“I haven’t done anything with my life!”
That’s how I felt when I left church yesterday morning. I was visiting Redeemer Temple in Denver to help promote their men’s retreat. I’m speaking at it later this month.
I was looking forward to hearing the pastor preach, but instead, they had Marty Huber, a visiting missionary from the Philippines, give the message. Everyone called him “Inky,” short for “incubator.” I’m told they call him “Inky” because he was born premature and kept in an incubator for days.
Over thirty years ago, Inky had been attending Redeemer when he was invited to go on a two week medical missions trip working with the poorest of the poor in a garbage dump in the Philippines called Smokey Mountain.
At the time, Smokey Mountain was home to 30,000 people and was notorious for its poverty, crime, filth, sickness and death.
As Inky began to speak, he broke into tears as he described the conditions he found. Every night, three to four children would die in the camp. Sickness, malnutrition and starvation were everywhere. The stench of garbage, human feces, and dead corpses permeated everything.
During that short term mission trip, Inky would go to bed struggling with how God could possibly allow such suffering. Seeing his distress, a missionary challenged him to go up to the top of a hill overlooking the dump and listen for God to speak to him.
Inky did. And in that moment of distress, surrounded by garbage and human misery as far as the eye could see, he heard the voice of God calling him to minister full time in that garbage dump for the rest of his life. “I want you to tell these people how much I love them,” Inky said he heard God tell him.
From that moment on, Inky said the stench and filth of the dump no longer bothered him. Obeying God’s call, Inky set to work serving the poor, sick and dying in the camp. His stories of how God had used him to save the lives of hundreds of children and adults and lead even more to Christ kept me on the edge of my seat. Eventually, Inky and his fellow missionaries started a church at Smokey Mountain. God even used Inky to lead three drug lords to Christ!
Toward the end of his message, Inky showed pictures of several Phillipino’s whose lives he had saved as children. They were young adults now and they were wearing cap and gowns. It was a picture of them graduating from college! Inky and his mission had arranged for the children they were working with to be sponsored by people in America, South Korea and other countries. With this financing, they founded a school for these “children of the dump,” educated them, and sent them off to college.
During his message, I noticed that Inky’s right hand trembled. As he finished, Inky said – almost as a side note – “By the way, last week I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. In a few days, I’ll be flying back to the Philippines.”
Someone said recently that if you want to find Christians and the church at work, just go to any garbage dump in any third world country and there you will see them.
And if one of them has a trembling right hand, it’s probably Inky.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
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2 thoughts on “Inky Goes to Smokey Mountain Garbage Dump”
Hi Herb, Inky Marty Huber passed away last week. He was a one of a kind child of God. I’m sure he is missed by many across the world. He was a beautiful person.
He was indeed!