Month 2 I am in Trujillo, Peru. It’s a desert but we are totally surrounded by the Pacific Ocean and the Andes mountains.
Our first four days in Peru we had debrief. This is a time where our leaders make sure we are all doing well spiritually, physically, and emotionally. We could sign up for 1 on 1s with leaders, we had a time discussing our teams with the leaders, and we had squad worship and time of sharing and praying with each other. We also got to go sandboarding, which is like snowboarding, but on sand.
This week my squad has been in charge of a VBS. My team and the other team who we were with in Bolivia have been in charge of arts and crafts. Obviously I’ve been excited to be helping out with the crafts. One day the Bible lesson was Noah’s ark and for the craft I drew a coloring page. We made copies of it and the kids got to color it and draw some animals on it. It was cool to be able to use my talents for our ministry on the Race.
One night, my team went to our ministry contacts’ church where we were able to lead worship and my team leader preached. My team leader, Casey, gave an awesome message about freedom. This is something we talked a lot about at debrief. The first step to finding freedom from sin is confessing and bringing it out of the darkness and into the light. After Casey’s message, we invited the congregation to come find one of us at the front and we would pray for them. There was one lady who came to me and I prayed for her. She was praying as well and after a while all I did was stand there and hug her. She was not at all ready to let go of the hug, so I just hugged her a long time. She cried in my arms a little, I don’t speak Spanish so I don’t know what she was crying about. I just continued to hold her and pray for her some more. My squadmate who passed away before the Race made t-shirts for fundraising that a lot of us ended up buying that says, “Love needs no translation” on it. In moments like this I try to remember that and feel encouraged by it.
