The Reign in Spain

Merry Christmas and Happy Boxing Day (for real!)

Dear Friends,

We hope that you have all had a very merry and blessed Christmas!  We are blessed to be able to say that we have.  On Tuesday we welcomed Carrie's mother, Carole, to Spain--a journey she has always wanted to make.  On Christmas Eve we had friends from church over for dinner and to open some presents, and enjoyed a great time of food, fun and fellowship.  On Christmas we headed to downtown Madrid to celebrate with friends and fellow missionaries.  It was especially exciting to see their young children celebrating the day of Christ's birth.  They even made a birthday cake for Jesus!

While we are still feeling festive, today we "celebrated" Boxing Day, as they call it in the remains of the British Empire.  This holiday was founded to highlight the practice of giving gifts to the less fortunate (perhaps an early version of re-gifting; no statistics are available on how many received fruitcakes).

Actually, our church reached out to the less fortunate last Saturday, as four teams of church members took gifts of winter clothing, toiletry items and tickets for hot showers to the homeless of Madrid.  We passed out 130 such packets to men and women living on the streets of the city.

But today, we "boxed" in true style--by packing up much of our household items for storage as we get ready to move to Portugal.

 

Please keep us in your prayers as we continue this process.  We are so blessed that Peter, a member of the church here in Rivas, offered us his garage for storage and his guest room as temporary housing on the occasions we'll be in Madrid, and that our fellow missionaries in Portugal have secured us a (mostly) furnished apartment, so we should only have to take a modest amount of "stuff" there.  Still, moving is a lot of work.  We're glad to have Carole here to help out as well!

We wish each of you a blessed Christmas season and hope that your holidays are joyful and full of God's love.

In Christ,

Michael and Carrie (Caty) Hamley

A Friend Gone Too Soon

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

 

The Reign in...Portugal?

Dear Friends,

As those of you who receive the Free Methodist Missions Hotline may have already heard, we will soon be on our way to Portugal for a temporary assignment.  We will be relocating there just after the New Year.

If this comes as a bit of a surprise to you, it does to us as well.  While our desire is certainly to remain here in Spain and serve in the work the Lord has been providing and blessing to such a great degree, the reality of our work as missionaries is that there are times when we are subject to the vagaries of the economy and bureaucracies of foreign governments.  This is the case now.

Our assignment with Free Methodist World Missions is to "Team Mediterranean," a.k.a. "Latin Europe," which includes Portugal, Spain and Italy.  Some of you will remember that our initial assignment was to Italy, but after months of effort in applying for visas, that door was closed to us.  So, we made plans to stay for a time in Portugal for a couple of years while working toward Italy, and applied for Portuguese visas.  Yet all along, our hope was to work in Spain, and we hoped that sometime down the line we would have the chance to do so.

That chance came sooner than expected, as we stopped through Madrid to visit Josh and Susy Fajardo, our fellow FM missionaries already serving there, on our way to Portugal.  They invited us to stay and join in the work, and the rest is history.  Until now.

The worldwide economic slowdown, even more pronounced in Europe than in the U.S., has led European governments to be less open to granting visas to foreigners than before.  At the same time, the Free Methodist Church in Spain is still in the registration process, and will not gain full inviting status (i.e., able to invite foreign missionaries on religious-worker visas) until June 2009 at the earliest.

So what do we do in the meantime?  To us, the answer is clear: serve God where we can.  Which at the moment, is Portugal.

At the same time, our hearts are very much still with the work in Spain, and it will be a difficult transition in many ways.  However, we still plan to be back in Spain for a few special events, and to run the summer program in July.

Please pray for us over these next few weeks as we train and equip others in order to hand off the ministries we've been working in, and as we make the big decisions of what to do with the apartment, car, furnishings, etc.  We've already been offered a place to live temporarily when we're in Madrid for special events, as well as to store our items.  At the same time, our fellow workers in Portugal are looking for a place for us to stay while we're there.  Even in the midst of upheaval, God has been very good to us.  We are so thankful for the opportunity to serve a great and loving God!

Blessings,

Michael and Carrie (Caty) Hamley