Our first year as missionaries involved a lot of events: church visits, annual conferences, classes and New Missionary Training, which took place for three weeks in June and July, 2006, in Oregon. As NMT drew near, we looked at the list of couples who would be attending, and one sounded familiar: Ryan and Katie Bartlett. We pondered these names--where had we seen them before? Soon it came to us: on junk mail. Ryan and Katie had lived in the same apartment we had in Wilmore while Ryan was attending Asbury Seminary. He graduated and they moved to Arizona to pastor a church shortly before we moved in.
On our first day, our leaders told us that many of the people we shared this experience with would be among our closest friends as missionaries over the years. And happily, we bonded immediately with Ryan and Katie and several other couples.
Our curriculum those weeks involved training in a wide variety of areas: interpersonal relationships, team dynamics, language acquisition, insights from anthropology, assessing cultural clues. While each of these added to the overall value of the experience, I hope that our trainers will not be disappointed to hear that what we remember best from these weeks is inner-tubing down the creek though town most nights after dinner, often with Ryan following behind in his kayak, giving a ride to one or more of the smaller children.
We also spent time designing table games that could be used in any country with only a few needed resources, and when Carrie felt sad about having to give up her large aquarium, Ryan made cut-out and hand-drawn paper fish to cheer her up. On the day we had an outing to Portland to discover its many cultures, Ryan led Michael and Al Mellinger around the largest city of his native state, where we took many interesting pictures, sampled some food from all over the globe, and mostly just had a lot of fun.
Less than a year later, Ryan and Katie and their girls, Anna, Lydia and Ella, departed for Malawi, Africa, where they served with Ryan and Jennifer Willson, whom we had all also befriended at NMT. We eagerly read their newsletters and prayed for the work they were doing in various ministries in this mission field so different from our own. Their work with the Free Methodist Bible college, and in training and equipping national leaders, was bearing much fruit.
On December 2, Ryan and a Malawian friend were delivering maize to families hard-hit by a poor harvest this year. They were involved in an auto accident, and Ryan died from his injuries. His friend, hurt seriously, is slowly improving.
Ryan leaves behind Katie and their three daughters, now ages 8, 6 and 3. The Malawi team (the Bartletts, Willsons (including young children Curtis and Kara) and short-term missionary Kelsey Lynn) returned to the U.S. on December 11. Ryan's funeral is Monday, December 15, in Oregon.
There are questions to which we can't begin to find answers. Yet we know that God is still-present, still-caring, still-loving. And so we pray: for Katie and the girls, for Ryan and Katie's families, for Team Malawi, for the churches there, for Ryan's friend still recovering. That the love Ryan had for the people of Malawi would live on, despite his too-soon passing.
Please join us in praying for all of these today.
In Christ,
Michael and Carrie (Caty) Hamley
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