The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow.

Cynthia called me over as I was walking out to the van. She handed me a bundle of bright orange and blue fabric.

“I want to give it to you,” she said.

A couple of days before, I had made the mistake of complimenting her skirt and learned that she had made it herself. “It will fit you,” she said. She was right. A little chagrined, I gave her a big hug and thanked her.

It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change.

Our colleagues in the Philippine office had arranged a week of visits with our partners in Cebu for the whole team and our board. The visits brought us closer to the realities these NGOs are working in every day.

One of the communities we visited was in an area of the city that experienced a major fire several years ago, displacing more than 300 households. Although they weren’t supposed to rebuild, people had returned and recreated their community the best they could. As we walked around the community, the burnt bones of homes and rubble became the structure for new survival. Our partner organization, named after the rays of the rising sun, works to bring hope to these and many other families through healing, education, livelihood opportunities, and advocacy.

People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.

We also learned more about the online exploitation of children and the ways poverty can be manipulated for economic gain. Some of what we heard was very difficult to take in. I am still trying to grasp the magnitude of it.

At the same time, back home, the threat of floods continued to loom. I found myself thinking about how many communities live with instability as part of daily life, and about the question of where hope lies when so much feels precarious.

While you hold it you can’t get lost.

What I keep returning to are the women we met.

One mother had started a used clothing business. Her children live in Japan and send clothes to her, which she washes and resells. Another mother, who lives farther outside the city, had become an entrepreneur in several ways, including through reflexology.

“I love my plants,” she told me.

We talked about her garden and about plants that grow there and here too. The food and the medicine.

She said that some people have a hard time doing reflexology because they feel their clients’ pain.

“What about you?” I asked with curiosity.

“My plants,” she said, smiling. “I ask my plants to help me and they take the pain away.”

I have thought about that conversation many times since.

She is a mother of seven children and has lived through a great deal. What stayed with me was her clarity, her warmth, and the way she spoke about healing as something practical, relational, and alive.

The hope I keep thinking about is not denial, or pretending things are fine. It is something people make, protect, tend, and pass along to each other. Hope in the middle of reality, not outside of it.

Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.

And maybe that is what I am still sitting with from Cebu. Not just the urgency of the need, though that is certainly there, but also the dignity, ingenuity, humor, generosity, and sheer life force of the people we met. A handmade skirt, freely given. A mother building a business across oceans. A healer asking her plants to help carry the pain.

You don’t ever let go of the thread.

I came home feeling inspired, yes, but also challenged—about my own life, our work, and the ways I want to move in this world. In relationship. How to stay open without becoming numb. How to keep doing the work without giving in to despair. How to tell the truth and still leave room for people’s fullness, not just their suffering.

That is the part I do not want to lose. The whole story. That is the thread I want to follow.

—“The Way It Is” poem is by William Stafford.

Photo taken at Taboan Market, Cebu 4/17/26.