Hi! Happy Wednesday! I hope this finds you well and blessed and enjoying a beautiful summer! Thank you for taking the time to read this, as it is about something that is very important to me and has been on my heart and in my prayers for a long time. As you may or may not know, I am a full time Catholic missionary with Family Missions Company! I live in a small town in Mexico called General Cepeda and have been here serving the people since January. My life here has already been amazing and wonderful, which I know is all due to God’s plan for my life to love Him and serve Him by serving those who are truly in need. My life consists of wonderful things, including serving people who come to my door asking for help with real problems, visiting the homebound and those who have no one to spend time with them, taking the sick to doctors, dentists, eye-doctors, and pharmacies, praying with people, laughing and chatting with friends I have made during my time here, singing in the local choir, eating fresh cactus and avocados, praying in a tiny little chapel made of adobe, and spending time with my wonderful teammates who are courageously serving alongside me here in our beautiful little town. I am so grateful to be a part of something bigger than myself and bigger than the freedom of my twenties I get to choose to spend doing whatever I want. I love it here! When I entered missions, I slowly started to realize I had a very specific idea of what doing mission work is supposed to look like. When you are a foreign missionary, you are supposed to spend all of your time building houses with your bare hands or healing lepers and adopting orphans like Mother Teresa, right? Well, I have helped build a couple of buildings and have fixed a couples of roofs (which was amazing!), but I haven’t seen any orphans or lepers in my town since I got here. It turns out mission work is all about being present and trying to serve the specific needs of the people around you. There is no “right way” to do mission work! As long as you are constantly sacrificing for others, growing in virtue, praying daily, serving the poor in their real need, and preaching the Gospel, you are free to follow the call of God to serve in the ways HE wants you to. If every missionary built an orphanage or a Church every day (which would be awesome!), we would eventually have too many orphanages and Churches and we would not be serving the poor by helping the with their many other needs. Mission work isn’t supposed to be rigid and stereotypical; it is about intentionally encountering and loving people where they are in life so you can help them with what they really need. Sometimes they need an orphanage, a house or church to be built, or to be taken care of during times of serious illness. Those things are so important! Here in my town there are so many ministries and services we try to provide to the people to help their physical needs, such as providing people with food, water and medicine, doing manual labor when needed, and helping financially with medical expenses, school bills, buying clothing, shoes and diapers, and other needs that are brought to us daily. We also go to the surrounding villages to help the people there and to lead them closer to Jesus by giving retreats, talks, and helping bring people into the wonderful Sacraments of the Church. I am so grateful to be able to participate in these ministries! If I ever need to build an orphanage or spend time with a person suffering from leprosy, I know God will give me the strength and courage to serve in those ways! Until then, I know how important it is to look around at the people I live near and anticipate their needs in order to help them. Anticipating the needs of the poor and acting out of love to help relieve those needs is such a beautiful part of missions I get to be a part of every day!
Alongside all of the necessary ministries and services we try to provide for the physical needs of the people, there are other things God wants for his people here too. When I first came to this town last November, I realized the people have no place outside of the Church and the mission house to gather to be fed intellectually, mentally, or spiritually. The town does not have a functioning library, a theater, an art museum, a bookstore, or any other such places where people can go to read or learn or to grow intellectually. Many people I have met here have never owned a book of their own in their entire lives. People here have of course seen movies and have listened to music, but they do not have the opportunity to go to plays or musicals, to go to poetry readings, or to go to the symphony. Encountering the arts can be a beautiful way to encounter our own humanity, to come to witness the beauty other human beings can create, and can touch our souls and lead us closer to God Himself. I know I have grown and matured as a person and as a Catholic by watching musicals, reading classic novels, and listening to beautiful music...some of these things are gifts from Jesus to help us to encounter him and to enjoy the beauty of his creation! The places we have to encounter these things in the States are luxuries we take for granted, but have been wonderful opportunities for intellectual and spiritual growth as people and as a nation. I hope to bring some of these experiences to the people here through Café Asís!
Something we hear a lot in the States is “hey, you wanna go grab a coffee sometime to catch up and talk about life?” How many times have you gone to a coffee shop with a friend to spend time with each other and ended up sharing something difficult or joyful you are going through, giving support to a friend who needs a listening ear, or even learned something new about life, love, or God by talking about the deeper things in life? I know many of my relationships, especially in college, thrived more when I was able to spend quality one-on-one time sharing deep things and discussing parts of my life that were important to me. How much my faith grew from this as well! I worked at a wonderful Catholic non profit coffee shop in Colorado for 3 years, which helped remind me that we are all relational beings, so a coffee shop where relationships can thrive can be the perfect place to be invited to begin a relationship with Jesus. I also know how important it is to me and many others to get away from work and family for an hour or two to sit down alone or with a friend and read a good book, journal, or simply sit in silence with a cup of coffee. There is no place in our little town here for people to do this, to intentionally pick a location to encounter each other and grow in relationship, in faith, and in joy! A coffee shop is a great way to help bring these things to the people here.
God put the idea of Café Asís on my heart months ago. At first I wasn’t sure if starting a coffee shop was a “proper” ministry to do, since coffee is not a necessity in life. I thought it was not a good enough ministry to take seriously, since coffee does not serve the poor or preach the Gospel, which are the reasons I chose to become a foreign missionary. I see people starving here who can’t afford food for their families, people who are lonely and forgotten, people who lack proper medical care, work and support from family or friends, and I see people who thirst for a relationship with Jesus our Savior but have a hard time trusting in God because of all of the pain they are in. I try to help them every day and with God’s grace and your prayers I will continue to do so! However, I also see people who want to grow intellectually, spiritually, and mentally but have no opportunities or a place to go to do so. I see people who are lonely and need to be encountered by someone who wants to spend time with them and invite them into a life of joy. God wants to provide all of these needs for his people here as well! As I said earlier, coffee will never serve the poor or preach the Gospel. Rather, I will serve the poor and preach the Gospel while serving coffee along the way. How can I better serve the people here? Well, apart from my other ministries here, I can start by inviting them to a place they feel at home, a place they can better learn to read and write, a place they can drink coffee and play board games with friends, a place they can go to events and encounter the culture of their country, and most importantly a place they can encounter the God who made them. This is why I am starting a coffee shop in our town here!
Café Asís will be a place to gather, to meet friends, to be fed spiritually and intellectually, and to encounter the beauty of the Church through events such as Bible studies, women’s and men’s small groups, movie nights in the outdoor patio, date nights to promote family life, nights with music and bands, board game nights, poetry and writing workshops, literacy programs for both children and adults, lectures about history and other important topics, testimony or life story nights, English classes, and, of course, lots of coffee. There will be an event every Wednesday night, but this will also be a place where missionaries such as myself will be present to invite them to Church and other missionary events. Another goal of the cafe will be to sell products from local vendors and to hire locals to work at the cafe, which will give back to the community and help those in financial need. I know this is part of Jesus’s tremendous plan for this town and has already become such an unexpected and beautiful part of my mission here in Mexico! It is already producing fruit in many ways, even though it is slightly unorthodox and a random witness to how mission work can look in the world. Overall, Café Asís exists to serve the people of General Cepeda and to bring people to Jesus, one cup of coffee at a time.
When I first moved to Mexico, I knew that one of God’s plans for me here was to start a coffee shop. So, I searched around town for a location and found multiple places that fell through last minute, which was a little disappointing at times! I ended up becoming friends with the mayor here by asking him if I could hang up my hammock in the park. He thought this was very funny, and our friendship grew as I saw him and his family around town! I finally went to his office and expressed to him how difficult the language barrier was to me in finding a location to start a coffee shop. I asked if he could help me find a place, and within a month he and his employees had found me a wonderful location for the cafe inside of the town’s office of tourism. They told me they wanted to use this location to help the town’s economy by bringing in tourism. They thought a coffee shop would be a perfect place to do this. The building for the cafe is very beautiful! It was one of the first buildings built in the town during the late 1500’s by the Franciscan missionaries who came here to evangelize and serve the people. (The name Café Asís comes from Saint Francis of Assisi, which is San Francisco de Asís in Spanish!) the building was the old chapel for the missionaries, and still has the altar inside of the wall! How historic and beautiful! When I first started working on the building, there was an infestation of cockroaches and baby crickets living in the walls, paint hundreds of years old, and an uneven, broken cement floor. The floor still needs quite a bit of work, but on the last mission trip we had here we painted the walls fun colors and were able to build tables and chairs with a local Mexican missionary who is a carpenter here in town. (I am so grateful to everyone who helped with this!) I have been able to buy a refrigerator, some wall art, mugs, tables and chairs, a coffee bar, outdoor tables with umbrellas, rent for the past two months, and a couple of other things to help me get started. Things are coming along! Even so, there is a lot of work to do and many things to buy before the cafe is ready to go and before I can start serving coffee. I have many supplies to buy (espresso machine, coffee, milk, and other equipment) and still many projects to do on the building itself (electricity, water, the floor). I ask that you consider donating to this cause to help get the cafe started and functioning. I have about $2,000 to go (starting a business is unfortunately not cheap!) and I hope that you consider helping me make this ministry possible here in Mexico! If this is God’s plan for General Cepeda, I know he will make it happen. We serve a God who makes miracles happen, both small and big! Starting a coffee shop to help others in a random town in Mexico while making almost no income every month will be a miracle. Is he calling you or using you to help start Café Asís and to make this miracle a reality? If so, reach out, check out the Café Asís fundraising page, and consider how much you would like to donate (anywhere amount goes a long way to help)! Also, please keep this ministry in your thoughts and prayers as often as you can! The people here can use all the prayers we can give them! I am very excited for this ministry in General Cepeda, and I cannot wait to share with you the progress and the wonderful stories I know are soon to come. Thank you for reading this and thank you for continuing to support me and pray for me as I am still figuring out how to live this unexpectedly beautiful adventure of a life spent in missions.
God bless you all and have a wonderful day!
In Christ our Joy,
Your friendly neighborhood missionary,
Rachel Speer
Here is a link to the registry I made to raise enough funds to open the cafe!
http://www.myregistry.com/organization/Rachel-Speer-Abbeville-LA/1678732
(Instructions to donate: It's very simple! Go to my registry (click the link above) and check out all the supplies we still need. If you decide to donate, go to my website to donate, which can be found at: https://www.familymissionscompany.com/project/rachel-speer/ These instructions can be found on my registry by clicking the its link.)
