My teammate Olivia created this awesome video to the dance we taught the kids this month! It’s amazing and captures everything so well!
The Lord is so personalized with all of us because His heart is that we would feel known and loved. That was particularly evident for month 11 ministry. We were given the opportunity to choose where we wanted to go for our final month and pray into what the Lord had as we transition our hearts to return home. We could choose CRU in Ecuador, ATL from Peru to Ecuador or the Jungle of Peru. Now I know what you’re thinking, of course go to the Jungle! But the Lord had this on my heart not just because it sounds the coolest, but because of what we would be doing there. It was described to us as a ministry that works with an unreached people group and that enticed my YES!
When I heard about the World Race I was in a Perspectives class that educates people on missions in scripture, the work that has been done throughout history, strategies being used now and the work still to be done. The bulk of the last part of the class was learning strategies of how to share the gospel with people when they had zero religious foundation or start with the pagan beliefs they did have. We worked through scenarios of language barriers and how to preach when there was no written text. This included the work being done to translate the Bible into other languages and the importance of having the Bible in one’s heart language. It was during this class that I began researching the Race because I felt the Lord stirring my heart to leave immediately.
For month 11, I and 9 new teammates arrived in Chuquibambilla, Peru to work with the Nomatsiguenga people group. According to the Perspectives description of people groups, they would considered Engaged people. There are missionaries dedicated to their people group and the Joshua project reports 2.5% of the people being evangelical believers. However, the obstacles begin when you consider that the missionaries serving there speak Spanish versus the native language, Nomatsiguengan. Most of the locals speak both but sometimes struggle to understand everything communicated in everyday conversation much less the often complicated wording of religious jargon and scripture. Unfortunately the Bible is not fully translated and is only available in the New Testament. While we were there, our team got the incredible pleasure of praying for the group that will begin working with Wycliff Bible translators to complete the Old Testament. This group was made up of a married couple, a young man in his 20s, a teenage girl and two eleven year old boys. The last lady in the group has a few more grey hairs than the others but an incredible story. She was a young girl when the original group of translators worked on the first half of the Bible, her father being among them. She waited most of her life for a church in her village and now that there is, she is hoping leaving a completed version of scripture can be a legacy for her 62 grandchildren.
Belen and Pablo were our incredible hosts for two weeks and the ones that said yes to living among these people. The relationships they have been able to form in the short six months they have permanently lived in the community are truly beautiful. Because there is no Old Testament and they are battling against a background of animistic beliefs, they had to start from scratch. Their church is three months old and in those first three months, they successfully verbally delivered all of the major pieces of the Old Testament. Their congregation could give you a chronological breakdown of each book, list all of the major prophets and their roles and tell where Jesus was prophesied in each. It was truly amazing to listen to! They host church every Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday night to work around the locals schedule of walking miles back and forth to the plantations. Not to mention Belen could tell you the name of every person in her church and the names of their eight brothers and sisters that she may have never met. While we were there, our team led children’s ministry classes almost every evening, taught English at the high school and performed reenactments of the Bible stories told at church. For several mornings we also dug out an entire hillside to make space for an office to be constructed in the future and painted rocks to be used to mark paths around the compound.
I look back on our month and am reminded just how often the Lord gives us the desires of our hearts. Before leaving last year, I prayed I would get the opportunity to work in a setting like this. A place where I could see how to better pray for all of the things I had read about. Have a better understanding of what it looks like to share the gospel without things we take for granted, like a Bible. And how relationship can be one of the most powerful witnesses you have to work with.
**Title disclaimer: there is no word in Spanish for moth and we encountered some huge ones! I stead they call them Butterflies of the Night and we toyed with this as a team name!
