Peru was the BEST HARD month I had on the Race. There have been several hard months, but this one was special. The difficulties of this month were emotional and spiritual and divine. There were a lot of tears shed, but the end result was one of the biggest liberations I’ve experienced in my life, including a realization that it’s okay to admit that I am not even able to fix my own problems (more control stuff). But God…
I feel like Peru started out pretty awesome. We lived on the third floor of a concrete church building in a dirty, desert beach town called Chincha Alta. Yeah, desert beach. The Pacific Ocean was visible from the roof of our home, yet we were surrounded by desert mountains. It was dry… dry and HOT! I’ve never stayed by the ocean for an extended period of time and it not rain. It seems like it drizzled one time while we were there. I had the worst sunburn I’ve experienced in my life while we were in Peru. The good news is one of my sisters has a weird thing for pealing skin, so when my sunburn started to peal I had a designated person to take care of the damage. Ha!
Mosquitos were crazy here. We had to sleep with mosquito nets over our sleeping pads or we would absolutely pay for it overnight. One night one of my teammates decided not to sleep under a mosquito net, and the next morning she was covered in bites. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone covered with so many mosquito bites before – there must’ve been over 30, easily.
But, we had a roof over our heads, the heat was dry, so we didn’t sweat a lot, there was a constant ocean breeze, and I saw some of the best sunrises and sunsets of the race from the rooftop of our home. I took my guitar up there often to spend time with Jesus in the mornings and evenings, under the stars and with the sunrise.
Our ministry was with actual partners of Adventures in Missions – the organization head that The World Race is commissioned through. They kind of let us set up our own schedules and do pretty much whatever we wanted to do with ministry. Every morning we met together for a time of worship and prayer, but outside of that, we were able to do whatever we desired. MJ did prayer walks around our neighborhood every day. We did street evangelism around the area. The most significant thing we did in my opinion, though, was our work with the neighborhood kids.
The area we lived in was not very hopeful. It was poor and dirty, and most of the kids came from neglected families. So, 4 days a week we invited the kids to come to the church after school and we played games, did crafts, worship, bible lessons… all kinds of stuff with them. It was kind of like an off-the-books Vacation Bible School.
Andy became really connected to one of the kids/teenagers there who eventually accepted Jesus during one of our last days like this with them. MJ really connected with one of the girls who lived across the street from the church. Karla and Shae got to do what they love – work with kids, and create schedules and lesson activities for them. Me? I led a lot of worship, and it was great.
I have a ton of favorite memories from Peru. My birthday was that month, and the girls did an awesome job of loving me well. We also had some GREAT adventure days that month. One of them included a tour around part of Peru where we visited three different beaches THAT WERE ACTUALLY CLEAN!! Ha! I went sand surfing in the desert with a few of my teammates. Shae and I took a day where we swam in the crazy, dirty ocean near where we lived while huge logs and fish nets tried to take us down, but we would not be taken! We had amazing team times, too. OH! And there was this beautiful worship session we had with the kids one day where you could literally feel the presence of God while they sang with us. Peru was just FULL of awesome memories for me.
This was also the month where God did some amazing healing and liberating in me about my past. Many of you may recall a post I released back in April titled The Broken Beautiful. It’s by far the most real and vulnerable post I have made, and it has at least triple the number of views of any other post on my blog. The story related to that blog was the real gem of my time in Peru. Freedom from the pride that prevented me from being honest about my issues, and freedom from an addiction that had been haunting me for years.
Does this mean I will never struggle with these issues again? NO! Absolutely not. I may eventually get to that point, but it’s not today. However, knowing the truth is out there, that I am weak, and that I have friends and a God who will be by my side to listen and help at any moment gives me a push that I can’t explain. God has given me freedom, and I am walking in it.
