Wednesday, April 16, 2008

My life is a charade


Two months from today I will be heading back to Canada to finish this part of my life. In 2 months this place in Peru will only be a memory. In 2 months my TREK experience will be over and the people will all just be people I have grown to love and people I have spent a great season of life with. In 2 months I will return to my life as I know it in Indiana and look back on this and remember the memories I have made.
I know that people say that you aren’t supposed to look for the things ahead… that you are supposed to live every moment like it was your last… and that’s what I’m doing. I am living this season, my life, the best as I can. I know that the start of this may have sounded like I am longing to be home… but really and honestly… I’m not. Yes I miss home, and yes I miss my friends and families, but they can wait. This place is where God has sent me and this is where I want to be at this moment.
I look back on the past month and a half and I smile at the memories I have made here in Peru. The gym, charades, my family, and my new growth in love with Jesus. Those take over all the homesickness I may feel. Those memories make me smile and I think of the ones yet to come.
I know I probably have mentioned it before, but every morning we go with Otto and workout at a near by gym. At first, we hated it. We didn’t like waking up early, didn’t like to get all sweaty, and we just didn’t like the fact that we were going to do things to our bodies that would make us sore. Our options have changed. We still hate getting up early but its became easier. We are in bed by 10:30 every night and we learned to take small naps during the day. We don’t mind the sweat anymore… we just learned to take it when Hector pinches our sweaty body and move on. And the soreness… we have grown used to it. We no longer feel the pain of stretching muscles… and we just suck it up.
Charades!!! Who would’ve ever dreamed my life would become one. I personally hate the game, but when you are a gringo, you have to love it or else you wont survive in this Peruvian world. Everything you try to explain, everything you do, you are using your hands. You make the shape, you make sounds, you basically play charades every minute of everyday. Its been quite the experience. At home, I took advantage of knowing what everyone said, here…you guess and hope you are right.
The family here has been a blessing. I love each and everyone of them and I enjoy living in the same house as Jano and his family. We are learning their way of life and their way of doing things. Some come as a surprise but others, we grew up with to. They seem to have some good laughs at us as well. One incident I remember specify is one of the fist days here, we were eating lunch and we didn’t have a table in reach so we just sat on the floor with our plates in our lap. When Jano walked through the courtyard, he looked at us like we were green in the face. And the food on our plates had already been a laughing fit earlier because it was something they hadn’t ever seen… so this just added to the image in our minds of the way they seen us. We laughed about that one for awhile.
The past couple of days have been the best days spiritually that I have had in awhile. I did my devotions like I normally do, but the past couple ones have really touched my heart. On Monday, I read about King Saul and how he disobeyed God when he went into battle ( 1 Samuel 15 ). God gave him strict orders to destroy everything and leave nothing there. But Saul decides to take some of the best and offer them up to God as a sacrifice. It just really hit me how much God really wants our obedience. Yea… Saul offered sacrifices, but that wasn’t what God wanted! He just simply wanted Saul to obey. People say that I gave up a lot coming here… and I have., but that’s not what it is about. I came here because I had to follow God’s voice. I had to obey him. And when I obeyed his call in coming here… I had to make sacrifices.
I have learned a lot of other things in the last couple days of my ‘spiritually high’… but it would take way to long. You will just have to ask about those!!!
Six and a half weeks in Lima Peru and it has become my home. There is nothing I would change about it, that I would trade for, and nothing I am not grateful for. I love it here and I am so grateful for the opportunity to experience this season of life in this country… here and now!!

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