This month marks twenty years since I left Canada for Honduras, left the known for uncharted paths. When I met Rick in late 1987, I had to look on the map to find Honduras! Anne, of course, grew up in this kind of life, but she chose it for herself twenty-four years ago.

In India we kept telling our stories to those we met, and I realized how much time has passed by since then. I've been a believer for twenty two years now, every year a step in this journey. I look back at the time before I met God, and I see the journey began long before I discerned its direction. God is good and graceful. I have become more and more aware that grace fills my relationship with all of you, including many I'll never be able to write to like this (for example, the Latins and Mixtecs that are our friends, too).

Looking over some year-end reports from MBMSI, I realize five of you (from Ontario) have been with us (me) from the very beginning, that spring of 1988. Over the years as needs increased, God has sent more supporters as necessary, and today you hail from all over Canada and the US. The reports that I get from the mission board, though, merely sketch one layer of my journey. We know that hundreds of you pray for us and provide all the other kinds of support that keep us here. Thank you.

We're in the last days before our summer trip to Canada. School has ended with a bang, the applause for our kids' performances of Fiddler on the Roof, four performances before eleven hundred people. RuthE played one of the mothers, and Philip vowed that next year he wasn't going to miss out (he had signed up for something else). Anne helped graduate seven seniors last night and caught up with several alumni who came for the ceremony. In the background, the Oaxaca mountains, now green from the opening rainy season, hover.

Monday evening (we fly out Tuesday bright and early) I will teach a Perspectives class to a group of twenty or so. Again, my acquaintances in India reminded me of how instrumental this class (book) was for both Anne and me. This reader of eighty or so articles by missions thinkers and practioners changed Anne's focus sharply in 1986, moving her from caring for war refugees (a very good work) to caring for victims of spiritual war, the unreached half of the world that had no Good News about Jesus Christ. If I remember the story correctly, this same Perspectives book drew Rick to Honduras to apprentice under George Patterson, from where, on a trip home to Ontario, he visited a little country church, and invited me to begin a cross-cultural journey of my own.

We use this reader as the basic text for our apprentices and for anyone else wanting to explore missions. The classes that run here in Oaxaca meet every Monday for fifteen weeks, when a practitioner of missions offers his or her perspective on the reading of that week. My section covers "Mission and Culture: how a missionary identifies with a culture and brings change to it." Pray with us that these classes help awaken the Mexican church to its own opportunity for cross-cultural "church planting" mission, both here in its backyard, and beyond, in the world that is increasingly becoming the backyard of everyone.

Blessings, Robert.