Dan's Jubilee Birthday!

On Feb. 10 I will celebrate my 50th birthday. As my interest in the "Year of Jubilee" has grown since joining JEM nearly a decade ago, I wonder what land re-distribution, debt cancellation and liberation might mean for me this year. I am so thankful for the place God has me right now on the ancestral land of my wife's family in a small town in Mexico. We are attempting to "redeem" the land for God to use to bless many of our neighbors. We did accumulate some debt in the construction of our center but are seeing how God is using a variety of means to cancel it. I have said to some people recently that I have never felt so fulfilled in a ministry as I do now and I think that is part of my own "liberation" from things that have held me back in the past.

2009 is also very special to me because it is the 30th anniversary of my signing of a "commitment card" to serve in career missions at the student missions conf. known as Urbana '79. From 1979 to 1990 I finished my college education in Pol. Sci., a Master's in Theo. Ed. and immersed myself in a number of short-term mission experiences from Japan to the Dominican Republic, to Central America and finally to Mexico. From 1991 to 2002 I returned to my own "backyard" to help in the planting of a bilingual church in the Mexican barrio of Chicago while supporting myself as a teacher in public schools. Currently I, with my family, are halfway through "my third dozen years" of full-time mission service in the three southern states of Mexico (Puebla, Oaxaca and Chiapas).

Thank you for your prayers, support and ongoing communication that so enrich our lives everyday.