Formation and Looking Back

At Casa San Salvador Lynn and I are attending twice-daily learning sessions to prepare us for mission service to the poor in Bolivia. Most of these are informal, around a table in the large sitting room on the first floor. Some sessions focus on cultural awareness, emphasizing the need for objectivity when we inevitably begin to encounter different ways of doing things. We also discuss how our own enculturation can drive hasty responses. We try to practice greater sensitivity to others partly by learning more about our own unique personalities and backgrounds and those of our fellow missioners. We talk about some self analysis techniques, methods for approaching social analysis, popular education, and leading from behind. All of these are preparing us to play a supportive role where we are stationed, learning from the people we serve.

First steps

Lynn Myrick (my wife) and I have joined the Franciscan Lay Missioners (FMS). For the next few months we're living at Casa San Salvador, the FMS mission house in Washington DC, where we hope to learn how we can better serve poor people both here and then outside the United States. Throughout our marriage Lynn and I have thought that missionary service might one day be right for us. During the last two years, and while Lynn was completing an internship as a campus minister at Furman University in Greenville, SC, we started reading about missionary service, and making applications. This past spring we attended a discernment weekend with the Franciscans and shortly afterward accepted their invitation to join them. We've been here two weeks and feel good about our decision: good instruction, dedicated fellow missioners, a well-organized program. I'll go into more of that with my next post and also look back briefly at the incredibly challenging process of making good on that accepted invitation.