April 2022 Prayer Needs from Travis and Natasha Phillips

Thank you for praying for our family and our ministry with Ethnos360. We have been in the Philippines for 2.5 months, and on our home island for 2 months. The Lord has been gracious and shown Himself trustworthy through all the transition. We are happy to be feeling settled in our new home. By the time you're reading this, we will have had just sent out a formal update. If you didn't receive the update, please send us an email to be added to our update letter recipients list. Anyway, as we look into the month of April, here are some things you can praise the Lord for and ask the Lord for in our behalf:

Praises:
After four weeks of work, the house we are renting feels like a home and is functional for hosting visitors.

The workers we hired and managed to work on our house were some of our first relationships with locals here, and Travis spent a lot of time with them over the last month.

One of those workers had a 9 month contract at his job which ended a while back, and he agreed to work for us 4 hours per day as a language teacher! He speaks Bisaya very clearly and a little slower than the average speaker, and he enjoyed teaching Travis Bisaya words while they worked together on our house. Travis was hoping he would agree to become our language teacher, and the Lord provided! We started formal language class (4 hours per day, 5 days a week) on March 28.

A German couple in our mission and a Filipino employee of our mission have spent much of February and March orienting us to the city and the province. We thank the Lord for them, and thank the Lord that we are able to get around the city on public transportation and find the things we need pretty easily now.

We're getting to know a few of our neighbors, and build relationships with people who in all likelihood, have not heard the true gospel in an understandable way.

Prayer requests:

That the Lord would give us grace to learn the Bisaya language and understand the local culture, that we would be able to communicate the gospel to our neighbors and others with clarity.

That we would continue to have good health, so that we can participate well in language learning and get out and about with locals.

That we would parent our girls well, and be gracious as they continue to process this transition.

That the Lord would give us opportunity to immerse our girls in the Bisaya language.

That the Lord would comfort our hearts while we miss our family

That we would be good witnesses for Christ in and out of our home.

That the Lord would raise up more missionaries to go into the unreached language groups around us. There are many needs here.

In Christ,

Travis and Natasha