The Peru Chapter Begins!

Welcome back to my blog those of you who have been here before. To any newcomers, welcome! In continuing with pursuing and learning more about God and about engaging in missions, We will be spending this summer in Arequipa Peru. I say ‘we’ because this year I actually have a partner on this journey; David McMichael, a senior at Abilene Christian University. I do consider each of you to be my partners in this expedition, but it will be nice to have some company in the uncertainty of a new culture.

In the country, we will be working with a team of two missionary families, the McKenzies and Smiths (http://www.teamarequipa.net). They have been working for the past couple of years with the urban poor through community building, transformational development, and of course, ministry. In addition to starting house churches, they are involved in starting reading rooms, teaching sustainable development establishing reading rooms to promote literacy, meet people in the community and have Bible studies, etc), and managing a few micro-loans. I have never been involved in such full-time missional development and look forward to following, learning and growing towards such ministry. Also, as I am still looking to venture into long-term missions, this will be an opportunity to scout out this portion of Latin America. Unlike Argentina, whose origins lie nearly exclusively in European settlement, Peru has nearly no history of settlement or colonization. Many of the people still speak Quechua, the language of the ancient Incan peoples. So even though I know some Spanish, the culture (and Quechua) will be rather new to me!

As I write this paragraph, I have finally arrived after 46 hours of traveling across 5 airports in 3 countries. We slept in the Miami and Lima, Peru airports. At one point, the airline apparently felt bad for the extra-long layovers, so they put us all up in a 5-star Crown Plaza for the 4hr layover. Don't feel too bad... the travel did have its highlights! One thing that was particularly neat, however, was that we ended up spending the Bogota afternoon layover with two sixteen year-old guys from Miami on their way to Ecuador. They’ve been pretty thoroughly indoctrinated by the world under the mentality of ‘enjoy life now because later when you’re married, you cannot enjoy life any more. I was able to talk with one of them (Raphael) for a little while and the conversation turned to Jesus. I shared a little with him about my story and how much more freeing a life following Christ is. In the very least, I tried to show him that among the college-aged guys he looks up to (my age group), some passionately follow Christ... not just older people who are ‘too old to have fun anymore. I hope our short tour was able to plant a little seed in him, which someone else will water and God will make grow.

I arrived at 8:45 this morning (Central Time), settled my things in, bid farewell to a professor of mine (Dr. Allison) who was here for a retreat with the missions teams in Peru and Chile, and then sanded the paint of off a desk in one of the reading rooms. I’m thoroughly pooped. We’re about to eat some lunch and then I think I’m in for a nap. More later!