The Luecke Family

A summary of our mission experience

My family and I just completed our first Youth and Family Mission experience with many Regnum Christi members and three Legion of Christ priest here in Saltillo, Mexico. We are Americans from Iowa that are living in Mexico on a 2 1/2-year assignment for my husband´s job. The Mega Mission was an experience that words can not describe, but I will try.

The town that we served was Fraustro, a small group of about 40 homes in the desert of Northern Mexico.

My road to Fraustro began a year ago when God sent me Angels to save my family from a near fatal car accident here in Saltillo. Then God sent a Legion of Christ priest, Father Barry O´Toole, into my life. He was an American priest serving at my daughter´s school; he volunteered to hear confessions in English. After over a year of attending Mass in Spanish and struggling to understand, I was very excited at the thought of some sort of contact in English with a priest. We had been living in Mexico for a little over a year and still struggled with the language. Father Barry introduced us to Regnum Christi and its Web site which I have visited daily since last October. My encounter with him has changed me in such wonderful ways that I know he was another angel that God sent to me.

When I had some interest in our family going on "Mega Missions" over Easter vacation, God put other angels in my path, another Legion of Christ priest and two other Regnum Christi families that had been going on the missions for several years and agreed to "take care of us". They convinced me it was okay to go in spite of our poor grasp of Spanish. We would be the first Americans to participate in the Mega Missions here and that was a bit frightening in itself. Once I decided we would go, that God wanted us to go, I prayed the rosary daily that we could give something to the people that we would visit.

My prayers were answered and then some. For four days we stayed in a 100-year-old hacienda with 25 other families and visited our assigned homes in Fraustro. We brought the people the full host of Holy Week Services that they otherwise would not have had.

They welcomed us into their homes and participated in the many activities that were available for them. They were able to go to confession, attend mass, via crucis (Stations of the Cross) and attend formation classes, just to name a few.

We were honored to be among the wonderful families that gave their time and God-given talents to share with the poor people in the village. We were also humbled by the poverty the people live in, yet they have such a deep and wonderful love for the Church and Mary. Our family -- myself, my husband and 10 and 8 year old daughters -- will never be able to fully describe how this experience has touched us and just how wonderfully we saw God at work, but believe me I will tell everyone that will listen. I truly feel that this was the LEAST that I could for all that God has done for my family and me.

We will return to Iowa this summer and I look forward to getting others interested in the Regnum Christi Movement.