February 18, 2026

Hi friend,

It’s my last On The Level as I prepare to retire in just a few weeks. These days, I’m constantly flooded with incredible memories of my time with MDS. There are just too many to list. But as I reflect on ten years in this role, I think of:

A ride in 2015 with new MDS’ers Peter and Susan Thiessen who were wondering what exactly God might have in mind? A decade later, we know more than we did. Lots of story to go!
When Frank Hoover said to me in my first week of work, “that’s because we leave our differences at the door for the sake of the mission.”
When we signed a job card for Lorraine in Fort McMurray and she said, “can I become a Mennonite?”
When 5 years after building a house for a very skeptical client in the Yukon, she wrote a letter to us indicating, “I don’t think I ever said thank you in the way I wanted to.”
Being sent out with a volunteer named Shatara (an agnostic) to cut down some burned trees that posed a hazard to our build. I later learned the PD had wanted to ask this volunteer if he had ever met an executive director who was willing to get his hands dirty like that? (He hadn’t.)
Being chauffeured from the Shuswap to Kamloops airport on a Can-Am Spyder driven by Elvira Wiebe (first time she had ever done such a thing).
Canada-US joint board meetings to revise our vision, mission, and values statements.
Laughing - with staff, with board chairs on our regular checkup calls, at project sights, and celebration gatherings.
The countless stories of volunteers who saw God at work. Wow! Just, wow!
The number of times I have been moved to tears by watching MDS (Jesus’ hands and feet) do what we do.

May the story (and the memories) continue!

Ross Penner

Executive Director

MDS Canada

“We are looking forward to MDS volunteers coming”

People in Denare Beach, Sask. are looking forward to the arrival of Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS) volunteers this year.

“When MDS offered to help, it was a no brainer,” said councillor Karen Thomson of the village, which was hit by a wildfire last summer. “There are lots of people with no insurance or under-insured. All they want is to be back home.”

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Best days of my life

“They gave me a job as a kid. I thought I had died and gone to heaven,” Jim Herr said about his first Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS) experience. “You know what they did? They gave me a can of nails and a hammer and asked me to straighten the nails. I thought it was the best day of my life.”

It was the mid-1960s when a church burned about 50 miles from Herr’s childhood home in upstate New York. “MDS went to rebuild that church,” Herr said. “I was maybe nine or ten years old, and I went along.”

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