Prayer for care of parents

Dear Friends and Partners in the Gospel;

Happy New year to each of you. We are rejoicing that Christ's mercies are "new every morning" and that we can look back at God's faithfulness in 2011 and look forward to 2012 with hope and confidence that He will never leave us nor forsake us. This is encouraging even as we continue to walk through a situation we find my family in.

I find in scripture that I am to "honor your father and mother" (ex. 20:12), and "if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever." (I Tim 5:8). We are also told (and Claudia and I have experienced): "Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, 30 who will not receive a hundredfold…"(Mark 10:28-30). So as we enter a season where our parents are aging and in need of a different type of care and relationship, I find myself seeking wisdom throughout Scripture to understand how to walk out these passages and honor and care for mothers and fathers, even as our Gospel call has us living at great distances from both sets of parents.

I began writing this as I was flying to CA last night on short notice. My dad has been suffering with extreme spinal pain due to two crushed disks that result in pinched nerves. Up until the middle of December this has been managed with pain medication, but due to the side effects (confusion, instability etc…) he unintentionally over medicated himself and had to spend most of that week and a few days beyond Christmas in ICU. My father is a strong willed individual, and managed to have himself released from the hospital against the doctor's recommendations. He is a candidate for spinal surgery which would possibly alleviate the majority of nerve pain, but he could lose his candidacy if he does further damage, or rejects the Doctor's current care. My mom is not doing well herself, and cannot manage his medications, so after his hospital "escape", we convinced him to stay in a care home run by family friends, but by New Years Eve he once again removed himself and was back in their 3 story, split level home filled with stares he simply cannot navigate. The day after his return home, it was obvious that his being there was an unhealthy situation for both of my parents.  My sister has been attending doctor's appointments and attempting to manage things to the best of her ability from her home two hours away in Sacramento, but we must come up with a different, short term solution leading up to the surgery, as well as a long term solution post surgery.

There is much more to this situation than I cannot share here, but I do ask for your prayers in the following areas:

• Wisdom, grace, patience and discernment for myself as I work with my parents on many fronts including finances, properties, living arrangements, care leading up to a possible spinal surgery and long term care thereafter.
• The physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health of both parents.
• It is every one's desire (save my dad's) that he come back to Miami with me at least up until his potential surgery. Pray that the glimpses of compromise I've seen will open up to a willingness to do so.
• My ability to care for my parents while I'm here, yet cover my own family back at home, manage the demands at work (my boss has been extremely gracious in providing me time away from the office, yet there are multiple things that I cannot simply "drop").
• For rest in the midst of a difficult time. We are all emotionally taxed which has manifested itself in physical exhaustion.

Thank you all for your prayers, encouragement and love both for my immediate family as well as my parents.  Please understand that this is obviously a sensitive issue for my parents, so for those of you near them, unless already involved, please do not feel the need to initiate with them but please do intercede for us all. I am grateful to have numerous "advisers" assisting me with regards to medical care, property and long term care. Thank you for your understanding and once again, we so value your prayers.

In His Hands / En Sus manos;

Kevin S. Abegg

Forward Motion!!!

It was almost two years ago that I accepted the assignment of developing LAM’s North American Alliance department in order to work with, assist and develop resources for missionary sending and supporting churches, but that was immediately sidetracked when I had to take over and re-structure our International Alliances Department. I am 100% certain that this was by God’s design and it gave me a spectacular overview and introduction to all of our international ministries, equipping me to advise North American Church’s on how to intelligently work with Latin partners.  As recently as two months ago the banner of International Alliance Director was definitively handed to a co-laborer, finally liberating me to peruse what I’ve been chomping at the bit to work on. The only question was where to begin...

Well the conference I attended last week was a huge encouragement in this direction. The "Interchange" Conference put on by Catalyst Services focused on coaching in the context of partnership development, training mentors of future missionaries and conflict resolution between missionaries, churches and missions agencies. If it's a surprise to you that there's conflict involved in CHRISTIAN missions, so sorry!  Actually, this conference touched most of the areas I have been, and am currently working in spanning our international alliances, the missionaries that work there and the churches that send these missionaries out. I also had the spectacular opportunity to learn from others that facing similar challenges as LAM, and those who are a few years ahead of us in developing their own North American focus and can help me avoid many of the pitfalls they have had to learn from. 

All in all, it was a VERY encouraging time for where I believe the Lord is leading LAM, and our role in assisting North American churches and Christian ministries assess, or re-think how their particular vision and calling at home, relates to the commandment of "GO AND MAKE DISCIPLES OF ALL NATIONS...". 

Please be praying for me as I work to create a master plan for this department even as I continue to work with many of the churches that have partnered with us over the years. I have already been blessed in being able to take part in re-connecting churches with Latin ministries they had lost contact with, mediate various issues between missionaries and their sending churches and assist numerous churches as they work through a re-structuring of their missions program. I feel like a kid in a candy store (or myself at Outdoor World) in what I believe the coming year may hold, but I also see an OVERWHELMING amount of work, and for this I need your prayers as well. Please pray for wisdom, endurance, discernment and the Lord's provision of an assistant (a supported missionary would help keep costs down) who could help me keep up on all that needs to be done. 

Thank you for your prayer and financial support as we enter into this new year. Check out or new web page, and please consider making an end of the year gift via:

• Online giving page: Abegg Online Donations
• Printable Mail in: Abegg Printable Donation slip

God bless and Merry Christmas!

Valley Forge at Sunset on my way back to Philadelphia. 

LAM Has a New Website!

It's been a long time in coming and desperately needed in order to better communicate with and to all of our partners, missionaries and those who simply want to grow in there missions understanding of Latin America or the world in general.

Personally, I am most excited about the "Partnership" section (which includes my area of responsibility in North American Alliances) and particularly the various resources we're beginning to gather to help our alliance members. Please take a few minutes to see what I've been working on lately and the direction we're going for the future. Here's a few links:

• http://lam.org/partner/for-churches
• http://www.lam.org/partner/for-colleges-and-universities
• http://www.lam.org/partner/us-partnership
• http://www.lam.org/partner/for-latin-ministries
• http://www.lam.org/partner/resources-for-responsible-partnership

You can find my North American Alliance Director Bio on the "team" page: http://www.lam.org/about-us/our-team

And don't forget the Abegg family Bio as well as our new donation/support link (use well and use often) J at: http://lam.org/missionaries/kevin-and-claudia-abegg

MISsionUNDERSTANDING : Partnership

I've placed a new post on our other blog: http://missionunderstandings.blogspot.com

MISsionUNDERSTANDING : Partnership

…something I believe needs to be re-defined in the North American Church's understanding of international missions, especially when it comes to our perception of the Latin American church's current and future contribution toward "making disciples of all nations…".

Too often there is the perception that North American Missions to Latin America consists of: "us going to help them because they need our help", or the other extreme: "Latin America is now evangelized so we should focus elsewhere". If we approach missions to Latin America from either of these perspectives we fail to recognize what God has accomplished through generations of missionaries and that the Gospel has not returned void but produced much fruit and new partners in the Great Commission…

See the whole article at: http://missionunderstandings.blogspot.com

Lessons We've Learned from our Kids #17

If you use a dry-erase board for Home Schooling your 7 year old, and there happens to be one permanent marker hidden somewhere safe in the same house, the 7 year old will find it and use it for schoolwork on the dry-erase board, leaving a record for future generations to enjoy.

This same 7 year old, using this same permanent marker, just may happen to “accidently” draw eyebrows and a mustache on his younger brother.

If you are going to carve something into mommy and daddy's office desk and then attempt to deny it, do not carve your own name.

Anything and everything can be a musical instrument…a VERY, VERY LOUD musical instrument.

On that note, for the life of me I can’t remember why we keep bongos in the house.

Back Pattio Update

Prayer Item: I received a call from the insurance adjuster who I’ve been working through in dealing with our patio and back door issue (see previous entry) . She called to give me the good news that we are not sitting on top of a sink hole. That is great news! (Sink holes have been known to swallow entire blocks of homes without so much as a single burp). The bad news is that the dropping of our patio was due to “organic deterioration erosion” or something to that effect which means that there is no assistance available from insurance (aka: “not covered”). They will be sending me the written report in a few weeks at which point I’ll have a chance to wade through their reasoning and give a response.

Praise Item: As we currently could not afford to replace the boy’s bedroom window on our own, we’ve had the hurricane shutters up to keep rain, bugs and anything else out until we heard back from the insurance company. Some dear friends however felt that we shouldn’t wait on this and blessed us a love offering of $400. so we could replace the window and air out the boys room. (A room housing two active boys who live in a tropical climate desperately needs ventilation!). At the time our friends did not know the replacement cost of the window, but including a few complications, the labor, materials and everything came exactly to $402! We want to thank these friends, those of you who have been praying for us now and all of you who continue to provide amazing prayer and financial support to the Abegg family.

Excitement, Cracks and Insurance

A few weeks back, around 10:00 AM, Claudia, Jeremy and Nico were at the dining room table doing their morning classes when the house gave a short, violent jolt very similar to the small Californian and Chilean earthquakes we used to experience. The jolt was immediately followed by the sound of shattering glass from the boy’s room where their sliding glass door had exploded sending glass debris throughout their room and 20 feet into the back yard.

The sliding glass door had exploded as a result of our cement back patio dropping up to 5” in places and creating giant cracks that now crisscross the entire slab. We thank God that this happened when the boys were out of the room (they could have been in bed or playing with Legos in their usual spot right in front of the door) and that nobody was hurt.

So we boarded up their room with the hurricane shutters (essentially turning their room into a dark cave), reported the insurance claim and started thinking of how to deal with this new challenge. In order to make sure that we weren’t sitting on top of a sinkhole the insurance company sent a geologist team to our house who spent two days hammering and boring holes, dragging measuring devices around every corner of the house and measuring things like elevation changes, water levels and who knows what else.

For now we need to wait for the report before any possibility of insurance assistance comes through, but here’s the catch (as I understand it): If there is a sink hole under our house, the necessary repairs will be covered (new sliding glass door & replace patio), BUT we can pretty much plan on never being able to sell a home that has a sink hole attached to it’s permanent record. If there is no sinkhole we don’t have to be concerned about being swallowed up by the earth in the middle of the night, we can sell our home in the future, but we are on our own with the repairs. (Oh how I love insurance companies). So... I’m praying for wisdom and discernment on how to navigate this and would ask you to do the same.

Thanks!