Dear Ricardo and Beth,

on May 31 we wrapped up our week long Latin American Missionary Family Retreat in Brazil. What a blessing it was to be together, to worship together and learn together with most of the missionaries and their families plus Bishop Kaye Kolde and her husband Dr. Dave and Gerry and Jan Coates from FMWM headquarters.

It was also a great opportunity for all of us to meet new missionaries who are raising support - Gaby & Dalia hope to begin serving in Ecuador in about a year, and Brook, Susan and Shelli have plans to relocate to Panama (and Shelli will be doing some work with VISA in Colombia) by the end of this year...and International Missionaries Juan Carlos & Yaneth who are from Mexico serving in Paraguay. (Please click on their names to learn more about each them.)

Our theme for the retreat was "Expect Great Things from God." To do that, we focused on Learning to Listen...to God, to each other, to ourselves and to culture. It was such sweet time of deepening our relationships with God and one another.

Dr. Darrell Whiteman, a renowned Christian Anthropologist and Missiologist, was our keynote speaker. He was a former professor of several of our team members, including Ricardo. He said he appreciated getting to see his students in action!

In addition to soaking in his teaching and experience and learning from experiential activities, each family received a copy of Whiteman's book "Crossing Cultures with the Gospel." Even though between us we have a shared experience of over 320 years on the field in Latin America.... we can always learn new ways to be more effective cross-cultural witnesses!

It was also a delight to be able to include all of the missionary kids in this retreat. (They get along like cousins!) We are grateful to Wendy Lorenz and her team who led the younger group. It was also a highlight to have three of our college kids join the adults. Two of them grew up on the mission field and had a unique perspective to add to our discussions.

We were all sad that the Assistant Area Director, Thad Roller, and his family were not able to attend due to medical issues. Thad and Nikki did so much in preparing for the retreat that it was an added blow that they weren't able to participate. Please pray for Thad's continued healing and upcoming travel plans.

While we were there, the latest version of the Latin American Area magazine was released. This magazine is an excellent resource. Please click on the picture to open the magazine and then use your mouse to flip the pages and read the exciting stories of transformation! This is what God is doing as we participate with him in his restoration of Latin America. Please feel free to share this magazine with friends and church members.