Going and Sharing

In a word:  Well after two months of working and getting started I love it.  It is hard at times—sometimes lonely, and sometimes you just want people to speak English but all in all I love what I do.  I have been on about 4 trips with volunteer teams now and I can’t tell you the joy that I have had serving along side these people.  Please pray for God to give me friends in Huancayo, for those I have shared with to be saved and for God to move in powerful ways to unite the effort of all the churches at work in the Huancayo area.

Huancayo: I have finally moved into my apartment and I seem to be getting settled one piece of furniture at a time.  I can’t tell you how great it feels to finally have a place to call home.  I feel like I moved around forever before I finally found this place to come to between trips.  One thing that is hard living in Huancayo is not being here much.  I think I will travel to other parts of the department of Junin (where I live) almost 3 weeks out of the month.  Therefore it makes it hard to really get plugged in to just about anywhere.  So please pray for connections, friendships and motivation while in Huancayo.

Volunteer teams:  One of the greatest joys of my job is working with people from all over the US that I have a passion to share the good news with Peruvians.   Over the past two months I have worked with Canadians, Tennessee folk, South Carolina folk, Colorodo peeps and now this upcoming week with some Mississippi folk.  Many of these people have answered the call to come down here and share Jesus for 4 years until the area they have adopted reaches 10% evangelized.  At the point it is believed that the Peruvians should be able to complete the task.  Please pray for many of these churches as they have so much work still to do to reach the peoples of the areas they have adopted.

One particular experience: I went with my Canadian friends to the city of Acolla which is about 45 mintues from where I live.  I ended up getting to share Christ with several different people but one particular man I got to share with really taught me a lot.  This man walked up to me randomly and told me that he really wanted to talk to me about something.  So we sat down in the plaza (town square) and I just listed to this man for like 30 minutes.  He told me all about his belief in reincarnation and that everybody had the own path that always leads to the same place.  Beside all of his crazy thoughts on religion he told me he had visited a spiritist. to try and get his daughter healed from an illness.  The spiritist told him that he would change the spirit of his daughter with someone else in the United States and from what this man told me his daughter is completely different now.  After listening to all this he asked me what I thought about it and I got to share with this man about the dangers of messing with the devil and that he needed to dig into the Bible to find his answers.  Now this man did not pray a prayer to receive the gift of Christ in his life but I believe this man heard me because I listened to him.  It seems that as believers we want to share and share and share but really in order to understand what we need to share with the individual that we are speaking with we need to listen.  So God has been teaching me a lot about how to listen and really find out who people are to share the message that they need to hear.  Please pray for my friend in Acolla that he would be saved.

In the jungle: I just got back from the jungle and there I had the opportunity to work with a church from South Carolina who had been working out in this area for 3 years now.  During this trip I got the opportunity to pray with church leaders, encourage local believers and watch as these passionate followers of Jesus learned how to take communion.  One of the most interesting things about this people group is that they have churches and many of them are saved but they just need to be discipled.   

I got to preach one night in a local church (in Spanish haha yikes!) and I took that opportunity to encourage the brothers and sisters to focus on Jesus in their time of need.  These people have many many needs and something that is very difficult to do is to see past those needs and trust Jesus to provide.   The volunteer team came and taught many of the church leaders in the area how to play guitar and how to lead worship in a church setting.  They gave each church leader a guitar to take back to their villages where they could teach others to play and lead worship with their new instruments.  I learned a lot during this trip and I really look forward to the opportunity of working with the believers in this area to reach the interior areas of the jungle.

Coming?!: One of the greatest opportunities is to come and serve like one of these volunteer churches—that could be you or your church.  Would you consider coming and being apart of what God is doing down here?  Check out www.tellperu.org for more info.