MISSIONER NEWSLETTER – Winter 2025

Sarah Bueter, El Salvador

In May, Sarah moved to the semi-rural town of Huizúcar, a few hours from San Salvador, to discern her ministry with the San Miguel Arcángel Parish. Despite some successes, ministry was unsustainable, and she is now pivoting to a new one.

EL SALVADOR—In the Catholic liturgical calendar, we recently concluded the season of Advent, the season of waiting. Active waiting, mind you, the kind of waiting that involves preparation, alertness and attentiveness to God’s presence in our daily lives. All good things.

But Advent is still about waiting, and waiting is not my forte. In particular, these past few months were characterized by an uncomfortable waiting. Thus, Advent arrived without any alacrity on my part.

In Huizúcar, the town where I was serving, the monthly nutrition program there had taken off with 26 women and nearly twice as many children participating. At the rural school, we graduated five (timid) students to high school and 10 (not timid) kindergarteners to first grade. In the rural areas, we harvested the corn (then bean, and now coffee); afterward, still covered in the gossamer hairs of cornsilk, we mashed sweet corn into riguas and atol de elote over the fire.

Ministry in Huizúcar, sadly, also revealed itself to be unsustainable. Community members saturated in prior commitments, a parish suspicious of engaging with the world outside its church doors, and an archdiocese program that fizzled out left me without onsite support or collaborators.

The work of attending to needs in the community is a privilege and blessing. However, it requires collaboration. Its sustainability depends on both my own ability to thrive and the community’s ability to assume responsibility and interest. Anything else risks white saviorism, el protagonismo, the patterns of dependency we’re trying to dismantle by creating more equitable relationships.

As Huizúcar became less sustainable, it meant pivoting to a new ministry.

“It’s tempting to say, ‘It’s back to the drawing board,’ but much like the liturgical calendar, although the same seasons repeat themselves, we enter them with new wisdom. The parish, rural families, and I learned too much from one another to say that we’re back to where we were eight months ago,” says Sarah.

It’s tempting to say, “It’s back to the drawing board,” but much like the liturgical calendar, although the same seasons repeat themselves, we enter them with new wisdom. The parish, rural families, and I learned too much from one another to say that we’re back to where we were eight months ago.

Nonetheless, the search for a new ministry is the current reality: waiting for God, waiting for the follow-up phone call, waiting for a contact of a contact of a contact. Waiting with an unpleasant restlessness, disquiet, and longing.

Advent is about waiting, but it’s also about longing, getting us in touch with our own restless loneliness and touching our deepest desires.

Longing can be embarrassing, an admission of the vulnerable pieces of ourselves, for the heart intuits a desire for right relationship, wholeness, intimacy, and stability. Sometimes these deep desires get lost among the palatable, yet ephemeral desires that temporarily sate, like merit, accolades, or a numb comfortability.

Sincere longing, however, has the potential to jolt us, to reorient us, to put us back in touch with the deepest desires of our hearts and of God’s own heart. We all are yearning for a world of just relationships, peace, and harmony.

Longing can be like the stomach gurgling for an approaching Christmas feast. We ask, “Why is my stomach grumbling?” Our grumbling stomach tells us that something good is coming! It helps us identify what the heart intuitively hungers for: love, joy, and connection.

Where is love, joy, and connection today? Fragments appear all around: in the intergenerational, chaotic family lives of Salvadorans; in the expressive students I teach; in friends who text me funny jokes to cheer me up; or in my mom’s faithful phone calls that update me on her current library book.

The search for a new ministry in El Salvador continues. But in the end, clarity is granted to those who wait and to those who long: a deepened, softened understanding of the heart of the human family and the heart of a loving Creator.

Sarah

Please support my mission in El Salvador with a donation through the link below.

I also invite you to walk with me as a “COMPANION IN MISSION.” Companions in Mission are friends and generous donors who give financial gifts on a regular (usually monthly) basis. For more information, visit Become a Companion in Mission. Thank you so much for your generosity!