Imagine this: Spending three weeks in a small two man tent in a dirt field, surrounded by a brick and adobe fence with a row of classrooms as one wall. Your tent is positioned closely to a group of twenty plus goats, who get really hungry and loud around 5:45 in the morning. The sun rises in the six o’clock hour and tends to be relentless throughout the day. You try to find refuge from the sun under two large circus type tents but you often still suffer from the constant pressure of the sun. You flush the toilet (mind you only one of your three toilets has a seat) using a five-gallon bucket that you fill with water from a large barrel of water. When you want to shower you use the same five-gallon bucket with the same water. Oh and I forgot to mention the pet chicken that was recently named Howard (turns out it’s a girl cause she laid an egg yesterday) sometimes poops in the water at night. Getting clean is almost impossible amongst the dirt, sun and occasional poopy water.
Your circumstances sometimes bug you because you are human and in the past you had everything at the tip of your fingers, and the money and ability to purchase it. You still remember having those luxuries of a home with walls a roof and air-conditioning and you still long for the comfort of your bed and pillows! You miss showering and feeling clean and flushing a toilet with just one hand. While at times you are agitated because of your circumstances, you realize that they are only temporary.
Now imagine this: You’ve lived your whole life in a home made of adobe and stucco in a small fishing village. On an August day you and your family are preparing the fish your husband caught the night prior for dinner. The earth begins to move under you and immediately it is literally crumbling and crashing around you. This earthquake lasts for only three minutes but destroys everything you’ve come to know around you. Even some of your friends and family are crushed and buried under the rubble. Within a few minutes you grab your family and vacate your home to find higher ground because the ocean is rising into your broken home.
Weeks and months go by and your family and 300 other families now live side by side sharing tarps and bamboo poles for walls. Your previous home is in rubble on the ground, and the government has declared your whole town as a disaster area. You share about 15 wooden outhouses with all of these families. Water is scarce for your family, but what you do have you store in any kind of bucket or barrel you can get your hands on. Outside sources provide you with a small amount of food weekly. The food is only enough for the youngest children to eat more than one meal a day, so some of your older family members eat one meal a day and occasionally on the weekends they get two meals per day.
You often feel stuck in life and in your home. Daily the sun is relentless on your home and body. The tarps that are your roof and walls melt and break with the heat of the sun. Your roof provides little protection for yourself and your belongings when it rains, and the rainy season is starting. You do what you can to get by, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone sticking up for you, advocating your well-being. Without the resources to rebuild your home you are stuck in this tarp home until someone else advocates for you, and you lose hope more and more every day. After over five months of living like this you have yet to see a dime from your government to help you out. You begin to believe that this is not a temporary short- term home.
Both situations are hard and stretching physically and spiritually. Both situations require faith in something bigger than themselves. Both situations also require individuals to choose their attitude and their course of action and how to make it better. Fortunately in my case, the first one if you hadn’t caught on already, I have faith that God will use all of my circumstances to glorify himself (even if it is humbling me to wash my body with poopy chicken water). I have no idea what it is like to have never experienced the presence of the Lord. I continue to have to choose joy daily, James 1:2-3: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance.” For some of us our trials involve being dirty, hot and living with loud goats and for others the intensity of the trial makes mine seem so menial. No matter what the trial is, God has bigger plans than we’ll ever be able to comprehend. For the people of Tambo de Mora, Peru, the second situation, I pray that God will lead me to show them the joy of the Lord daily, and that they too may fully experience the joy of the Lord on their own someday soon.
God is continually opening doors for our World Race team and the spirit of the Lord is LIVING AND ACTIVE amongst us. We are beginning to claim the POWER AND AUTHORITY that Christ has given to us (Luke 9). Please pray for us as we claim this that we would be able to identify attacks from the enemy so that we may press into the power and presence of the Lord. I know that God does not desire for the people of Tambo de Mora to feel stuck physically and spiritually. We have a little less than two weeks here, pray for us to continue to seek the Lord’s will for us daily and for us to finish this leg of the race strong.
