I fell in love this month.
I’ve heard my squadmates say it for the past ten months: “I fell in love with the ministry/kids/people. I didn’t want to leave. My heart is still there.” But I haven’t felt that crazy rush of emotion that makes people adopt a new country, a new culture, a new language. I stopped thinking it would happen, honestly, and I was fine with that.
Then my team was partnered with Monte Sion Baptist Church in Cajamarca, a ministry that was thinking about ending it’s relationship with AIM. We arrived at 4:30 a.m. on a Sunday, sticky from three days of travel, and slept until the late afternoon.
That night we walked into the church a couple of minutes late, the way I do most mornings at home. The sanctuary was larger than many I’ve been in this past year, with wood-paneled walls and pews that were obviously handmade with care. We shook hands and kissed cheeks, my hair flying into the faces of the women leaning in, and all seven of us shuffled into the pew one of the church ladies pointed out to us, a couple of rows from the front.
Two people stood at the lectern to lead worship. They started with one of my favorite hymns, How Great Thou Art, and I stumbled along with the Spanish words on the screen.
And it felt like home.
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Every day, I wake up in a little bedroom on the second floor of Filomena’s house. Filo is the sweetest, most meek woman I have ever met. When we served her ice cream last night, to try and thank her for cooking all of our meals and generally being our mom this month, she cried and told us, “I will miss you, because you have been good company.”
This month, I fell in love with a church that feels like home, like good company. A church that plays games in the sanctuary, the pews pushed back into a circle; a church that cooks huge meals for every occasion; a church that takes seven missionaries and calls them hermanitas– “little sisters.”
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The church ladies sit in the front pews. They have their hair in braids down their back or buns at the nape of their neck; they sing all the hymns with no need for hymnals or words projected on the screen.
The youth work the sound equipment at the front of the church, and the boys poke each other and laugh during worship. Some of the girls sing in the worship band. Ivan, the youth leader, plays guitar and smiles at the boys in the back pews with messy hair who act like they don’t want to be there, but so obviously do.
When my team went to Monte Sion’s anniversary celebration, we spent two days watching all ages of men play soccer on a concrete pitch behind the church. I threw water balloons high in the air for children to catch, and juggled to make them laugh. I played volleyball with two middle-schoolers on my team, and that guy who always shows up at church sporting events, the one who doesn’t know how to chill, spiked a ball right into one of their faces. We ate kilos of rice and washed a ton of orange plastic dishes. And even though I didn’t understand most of what was being said, could only ask weirdly personal questions in my broken Spanish, it was all pretty close to perfect.
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Monte Sion isn’t a perfect church, though. There have been moments this month where we weren’t sure what was being lost in translation, what nuance was causing a conflict we weren’t understanding. But maybe that, too, is why I fell in love here.
The church I grew up in isn’t perfect, either. Words and actions hurt people who are supposed to be family. But my church keeps cooking at every opportunity, welcoming the messy-haired boys to the back pew, and taking in the people who don’t speak our language and saying, “This is home for you.”
Sometimes the Race feels like it’s all about leaving, and so many months I’ve used that as a source of relief, as in: thank God we are only here a month.
It took ten months, but I finally found a place that makes me want to stay.
I fell in love, in a church sanctuary in Peru. I woke up every morning to Filo’s worship music and the sound of frying eggs. I fell in love with church ladies and a goofy youth group and the hymns of my childhood sung in a strange language.
I fell in love with a little piece of home.
