missionaryMAC

Happy Shrove Tuesday. I don't know about you, but I'm having pancakes for "brinner." It's hard to believe we're almost into Lent, but alas, the winter 2023 iteration of LAC's biannual regional leadership meeting was last week already, so here we are.  We were supposed  to go to Belize, but an overnight in either Santo Domingo or Miami on the way there and back excited exactly no one. Plan B was Santo Domingo. Admittedly it sounded like a bit of letdown, but in the end I wasn't mad about an extended stay in the heart of the Zona Colonial , or old city center, at all (I was a little mad about the lack of hot water in my shower). I've been there a bunch of times, so I enjoyed the chance to meander its now familiar streets during down times, without the pressure to do ALL the things.  And really, regional meetings aren't about the place. While being offsite   does remove the entrapments of everyday life, allowing for that "in the zone" (p...

What better time to put up an overdue post than while breakfast is in the oven?!  You thought we were done with ones where all the pictures are of my computer screen though, didn't you? Au contraire . The short-term unit had a few COVID-driven ideas that have outlived the pandemic, one of which is Virtual Mission Education . It's the DR* in a cacao pod (the tropical version of a nutshell!): 10.5 hours of evening and weekend Zoom-based content to mirror the on-field experience as closely as possible. In the past it's been open to individuals from disparate congregations; the session earlier this month was customized for Trinity Lutheran Church in Garden City, KS, a congregation that sent an in-person short-term team in September 2022 and returned home on fire to share God's mission in this place with a wider circle.  The pastor's wife handled publicity such that a group assembled in a meeting room at church each day to listen in - anywhere from a handful to severa...

(Continued from " In the winterim... ") I thought we'd have a few hours during which to get settled before we had to leave for Monday afternoon's mural tour - wrong. By the end of the week I sounded like the boy who cried wolf every time I said the words "free time." The Concordia Seminary, St. Louis (CSL) gang kept up with me every step of the way, though, literally in the case of the ~1.5 hr. walk through a colorful downtown Santiago neighborhood.    THEN I made them climb the hill to "Golgotha" - in the dark - for dinner with the single seminarians. This isn't something that regularly figures into mission education, but I wanted the CSL students to see what it's really  like to be a student here.  I arrived before everyone else and sent them this picture as motivation for the hike ahead.  Wesley and Nick. You KNOW it's a good time when the karaoke starts before dinner.  Tuesday had us in Palmar for most of the day: leading Christian...