Small Steps. Big Faith.

Please forgive the pause in communication recently! Last week, I started feeling bad and Aaron joined me the next day. He was home from Wednesday through Friday! We started with all the typical home remedies: chicken soup, Tylenol, extra liquids and extra rest. However, on Thursday morning Aaron woke me up saying that he could not breathe. So, I  put Aaron in the bathtub with hot water running, hoping the steam might open up his airways while I made an appointment at the local primary care center. We waited an hour past our appointment time, but finally the doctor was able to see Aaron. After listening to his lungs, she said that, indeed, he was suffering from a strong case of bronchitis. Right there in the office, she gave him some medicine to breathe in through this plastic mask. Later that afternoon, we bought the prescribed medicines to nurse him back to health. I am so grateful to live in a country where we have almost immediate access to doctor care and medicine. A...

Sometimes it's hard to live the life of an ex-pat. I don't have my family and old friends with a long history here. I sometimes still miss cultural cues that would help me to know how to respond in certain situations. Being from another country does have its benefits though. A good portion of my staff career, the formative years, were spent in the U.S. and some significant relationships were formed during that time. Those connections can be useful at times when there is a need to resource one of our Spanish staff. Mariló Fuentes is an incredible staff woman who has begun to serve as the Director of the Campus Ministry in Málaga, in addition to serving at our national office in the areas of MPD, Donations and Reimbursements. Recently she has begun to experience a restlessness in life, sensing that God may be calling her to make a change, to look for more training, to pursue even greater growth. I had the privilege to chat with Mariló in February about her situation. A...

Today I traveled by train to Terrassa to meet with Gema Pérez, Spanish staff member who serves on the Area Leadership Team for Ágape Europe. She has gently taken me under her wing over the last few years to check in with me, to see how I am doing, to share life, to pray together. She has been a great encouragement to me as I am still learning how to fit in to Spanish life and culture. Gema (pictured left with her husband, Javier García) and I also attend the same church so I told her about the plans for the Evangelism Module that I will facilitate this fall at church. She encouraged me and gave me several ideas that I hope to implement during this learning opportunity. Thank God for Gema's initiative with me and for the privilege to have an older woman to connect with as I live life and do ministry in Spain. Pray for Gema that God would continue to bless her in her life (she's a new grandmother!) and her ministry.  Pray that God would use our relation...

Last month, I met with Ruth, co-pastor of my Spanish church, and Miriam, director of evangelism at the church and Nacho, our national Ágape Director  to consider how Ágape and our church can continue to grow in partnership to take the gospel to Spanish people. One of the needs that was surfaced during that meeting was an effort to better equip church members in their "natural witness," increase their capacity to initiate one-on-one spiritual conversations and to share their faith with the people around them. The idea we landed on was that Ágape could provide a 4-5 week Sunday School class where members could explore the biblical basis for personal evangelism, prepare their own personal testimonies and also learn about relevant evangelistic tools that they could learn. I am very encouraged about the possibility to facilitate this Module on Evangelism and have prepared a proposal of topics to touch on during this class that will be launched this fall. Pl...

Sometimes life throws curve balls. The month of February has seen the loss of the fathers of two different friends here in Sant Vicenç. In addition, the older daughter of our LDHR Directors required surgery for a serious heart condition. When we pass through a crisis like these, everything comes to a halt for a time. (I know this all too well from experiencing our car accident in 2007  or my miscarriage in 2012 . .) As companions in the journey, we pray, we call, we support....but our lives may not necessarily stop in the same way. Our lives and responsibilities continue. At the same time, while our friends/co-workers are absent, sometimes it creates a hole or a pause in our activities as well while we wait for grief, for logistics, for healing. This pause, this " white space " is something that I experiencd today during our normally-scheduled LDHR meeting on Thursday mornings. Because Rex and Gema, our LDHR Directors were out of pocket, another staff member, Garr...

This week, Donna, my LDHR teammate, (pictured left with her husband) and I met again in Terrassa, the city half way between hers and mine at a restaurant called Viena.                                                                                                             During our weekly meeting, we  catch up on our personal lives, pray together and, this week, to talk through priorities for New Staff Training (NST) over the next few weeks. As we reflected over our time of working together, it is amazing to think about how God has used Donna to bring structure and order and to lay a strong foundation for our incoming staff and, really, our entire ministry, through her leadership and supervision of our...

The question I am asking this week involves partnership : What does teamwork or partnership look like? How do we agree on common objectives and at the same time allow the various partners to focus on different priorities? How do we ensure that each partner looks out for the good of the common objective, rather than merely looking out for himself /herself? (Even as I write this, Aaron is at school talking through some problems with his teacher as he and a couple of classmates develop a group project. One student is pulling more weight than the other two.) This challenge of teamwork is not unique to the 21st century. Even Jesus' disciples struggled with this. Consider this comment from the book of Mark... “Teacher,” said John, “we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.”  “ Do not stop him ,”  Jesus said.  “ For no one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me,   ...