quick post from my trip to the Philippines

Trip to the Philippines!

(a quick post)

      Recently our family experienced something we have not experienced many times and not at all since our family grew to 8, 9, and 10 children. I left to family.....I was gone for 18 days. This was very difficult, to be away from my family, thankfully the Lord knows each of our personalities and sent me to the Philippines. The Filipinos are such a family centered society so being away from my own family was made endurable by holding other peoples babies and enjoying their families! 

We went with our mission team in Malaybalay to San Isidro College: http://www.sic.edu.ph/ and got to hold a baby while the mothers are making pillows at a workshop hosted by the college. 

Malaybalay is such a beautiful place! We are praying the Lord will send us there!

 Joseph and myself with the Malaybalay mission team: The Romero family, Sarah, Rebekah, and Susanna.
Also in the picture some of our friends from the college and the president of the community at Isla Bonita. There is a special bond between fellow missionaries! What a privilege to get to visit the mission team!

Pictures of the Benedictine College Group that came for Spring Break. What an amazing group! There hearts were so open to follow what the Lord had planned for the week. I learned a lot. I hope to post more in detail....

In the center front row, our wonderful cooks!

Special Thanks!

Especially since we have been able give away so much of it! More than a few of you have sent boxes. They have been full of books, chocolate, religious items, a coffee maker, spatulas, Tony's Cajun Seasoning, cookie cutters, and many other amazing things. Easter has presented us with special opportunities to give away so much. The books have been great. Staff here at the nursing home come to us to see if we have a book, like on the subject of prayer. I gave a copy to a staff member then a few days later she tells me she gave it to her daughter who really enjoyed it and wonders if we have another copy. Still looking.... which is one of the reasons I wanted to give this quick update to say "Thank you!" and that your support is being put to good use! I really need to update what our needs are but books are so great and people seem to really appreciate them. Here is the link to what we can use: http://rooftopmissions.blogspot.com/p/supporting-us-in-missions.html and I will update it soon! Paper products seem to be hard to get items here.

New wheel barrow we were able to buy because of donors sending money for specific needs!

Here we are working on the back board for the Basketball hoop! One is now up and we have visitors to play very often!

    Some of you sent money for the Basketball project, which we are still working on. (I am going to do a big post with lots of pictures on the progress). Some of you sent money for tools and stuff for the Marian Home. This has allowed me to fix and repair things for the Sisters without charging them for materials. I now even have a book with little projects the Sisters and staff at the Marian Home write things that need fixed. If someone feels the Lord is leading them to fund this ministry regularly that would be great. We are praying about how to maybe start a ministry to teach the young people practical skills, like how to repair a faucet (the pipe as it is called here) or how to make bread. 

Please continue to pray and make sacrifices for our ministry here. 

God Bless you all!

Mission Formation: St. Lucia style

North and West from here in St. Lucia, at Big Woods every Wednesday night, people in the community, as well as state-side missionaries in Louisiana, join together for Mission Formation.  This is a wonderful evening of food, fellowship and worshiping together.  At least once a month they have mass and the other weeks they have...well the formation of missionaries.  We give testimonies,sharing what the Lord is doing in our own lives, in the lives of those the missionaries are reaching and then there is a topic pertaining to the missionary life (which by right of baptism we are all called to be) that encourages, teaches, and inspires.  In another word, catechesis. 
Since our experiences from living at the Big Woods last year during Intake (our missionary training time) we have desired to have a night like that in our mission post.  A lot of times our desires are brought to fulfillment but not always the way we had originally thought.  Now that we have been here for a couple of months, we are starting to see the fruition of having a Mission Formation night come to pass.  Instead of Wednesday night our family tradition of Sunday night desert is morphing into Mission Formation.  Praise the Lord!

The Food

Tonight Mia made pineapple upside down cake.  Yum Yum Mia!

The Worship

                                                     

The Testimonies

Jessica sharing a testimony

Our mission formation night is small, well considering our own family still outnumbers those who come, but it is still a blessed time of talking about Jesus and encouraging one another.  We pray to see this grow.  Pope John Paul II on Catechesis in Our Time writes:

"If catechesis is done well, Christians will be eager to bear witness to their faith, to hand it on to their children, to make it known to others, and to serve the human community in every way.”

And, as missionaries, this is always our job; to work ourselves out of a job

Our Busy Life

With the Missionaries of Charity

   We are finally sitting down to give an update on our mission. Thank you all for your support through prayers, money and sending us boxes. We have been here for two months now and as you have seen through our posts we have been learning how to cook the local food and about the people themselves. Now our ministries are getting off the ground and we are keeping very busy.  When the children are not studying they help in the nursery school and visit the residents of several different nursing homes. 


   Our parish has given us lots of activities to be involved in. Three  mornings a week Mark, Lora and our missionary partners Sidney and James take turns going to the parish center were we bring a couple of bags of non-perishable food for anyone in need. We are also available to council and pray with them. It is an amazing gift to us to be able to spend this time with the sole purpose of talking about Jesus to those who are seeking Him.
  
   This parish is not unlike other parishes in that they have dwindling numbers and indifferent youth. With having teenagers ourselves we are getting involved in the youth group, as well as the children’s liturgy. We know that the youth need something more than just “fun activities”. They need Jesus. They need to hear the gospel. Even though they are brought up in Church, they need to come to know Jesus in a personal way.  These are another opportunity for us to involve our own children and teach them to look to others and learn how to serve. Mother Theresa once said

“Thoughtfulness is the beginning of great sanctity.  If you learn this art of being thoughtful, you will become more and more Christ-like, for His heart was meek and He always thought of others.  Our vocation, to be beautiful, must be full of thought for others.” Something Beautiful for God

Feeding the Poor 

   Outside of our parish ministries, we help with feeding the hungry downtown, make home visits to the shut-ins, visit four homes for the elderly, abandoned or disabled (one run by the Missionaries of Charity). Then we have opportunities every day we go out into town to evangelize, pray, give food or money to the homeless and hungry who walk the streets. These are not always seeking Jesus but have not found them to be opposed to us praying with them. And then there are those who we can engage in lively discussions about God.


   As you can see our schedule is very full. Alongside these our home is open in the evening to young boys coming home from school. We have at least two who eat with us every night and join in our evening prayers and thanks to those who donated for the basketball needs we have another avenue to attract more. But this gives the boys a chance to witness a family, eat, and hear the Word of God and learn how to pray. We are not sure where all this ministry will lead too but we are thankful to be able to reach out to these boys and we think of Don Bosco a lot. 

At the St. Lucy Home

   As we have mentioned before the state of the family is in dire need right now. In just one generation this country has gone from a safe haven to gangs and violence. There are many women who have never married yet have 5 children from 5 different fathers. Or a man might have one wife but other women on the side. These women may have children by him but they are left uncared for. These children are then brought up without a father and their moms are trying to survive themselves and so do not look after the children. Boys join gangs with nothing else to do but find trouble. Girls look for love in all the wrong places and the cycle continues. This leaves so many broken people. Children are growing with a lot of anger. Please continue to pray for this country.  

Rachel and Nette @ Marian Home

Privileged to Serve

    Today three of the girls were asked, along with others, to help with the singing as part of a choir at a funeral.

"Privilege, huh?"

    Yep! One of our fellow missionary's Grandma passed and today was the funeral mass. Abi, Ellie, and Esther sang very well. The family was grateful to have music. Speaking of family, our being here, living in community, training with other, is a lot like living as a family. Our lives intertwined, their concerns become our concerns.  So we were glad to go and support our sister and her family and serve!

     When Lora and I got married one of our life goals was, and is, that we would be able to love and serve the Lord  and our neighbor as a family. We believe that putting into practice our Lord's words is one of the most important ways of giving others faith in Jesus.  Missionary life brings so many opportunities to serve and we have not even left our training yet, much less the country!!! As part of our training we are learning to integrate certain things into our life routine. They are Prayer, God's Word, Sacraments, Community, and Service.  Each day we try to examine our day and see where we have put them into practice. I will write more about what this list means practically, later on.

Please pray for our sister Andrea who will be delivering a baby any day now.

Trip to Family Missions Company down South

We had an amazing time in Abbeville, Louisiana. The Family Missions Company (FMC) truly is a people of Praise and Prayer. I will write more about our time there soon, all went well and we feel confirmed in our calling, not because they said "yep, you are called to Missions" when in fact they did not say this at all. In fact they said they would welcome us but only we can decide if God is truly calling us.

Eternal Wisdom

March 2 was the feast day of St. Henry Suso who lived in the 1300's. In a book called "Voices of the Saints" which was given to us by our good friend Ranell Curl (who is not a Catholic) I read the following excerpt:

Eternal Wisdom: When I hide myself, only then do you become aware of who I am or who you are. I am eternal Good, and so when I pour myself forth so lovingly, everything I enter becomes good. One can thus detect my presence as one detects the sun by its brightness since one cannot see its essence.

Servant: Lord, I find within myself a great unevenness. When I feel forsaken, my soul is like a sick person to whom everything is repugnant. But when the bright morning star bursts forth in my soul, all gloom disappears. Quickly, however, it is all snatched away and I am again forsaken. But then after intense sadness it returns. What is going on?

Eternal Wisdom: I am causing it, and it is the game of love. As long as love is together with love, love does not know how dear love is. But when love departs from love, then truly love feels how dear love was.

Servant: Dear Lord, teach me how to conduct myself in this game.

Eternal Wisdom: On good days you should consider the bad days, and on the bad days consider the good days. Then neither the exuberance at my presence nor despondency can harm you. To find joy on earth, it is not enough that you give a certain period of the day. You must constantly remain within yourself if you want to find God, hear his familiar words and be sensitive to his secret thoughts.

St. Henry Suso wrote a book on prayer called "The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom" which is where this quote came from. Some think of saints as people who were perfect, but they were not, they loved God passionately and tried to say "Yes" to His will in all things, and they humbled themselves before Him when they failed. We can all be saints, we are all called to be saints. Let us seek to Love God more and more each day.

Sending in our application....

Whether it is faith or foolishness I don't know but we have made many moves in our short 15+ years of marriage trying to follow God and draw near to Him and His perfect will. We usually sense His calling slightly stirring us, then it gets stronger and things fall into place,(though not everything when we think it should), we make the move or prepare to then God provides as we do. He is such a Good Shepard! There are no mistakes in God's plans, because we are on a journey to the New Jerusalem, and as we humble ourselves(this can be hard) and constantly seek His will He uses all things for His purposes. This is a lead up to saying I sent my application into Family Missions Company on Friday and Lora will finish hers soon so we really asking for prayers for the Lord's will to be done. A few people have asked: "You have not been accepted and you are telling others you are going to be missionaries?" The answer is "Yes". We feel God is calling us to this life change. I have had more than one person tell me that this is not a poll and if you believe God is asking this of you, say "Yes".
I know we have made mistakes in our lives, we have not always waited on God's Providence and at times we have even said "no", but at this stage in our walk with Him we are seeking Him and trying to say "yes" more than any time before....atleast I hope and pray we are.

So please pray for us.

Mark