missionaryMAC

When your next team misses their connection and gets in a day later than expected...you blog about the last one, a vision clinic in Lima, Peru, with Our Redeemer Lutheran Church (ORLC) in Wichita Falls, TX.  ORLC is perhaps LAC's most widely traveled congregation, so six of the eight team members had served in at least one other field, sometimes more. Four were part of a vision clinic team  IN Lima in November 2019. This particular trip was a Tuesday to a Tuesday, with a set-up day, four clinic days, and a culture day.  My practice is always to arrive in countries I don't live in the day before a team. I would have been OK with late evening, but all the good flights must have been gone. I was therefore scheduled to arrive around 1 am Monday, which turned into 7 am when all was said and done. I vowed to stay awake so I'd sleep well that night and have energy for prep work Tuesday before the team arrived in the early evening - not hard when a pair of cuties is begging for Tí

This space is one to share life with you, my faithful readers: friends, supporters, prayer warriors, and encouragers. Oftentimes ministry is very much intertwined in that, but in this instance, allow me a brief, celebratory personal note: my sister, Kara, is engaged!  It feels strange to type that, but she is  25, after all. Her fiancée Christian proposed 2/10. (I give him mad props for NOT succumbing to a cliché and doing it four days later on Valentine's Day.) He's an Iowa native, one of six siblings, and a laser technician by trade; I still don't know what that means other than he does NOT play laser tag all day. They met online shortly after he moved to St. Louis for work, and she's been his world - and tour guide for all the best the Lou has to offer - since their first date in December 2021.  I was honored when she asked me to be her maid of honor! I'm an old hat at the  long-distance MOH gig  thing, but "dress shopping" via FaceTime is just not the

I did a TER-RI-BLE   job of photojournalism during the most recent DRLM FORO partnership meeting, but here's a post anyway :) Eight partners, including one first-time congregation and two partner short-term team sending organizations, joined us for a deep dive into education: school outreach + a secondary focus on mission  education.  You can't rightly highlight Concordia Lutheran School in Palmar Arriba without seizing the chance to see it in action, even though it meant an early morning on Friday made even earlier by the fact that our "normal" hotel was unavailable. My alarm regularly goes off at 5:45 am so I wouldn't have minded the 7:15 am pickup time, but somehow I got elected to pick up three partners whose delayed flight got them in around 1 am. More sleep > chapel. We met the rest of the group and our ride to part II of the day's activities in the parking lot of the botanical garden and squeezed in a quick walk while we waited.   📷 Jana Inglehart T

If you're a faithful blog reader, you've no doubt read about "Mission Education" short-term teams.  Therefore, I was honored when Regional Director Rev. Ted Krey asked me to unpack the term and its implications at last weekend's DR FORO. It was somewhat cathartic to finally structure my thoughts around a concept I'm on a quest to make into a household term in LAC, and I'm confident that the resulting presentation is going to have legs far beyond its original purpose. And no, I'm not just saying that because I'm about to turn it into a blog post... :) Defining terms is always a good place to start. By "Mission Education," I mean a type of short-term mission team - equivalent to a VBS team or a medical team or a construction team. That being said, ALL short-term teams are mission education teams. Missionaries are teachers, so whether volunteers know it or not, they're learning about the mission of the Church while doing children's

[Note: this post is a sequel to this one , from December 16, 2018.] It's the 2nd week of Lent. Sitting in church on Ash Wednesday watching the people sitting behind me cycle through the line to get their ashes, I had the following thought: Baptized believers always  bear the cross of Christ; it's just made visible in this rite which the Church observes to mark the start of a new ecclesiastical season.   Ephesians 1:13-14 reads: In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory. It's Baptism! When I was baptized on January 11, 1987, the pastor said these words: "Receive the sign of the cross both upon your forehead and upon your heart, to mark you as one redeemed by Christ the Crucified." Nothing outwardly changed, but from that day forward, I've had the name of Jesu