I get home and immediately began cleaning my feet after a long day of ministry. We started the day in the morning at about 10 as we headed out to a little community up on a hillside. The name of the community is Lomo de Corvina. It is situated on top of a ridge that overlooks the city. It is an interesting story for this and so many other cities here in the outskirts of Lima.
The area surrounding Lima is perhaps one of the strangest places I have ever seen. And by that I am mostly speaking just in terms of what I expected Peru to be like. I have often heard of the beauty and wonder of Peru. Of the mountains and jungles and rivers that seem to plot the countryside. What I was not expecting was there to be a desert here. The towns we work in and travel through are nothing but sand. There are no trees or grass or very many plants. There are every once in awhile a beautiful flower, but it is a rarity not a normality.
Many of these towns including Lomo were started as squatter villages. These are mostly started from people from the highlands coming to the big city in search of dreams of prosperity and education. Normally large groups of people get together and plan to take over entire empty plots of land. They normally raid these plots of land at night and typically on national holidays in order for the authorities to not have quick responses. They have people who plot out the entire cities and the people rush in making make shift homes. Eventually they build more permanent structures. They also vote in officials to work with the Government to get them electricity, water and sewage.
The dreams that were once so real seem to slowly fade away as the fact is that the city is not overflowing with rich prosperity that so many believe. In fact jobs are quite hard to come by. But yet these communities still seem to come and seem to in a way take on a life of their own. As they fill with little shops and schools and churches.
We are working in this village meeting people and helping to plant a church here. We also go to many schools around the area and preach the gospel to a lot of different students.
The ministry has been really neat. It has been a great experience seeing God work in so many different arenas. But it has also been hard. It is very dangerous here. We can not just go walking and exploring the city. We have to always be in large groups. There is no grass to lay in or trees to find shade under. It is just sand everywhere.
Last night I walked out of the church and could see that the sun was about to set. I had to walk out into the middle of a giant median that is being redone in the middle of a major road. I stood up on the curb and could see the sun beginning to go down behind a local power transformer plot. I sat there for a moment pondering the beauty of God’s creation when it hit me how beautiful it was here. Sometime we get so caught up in the dirt of our lives that we miss seeing the real beauty that is always there. The beauty that lies in the people here and their generous hearts that blow me away day after day. In all of my travels I have never met people more kind and generous then the Peruvians. They amaze me so much. The sun set and filled the sky with its beautiful hues of pink and purple as I walked back into the church. I saw my new Peruvian friends and I smiled. I thought I can travel the world and see many wonders and beauty in creation . I can see mountains and grass and the sea, but what is more beautiful than all of that is seeing God’s love in another human being, and geting the chance, maybe just for a moment to share my life with them.
