Remote Discipleship: Claudine’s Story

A friend I’ve never met in person

Claudine is a colleague of mine from the Philippines, and here’s the strange part: I’ve never met her in person. Not once. We work fully remote. For a long time I wondered how you could possibly be a witness to someone you only ever see on a screen.

What I learned is that the method doesn’t change, even across an ocean. As her manager I had regular touch points with her, and over time you build a real connection through all the small, consistent moments of showing up.

Then a hard season came for Claudine. She was carrying a heavy load for her family, and it started to spill into her work. She came to us, a bit frightened I think, and told us what was going on. And this was the moment that mattered. She’d had employers before who let her go the minute life got complicated. We didn’t. We gave her room to breathe and we stood by her, and that one decision changed everything between us. Almost overnight, she stopped seeing us as just her bosses and started seeing us as friends.

Once we were friends, she opened up, and we could meet her honestly in what she was facing. Because it’s simply who we are, we’d offer perspective, and we’d share the scriptures that hold us steady in our own hard times. Claudine is a woman of faith but had never had the Bible opened up to her in quite that way, and she said more than once how much it comforted her.

Then came the questions. Real ones, about God, about herself, about how to carry what she was carrying. And one day Claudine asked us the question I’ll never forget. She asked if we would teach her the Bible.

So now we do. We’re walking through Scripture together, a Catholic woman in the Philippines and her Adventist colleagues on the other side of the world, none of us ever in the same room. God didn’t need us to be. He just needed us to stay.