigs, worship
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Posted by Lance and Laura Ostman on Friday, March 30th, 2007
“When the missionaries first came to our place, we were terribly afraid of them and we ran away when they came near us.
“We had been told by our parents that white people were demons in disguise who would befriend us and then later on, cook us all in a great big pot and eat us. Our spiritual leader told us that it was all right for these particular white people to live with us because the dee-wah-tah spirits had told him so, but we remained very suspicious for some time.
“At first we did not understand the missionaries because they could not speak our language and when they tried to speak they seemed to babble like children. Eventually, they learned to speak properly and many of us began to like them being around because they helped us with our sicknesses and other problems.
“Others of us hated them because we blamed some of our sicknesses and deaths on the fact that the spirits were angry about us letting the missionaries live with us. “We did wonder, though, how their medicine could sometimes overcome the spirits, but we just thought that it must be because the spirits didn’t have power over white people. Somehow the spirits did not seem to be able to control the missionaries.
“We thought that the missionaries might give us lots of goods so that we could live long and gain favor with the gods. We were a bit angry sometimes when the missionaries would not give us all we wanted and we made up schemes that we could use to get as much out of them as possible. We would give them false information and try to make them feel obligated to give us things and do things for us out of pity. After all, they had so much more than we did.”
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Tags: afriad, angry, culture, demons, diwata, false information, goods, hate, hatred, language, missionaries, obligation, white people
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Posted by Lance and Laura Ostman on Friday, March 30th, 2007
“We often wondered what the missionaries purpose really was.
They didn’t try to do anything bad to us like our ancestors had told us they would, and they didn’t gain anything from being with us except a lot of problems that we created for them. Their children played with our children and we became fond of them like they were our own. They caught our sicknesses and their children even got malaria.
“They missed their families from where they came from and they had to put up with the constant threat of rebels attacking our village. Some of the village leaders were jealous of them and tried everything they could to harass and drive the missionaries out but still they stayed and we wondered why.
“After the missionaries had lived in our village for nearly two years they told us that they had a message for us from the creator’s book and that they wanted to teach it to us if we would gather twice a week to listen. Our chief told us that we should listen. Many of us were skeptical and did not want to, but most of us attended because the missionaries were no longer strangers to us and we were curious to hear what they had to say.
“We were amazed that their stories were about the creation and the beginning of the world because our stories are about that, too. But unlike our stories, their stories seemed to explain the truth about the way things are in the world. The stories told about how Satan lies to people to get them to follow him and how that what he promises doesn’t come true and we knew that this was describing our dee-wah-tah spirits because that is exactly what they are like.
“We started to get angry with the dee-wah-tah spirits and some of us talked about abandoning our old ways to try and get away from them, but the missionaries told us not to make any decisions until we had heard the whole message. “As we listened week by week to the story from the Creator’s book, we were amazed at all we heard and began to believe that the way in this book must be the way that our ancestors had searched for but because they did not have the book they didn’t know the truth.
“Then we heard the story of Moses and the creator’s law and how we could not keep it. The Creator gave us His laws so that we could know that we are guilty of offending Him and we understood then why we were lost. We could see so clearly the lie that the dee-wah-tah spirits had controlled us with because they always told us that it was possible to gain the creator’s favor by keeping the laws that they gave us.
Now we knew that the Creator wasn’t waiting for us to keep laws but rather to believe in the way written in His book. “So we pleaded with the missionaries to tell us how we can be saved from the creator’s wrath on our sin. What if we died and our sin was still not dealt with?”
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Posted by Lance and Laura Ostman on Friday, March 30th, 2007
“After the missionaries told us the story of the birth of the promised Savior Jesus Christ, and also his death and resurrection on our behalf, most of us said that we were now trusting in the Lord Jesus as our Savior.
“A few were still not convinced but most of us said we were. We were so happy! All we could talk about was what Jesus had done for us and how we could now see the truth so clearly.
“We were amazed at the darkness and depth of sin that we were in before. To think that we actually worshiped God’s enemy thinking that we were on the right track! Some of us who had dee-wah-tah spirits living in us actually felt them leave as the Lord Jesus came to live in us. It was such a joyful time in our lives to be set free from the terrible bondage that the spirits had held us under through fear.
“The missionaries were happy too. Now we understood why they stayed with us and put up with so much. We were overwhelmed at all that God had done for us.”
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Posted by Lance and Laura Ostman on Friday, March 30th, 2007
“We were sad about our chief because even though he had encouraged us to listen, he turned away when he realized that we were no longer going to follow his dee-wah-tah spirits.
“He tried to scare us with threats from the dee-wah-tah, but it was too late. We belonged to the Lord now and we told him that we would not follow him or his spirits any more. He tried really hard to draw us away from listening to the missionaries.
“It wasn’t long before the Lord stopped him by allowing him to die of a throat disease where he could not talk anymore. He died without being able to draw anyone away from the truth. We were really sad but we knew that God was in control. Some of the spirits came back and tried to reclaim us, but when we called on the Lord they disappeared.
“We were really eager to learn more and so the missionaries continued to teach us. We were so excited about our new life in the Lord and it was not long before there were no more sacrifices in our place and no one was following the old ways. Most of the village shamans and spirit men had turned to the Lord so even if anyone wanted to follow the ways of the ancestors there was no one to lead them. Those who wanted to continue in the old ways moved away to other places where the people were still doing that.
“As we learned more about the Lord, we became concerned about our fellow Higaunon in other villages. We questioned the missionaries about why it took so long from when Jesus told His followers to take the message to the whole world to actually bringing it to our place. We wanted to know what happened to our ancestors who never heard.
“Anyway it seemed to us that 2000 years was a really long time to bring the message to our place and we didn’t want it to be a long time before it reached other Higaunon villages. So we began to discuss and pray about how we could take the message of salvation to the rest of the Higaunon people.”
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Posted by Lance and Laura Ostman on Friday, March 30th, 2007
“My husband Monsing was the first one to go to another village to teach the message of eternal life.
“He learned from the missionaries how to teach and they gave him pictures and the stories in Higaunon. Monsing went to a village, a 2 day journey away and he was able to teach there often.
“After a while though he started getting visits from insurgents in that area who threatened to kill him if he did not stop teaching. Quite a lot of people were turning to the Lord and they did not like losing their followers. Monsing himself had been one of them before he turned to the Lord.
“Monsing really loved to teach the Gospel and he would not stop because of their threats. In 1985 they killed Monsing but the church there kept growing.”
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Posted by Lance and Laura Ostman on Friday, March 30th, 2007
“About three years after Monsing was killed, there were quite a number of Higaunon men from our village involved in the ministry of God’s Word. Some of them had gone to other areas following Monsing’s example and there were believers now in each of those places.
“Others, including myself, were leading the church in our village and we often had conferences in our village with believers coming from the other outreaches.
“As the missionaries continued to teach us from the word of God and we were exposed to deeper truths about how we as God’s children ought to conduct our lives, we began to notice quite a number of our people openly reject this teaching.
“This was especially evident in situations where people wanted to continue on with sinful practices. To our surprise when they were confronted with sin like continued drunkenness or adultery, they not only rejected the exhortation but they got mad at those dealing with them and they began to slander the church and even persecute those who wanted to follow the Word of God. What tended to happen then is their believing relatives would take sides with them and this caused a lot of strife and division in the church.
“Through these things we have seen that not all those who claimed to be believers in the beginning were really genuine. Many simply followed the majority, but their motive was wrong. Then, because they did not have the Spirit of God to enable them to follow the Word of God, they turned away from it. Some of them have even gone back to the old spirit worship and others have joined false cults. We are sad about this but not discouraged because it is just like the parable of the sower.
“We have also learned that, though our old ways were broken by the introduction of the Word of God, many of our strong Higaunon family relationships still have a strong hold on those of us who are not making a determined effort to follow the Word of God.
“Family loyalties and the pressure of expected cultural behavior from our unsaved relatives and tribal leaders is often the cause of us choosing to deny the Lord rather than follow Him. We are sad about this because, on the one hand, we are so excited about our new life and all that the Lord has done, but then, on the other hand, there are so many of us that are still very weak in standing up for the truth.
“We have also struggled with the idea that we are not all equally as strong in the Lord because, in the tee-noo-mah-nun before we were saved, the whole group had to be equally committed for it to succeed.
“We know that this is not how it is in the Lord, but, because the group feeling is so ingrained in us, we get easily discouraged when some members of our church choose to follow their own selfish desires. We feel as if it is us doing it. We hope that anyone who reads this will pray for us in this area because we want things to go smoothly but there always seems to be problems.”
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Posted by Lance and Laura Ostman on Friday, March 30th, 2007
This is Tahak sharing during one of their weekly discussion times. They were talking about their problems and suffering. Read what he has to say:
“As we have continued on with the Lord we have begun to learn that it is through problems and suffering that God causes us to grow. We can see so many areas where we have grown in our spiritual understanding because of hard things.
“One difficult thing that happened was about 13 years after the church was first established in our place, our main church leader committed adultery with the wife of one of the deacons.
“When it happened it was as if we completely forgot our faith and we reverted right back to wanting to deal with it the way we would in our old ways. Adultery is the worst form of sin in Higaunon culture and it is punishable by death if the person doesn’t flee quick enough.
“Those believers who belonged to the ladies’ family wanted to take revenge on the family of the man who committed the adultery with her. It took a long time for us to get sorted out and we nearly ended up killing one another, but the Lord used lots of situations to show us that we were all walking in sin.
“Like when the river flooded really badly and we couldn’t cross it to go and take revenge and the Lord used that to speak to us. Since that time we have actually seen a complete reconciliation of everyone involved. This was absolutely unheard of before we were saved. We learned so much about God’s forgiveness and realized that there are still many things in our ways that are opposed to the Creator’s ways.
“This is another area that we hope that our fellow siblings in the Lord in other places will pray for us in, because we tend to be so stubborn when it comes to issues between family groups.
“We usually get along fine within the bounds of one family group, but when an issue comes up between two or more family groups we are so easily tempted to be loyal to our own family group even if they are walking in sin! We need a lot of prayer in this area.
“Another area that is affected by our family relationships is the church leaders. This happens when the church leaders are having to deal with an area of sin in someone’s life and if there is a church elder who is from that person’s family group, he is expected by his family group to take sides with the person being dealt with.
“This often causes a problem between the church leaders. If the church leader takes sides with the person because of his family group then there is a rift in the fellowship of the leaders. If the leader stays faithful to stand with the church leaders in dealing with the person’s sin, then there is a lot of strife and problems between him and his family group.
“Either way, it seems that this area of family relationships is something that Satan is really trying to use to destroy the fellowship of the Higaunon church leaders and teachers.
“We think that Satan is doing this because there are so many new groups of people who are asking to be taught the truth these days that he want’s to get rid of all the teachers and leaders so that there will be no one to tell them”.
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Tags: adultery, church growth, church leaders, division, reconciliation, revenge, Satan, Spiritual growth, The Higaunon Church's testimony: From Fear to Faith
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Lance and Laura Ostman Helping to equip the Higaunon People of North Central Mindanao 