We arrived in Lima, Peru at about 12:25am on Monday and hopped on a bus with our host for the month.
Our home is a small hostel on the 3rd floor of our host’s home.
His mother, father, brother, grandmother, and wife live on the floor right below us. All the homes are open floor plans with no windows and some places without walls.
There are two teams here from my squad (Hope Ignited and Team Undertow) working together to help a local ministry in Lima with the children and women’s program. The congregation is kind and filled with love and compassion.
We’ll be leading the kid’s program next week and speaking on Sundays as well as assisting at orphanages and local charities in two weeks. What a way to stretch our gifts!
Dancing is a big form of evangelism here and we have learned some new dance moves to do with the children…and in public. My team and I are super talented at dancing….we maybe need to work on dancing, but we giggled out bums off and did the best we could!
We take a bus each day to and from the church. There are mountains of dirt surrounding the city of Lima (as Peru is in the desert) and we can see them both from our hostel and as we drive. The other day, through our translator, I asked a man on the bus what the mountains were called here and he laughed-
saying ‘these aren’t mountains, on the other side are mountains.”
In West Virginia, those are mountains. But never the less…
Lima is beautiful.
I kept asking the Lord,
Where are you here? Where should I be looking for you?
among the homes built into the hillside, the stray dogs around town, and the towns.
And he said,
Look around- I’m in the people here, my beauty is in them.
And it certainly is.
I was watching out the window of our home last night and I saw a man washing a van. It was a very large van and he was doing it alone. Suddenly, I felt the Lord nudge me and say, go see him, He’s part of the kingdom too.
I saw God in the moment I began to speak with him, I saw his joy and beauty.
I saw God when we came across a young 14 year old boy on the streets who was hallucinating on some drugs, as my teammate prayed over him. And he sat there with his eyes closed the entire time.
I saw Christ there.
I see him in the people around us, who provide us with lunches and meals and take us from town to town. I see him in their eyes and in their outstretched hands.
I thought the other day of the reason I am blogging. I want to be adequate at telling you my story, I want to share this experience with you. I want my words to be just right, to touch your heart, to show you the magnitude of the work the Lord is doing around the world. I am blogging because this isn’t my journey alone, but it’s all of ours- and I am so humbled by that fact. I hope to be a voice for those who you may not be able to meet, and to share these stories so they may be beauty in your life as well.
He’s a good, good father and has surrounded us with his love in the people across the world.
And I can’t wait to serve them.
