November 29, 2007

"Be of good cheer! With your letters and support you have loved us well this year! The Lord has been near keeping His promises faithfully."

Greetings from the Wehmeyer Family in Yucatan, Mexico!

May the grace, mercy and peace of our Lord be with you all!

Part of the joy of Christmas is that we exchange far more letters than usual. I really look forward to hearing from family and friends scattered around the world. Your Christmas cards are like great signs of encouragement to us, so we keep them on display for several months after New Years Day. (I print out email Christmas cards and tape them up with the others, so emails are welcome too!) This year we will all be together in Merida. Valerie flies in on her birthday, December 15; she will be 23. Her Christmas wish is to return to Calcutta this coming summer for another internship there. Prayerfully, she will finish her master’s degree in Latin American literature by Christmas 2008. Kristen will arrive, the Lord willing, on December 20, having done very well in her last semester at college.

Martha and I are again serving the Door of Salvation Church, teaching at the seminary, and directing retreats at the Getsemani Retreat Center. Our return to Mexico after a year of home assignment was somewhat difficult because we “camped” at the retreat center for several months as we looked for a new house. David especially did not like that too much, as he was too far away from his friends. Now we are living in Chuburna, one of the older neighborhoods of the city, but quite close to several of his buddies.

We are very grateful for the wonderful help that was sent to Tabasco where the flooding was terrible. The churches in Yucatan sent great amounts of food and water, but even now there are appeals for all kinds of cooking utensils, bedding, and light furniture because everything was so badly contaminated by polluted water standing in the houses for several weeks. All in all, the people behaved quite well as the authorities were actually more efficient than usual and very little looting was reported. But perhaps this should not surprise us, because Tabasco has the highest percentage of Christians in the whole of Mexico.

This weekend I have a four-day retreat with five students from the seminary. They are fourth-year students and asked for a spiritual retreat because, they said, “we have not learned anything about spirituality while we have been here.” I remember experiencing the same thing in my years at seminary. The reason is that seminaries are designed to be academic institutions, and accreditation boards don’t grade on spirituality! Of course, it does not necessarily have to be this way, but the reforms required to correct the situation are probably more than either the faculty or students are willing to make. Therefore, at least for the foreseeable future, offering a retreat to the students is the best we can do. One of the thing they will be learning is the liturgy of the hours, especially how to chant psalms. This is exciting for me and a pastor friend, Adrian Rodriguez, as we will be using a new psaltery that we have writing for the past few months. The Lord willing, we hope it will eventually become a psaltery that can be used to guide family devotional time.

Our requests for prayers are few but very important to us. Pray that we are faithful ambassadors of Jesus our Lord. We are honored to be representing you and your churches here in southern Mexico. Pray for a new missionary society we are trying to organize with some of the people we work with. The methodology of the society will use small community groups and the Benedictine rule. Getsemani will be one community center, and we are now looking in Chiapas for a second location. Recently Pricila Encino returned from working in the Dominican Republic with some Anglican sisters, and she will be the director in Chiapas when that center opens. Our prayer request is that we find workers for the harvest. We want to challenge the Mexican church to begin international missions, and we think this methodology is the best way to do so. Also, pray that I have time to write a new course for spiritual direction and can find time to participate in a liturgy workshop. Martha has decided to begin giving quilting classes as a way of reaching women for Christ, and she has started small bell choir at church too! Also pray for the many work teams that are scheduled for 2008; just now we have folks from five different states planning to work with us in the first semester.

Dear brothers and sisters, do be of good cheer! With your letters and support you have loved us well this year! The Lord has been near keeping His promises faithfully.

Your missionary family,

Don and Martha Wehmeyer
Valerie, Kristen, David

The 2007 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 66