April 15, 2002

Dear Friends:

First, a commercial: The PC(USA) is in financial crisis. The Unified Mission Giving budget, our denomination’s general mission fund, faces a deficit of more than $5 million in 2002. Twenty-seven cents of each dollar in this budget goes for missionary salaries. The Worldwide Ministries Division does not foresee pulling missionaries off the field. But a hiring freeze is in place. And people that retire are not being replaced.

The reasons include the worldwide economic doldrums, dramatic decreases in investment income, increases in designated giving, and the fact that the PC(USA) is between major mission funding campaigns.

We know you believe in what we do as your mission representatives. Here are two steps you can take to help solve this problem:

Give more to the general mission of the PC(USA). We in the mission field can’t do our job without the support and guidance of our colleagues at the General Assembly offices in Louisville. This crisis endangers their salaries as much as ours. Folks in Louisville have set up a special account where you can designate funds to support missionary salaries (see box). This is the
single most effective way to help the worldwide ministries of our church.

Second, an opportunity: We will be in the U.S. from October 19, 2002, to January 13, 2003, and would love to visit you and share our ministry with you. We will be at my parents’ house in Coquille, Oregon. I know I will have at least one trip to Chicago, Illinois, and Madison, Wisconsin, another to Washington, D.C., and another to Louisville, so let me know asap when we can get together. Write me here in Guatemala at Our e-mail in the U.S. will be My parents’ phone number is (541) 396-2748.

Third, a meditation: The Eucharist is very important to us as a family. The next time you approach the Lord’s Table, this brief Communion meditation may be useful:

I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my Spirit within you…(Isaiah 36:25-27)

Lucas, our 9-year-old, described a certain sadness: "I feel bad for Ana Lu at school. She doesn’t have a Dad. And for Eric. He’s an only child. Seems to me they are incomplete."

Seems like most of us are incomplete, one way or another. Indeed, as a community of faith, we are drawn together by the common recognition of our incompleteness.

Ezekiel employs another concept to describe the human condition: uncleanness. I prefer the Spanish word: inmundicia, a richly evocative
term from another era. We are mired in muck, contaminated, burdened with our inadequacy.

Ever felt that way?

We are unclean when we consider ourselves somehow different from, superior to, our enemies.

We are unclean when we exchange the crystal clarity of harmony with the Creator for the idols of the moment.

What are your idols?

Our hearts have turned to stone. We have lost the capacity to feel, to share another’s anguish. We are incomplete.

This is why we gather at the Table. God, our Creator, our Redeemer, offers us a heart of flesh. "I will put my Spirit within you…"

Death’s dominion brings us to this table. In the midst of death, God cultivates within us a longing for life. Throughout all of human history, God calls us to accept the gift of life here and now.

Guatemalan poet Julia Esquivel says that all this—this Table, this Hope—is about the death of death. This bread, this wine reminds us that life, abundant and free, is God’s gift to all.

Here we are, fragile, incomplete, damaged, forgiven, called to build community with others who are fragile, incomplete, damaged, forgiven.

Here we are in the company of Jesus. Here we find that hearts can still be made tender. Here, in Jesus, our deepest longings are fulfilled.

Under the Mercy,

Dennis A. Smith

The 2002 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 236