Medicine, Mercy and Mission: A Catholic Doctor and Family Finds Christ in the Poor, from Loveland to Tanzania
- Guest Contributor
- 20 minutes ago
- 4 min read
A family on mission, the Engbloms show how faith-filled communities live the Gospel together.
By Jay Sorgi
Dr. Bethany and Josiah Engblom’s journey of seeing the face of Christ has led them to be the hands and feet of Christ, and in turn, has brought them closer to a deeper love of Christ.
This journey of service has led the Loveland residents to a life of deep commitment to a community in Tanzania, as well as instilling a similar commitment in their own hometown.
“The corporal works of mercy are a really important part of our life,” said Bethany, a family medicine and addiction doctor. “Corporal works of mercy should be something that every person, every baptized person does every day.”
The couple came into the Catholic Church 20 years ago.
Their commitment has gone far beyond so-called “missionary tourism” for years, involving mission work abroad in Central America. In December 2024, they began participating in medical missions in Tanzania through the Catholic nonprofit Mission Doctors Association (MDA), which turned last year’s journey into a continuing calling.
“I work with clients who are unhoused and in addiction, kind of in the throes of this cycle here in Loveland. And so we thought we'd just step out and give it a go,” said Bethany.
It’s the same kind of service that led Josiah, a former evangelical, to conversion to the Catholic faith.
“You encounter God usually on two of three paths, one being of service, one being more through a route of the beauty of faith, and the third being intellectual truth. I entered through service, through my time in Guinea, West Africa and Mozambique — East Africa, for that matter,” said Josiah. “I loved to serve other people and help them out through whatever way we could. So for me, that was through my work as a geologist and hydrogeologist, looking for water, wells, sanitation and latrines. I spent some significant time there, and that really kind of drew me closer into God, which then ignited my intellectual passion for understanding him.”
Their mission began about 12 months ago, traveling bumpy roads into villages in the Pare Mountains and in Mabilioni, in the Maasai flatlands, about an hour and a half down from the mountains.
They said the MDA’s setup creates two- to four-week visits and recurring relationships in long-term service.
“They’ve been returning to the same place and rebuilding that same kind of trust with the physicians and the people there to the point where they've now built a hospital. They've built a school. They've been working and partnering with all sorts of people here to raise awareness of what they're doing,” Josiah said. “We're not just going and applying a Band-Aid, then coming back and saying, ‘We did this great mission trip.’ It’s like, ‘How do we build out this relationship that's going to last and that's actually going to make a difference over the long term?’ They gave us a really good model.”
Bethany has expanded that long-term relationship, conducting monthly Zoom interviews and training sessions with addiction specialists to help set up their relief facility.
“When we go, it's not like we're the ones that are doing things,” Josiah said. “We're the ones that are ensuring that it's done right, finding the holes in the process, filling those to shore that up and make sure it's all going as it should be going.”
“This collaboration really is intended to be long-term in our connection with them, our reconnecting on a very regular cadence with these teams,” said Bethany. “We saw lives saved because of modern technology and the ongoing ability for us to communicate and keep training and educating.”
The Engbloms said there were countless moments when Christ showed his face to those they served, the first being immediate lifesaving actions that rescued a baby.
“I used to deliver babies for 10 years, before God kind of led me into working with the poor in our community and working with addiction. I walked into the hospital, and I heard a fetal monitor and the heart tones of a baby that were very low. The baby was in distress,” Bethany said. “I turned around, looked at the nurse-midwife [and asked], ‘What do we need to do here?’ We pulled the baby out, resuscitated the infant, and this little beautiful boy lived.”
Life and parenting don’t allow the Engbloms to make long-term stays in mission work. The pair now has five children, a calling that certainly brings its own challenges and time commitments.
Yet they decided to return to service as a way of further integrating God into their everyday life, and doing it with their daughter, Norah.
“She was just on the cusp of going off to school, and it changed her life,” Bethany said. “She really connected with one of the young little girls named Anna. She had had a traumatic injury where she had fallen off a ledge and broken her pelvis. Norah sat with her in the hospital, and she colored with her, and she got to know this little girl. To watch just the connection, even despite a language barrier, was so beautiful. You can show love and charity, even when you can't speak the same language. And I think that her stepping into those places of service was just so impactful for me.”
These continual experiences have led the Engbloms to establish a local service organization to help teach young people how Christ reveals himself in service to others, feeding the hungry, visiting residents in assisted living and potentially the imprisoned.
“I heard God say to me, ‘This is the way that you're going to serve our community. This is the way that you're glorifying me, by serving the community you're in,’” said Bethany.
The Engbloms are encouraging young people to follow their pathway of using service to find God and to praise God with love for others.
“There are opportunities for everyone in everyone's daily lives to figure out how to serve,” said Josiah. “That's the loop of grace that St. John Paul II talks about. The more you give away, the more you have to give away.”
