Well, I’m making history with this newsletter. I’m typing it up, and will e-mail it right from our kitchen table at Hope For The Island! The internet is finally available to us here and I borrowed my friend’s laptop to send this off. We don’t have our own internet yet, but we will soon. I know that this will change things for us here. It’s an answer to prayer because it will make it so much easier to communicate with family and friends of HIF.The HIFLC (Hope For The Island Foundational Learning Centre) school year just ended. Graduation ceremonies for our pre-school were great. It was an exciting day for all of us. Pre-school is a big ministry for us. We had 19 students this year. It gave us an open door to share the Word of God with 19 families. Our teachers have done a wonderful job. Many children can now read and write in English and Tagalog. Many of these children are the first in their family to be educated. They can already recite more Bible verses than I can!Six of our previous students that graduated from HIFLC and were enrolled into the local elementary school became the top 3 students in each Grade 1 class! What a joy for us! We are looking forward to our next school year which starts in June. More students are registering, which opens doors into the community to share the Gospel.The Lord has really been moving in one of our Bible sharing groups in the barangay (village) of Alegria. We continue to and have been meeting regularly with this group for the last 2 years. We weren’t seeing much spiritual growth. Dong, Grace and I recently directed the group back to the basics of faith in Jesus Christ. People have been turned on like a light switch! They were off, and now they are ON! They have finally seen the importance of repentance (Matthew 3:2, 4:17) and what it means to trust in Jesus for their eternal life (Acts 16:31). We know that their lives have been forever changed. They have been given the gift of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ (Ephesians 2:8, 9).Another barangay that has opened up to the Gospel is San Mateo. We held our second outreach there and shared the Gospel to about 25 adults and youth. Meanwhile, the children had their own ministries where they played games, learned memory verses and songs. This is a very remote and poor area that I visited for the first time 6 months ago on a Medical Mission. A week ago, Dinah and I visited a very sick 15 year old named Joseph. He was feverish; vomiting, not eating and had lost a lot of weight. People here in that condition will usually die. We prayed for him, and claimed that Jesus would heal him. Grace & I visited San Mateo this morning and were overjoyed to find out that Joseph was healed! He is now completely healthy, and we are trying to help him put back on the weight he lost by giving him donated vitamins.The Lord has really been blessing us. The Children’s Ministry continues to grow. Our staff is stretched as we minister to the increasing numbers. Each group is excited and ready for us when we arrive in their village. We continue to pray for more volunteers at HIF. The Lord recently provided 4 more workers from a nearby village. They are 4 teenage girls that we have been discipling. They will minister alongside an HIF staff member in their home village.Grace and I have been going through a time in our life where the Lord has been refining us and our marriage. We found out a little while ago that she was refused a travel visa to visit Winnipeg (Canada) with me in May. We know that the Lord is in control, and that it’s just not our time to visit family and friends in Canada. The next test in our life started a few weeks ago. We traveled to a city on another island to visit the doctor for Grace’s first pre-natal examination. She was 2 months pregnant. A boat ride is part of this journey, followed by a grueling bumpy vehicle ride. Grace began to bleed after we got home. We called her doctor. He prescribed medicine and strict bed rest for 2 weeks. We returned to the doctor for a follow up appointment and ultrasound via the same route. Last Monday we road the local ambulance back to the boat (ambulances are nothing like what we see in the Western world.) On the boat Grace was in a lot pain and bleeding heavily. We took an ambulance from the boat straight to the hospital. In the emergency room, all that was in her uterus came out. We were amazed to find that there was no embryo (baby) in her uterus. Her doctor told us that there was not a proper conception and there was never a life growing in her during the pregnancy.It’s amazing how God works. When Grace and I look back at this experience, we realize that we never lost a child. The lessons we learned were invaluable. I got to spend 2 weeks taking care of my wife 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We got to see the best in each other, and we really came to a peace about the outcome of the pregnancy during those 2 weeks of Grace’s bed rest. We have come to a new level in our marriage, and in our trust in the Lord. We also were blaming ourselves for the problems that Grace was experiencing. We thought that we had made mistakes, and that our bad decisions had caused the bleeding. After we found out that there never was a life growing in Grace, the Lord took all the guilt away. We now know that there was never anything we could have done to prevent what happened, or to have fixed the damage to Grace’s womb. This experience has strengthened our trust in the Lord so much. We don’t feel bad about what happened. We know that the Lord has amazing plans for us, and He’s just getting us to a point in our trust and faith in Him, so that we can follow those plans.I pray that you are blessed as we have been this past month. Continue to pray for us as we face many daily challenges. We attest to the fact that your prayers for our safety and fruit from our labor have been answered. Continue to pray for us this month. Derek, Jenn, Makana & Brison finish their Sabbatical May 11 and we look forward to their return.God bless you;Ben and Grace Cooney, and all the HIF staff
