The New Seat Belt Nazi

Posted by Stacy on August 31st, 2010 @ 9:52 pm under Everything Derek, Everything Jakob, Life and Culture, Parenting, The Newest News

In 1983 I was four years old.  You may not know this, but right around this time citizens of the USA  started pushing for laws requiring that drivers and passengers wear seat belts to save lives and increase safety on the roads.  About every five minutes there were commercials on TV that showed what happened to people who didn’t wear their seat belts.  People would say things like, “If you love your family, then you’ll make them buckle up.”  And in 1984 the seat belt legislation was passed.  I’m not making this up, really.  I looked it up on Wikipedia.  Since 1983 I have been know in our family as “The Seat Belt Nazi.”  Every time we got in the car to go somewhere I would shout out, “Put your seat belts on!!”  Every.  Single.  Time.  Drove my parents and my two older brothers crazy.  But I didn’t care.  I couldn’t live with myself if we had gotten into a wreck and I didn’t make sure they were buckled up.  Congratulations are in order to those people who made those seat belt commercials.  I’m sure I wasn’t the only 4 year old imprinted with frightening images of what would happen if the people you love don’t wear a seat belt.

And now congratulations are in order again.  Because my 4 year old has been brainwashed by all the recycling commercials he sees on TV.  When he sees me throwing away anything paper or plastic or metal or glass or anything that looks like it should be recycled Jake asks, “Mom, can we recycle that?” or “No, Mom, don’t throw it away, we can recycle it!”  Well, his persistence is working.  My kid is turning me into a tree hugger.  After we move into our new house I will figure out how we can start recycling here in Lima.

But not only that, lately he doesn’t want to throw away anything at all.  Nothing.  I’m not exaggerating.  Now, I’m sure this probably has something to do with the slight instability in our house right now.  The movers are coming tomorrow to load up our stuff, and I’ve been busy for the last week getting things in boxes.  So our life schedule has been a bit out of whack.  Derek keeps looking for his toys saying, “Wear, wear, wear, r my toyeez?!”  Translation–Where are my toys?!

This morning Jake came running in the room crying hysterically.  I couldn’t tell if he was scared or hurt, but I thought for sure it had to be one or the other.  No.  He was crying because the trash men came and picked up some of our boxes that we left outside with the trash.

It continued throughout the rest of the day.  He didn’t want me to throw away anything.  He said we could recycle it.  He said he could use it to build something.  He said we could use it later.  He said he needed it.  I thought the day of not wanting to throw anything away was finally over when I started getting them ready for bed and got them in the bath.  Nope.  His band-aid got wet in the tub.  I told him to take it off and I’d give him a new one when he got out.  Fearing the truth, he started crying and asked me if I was going to throw away that used, wet band-aid.

Yes, Jakob, I am.

But I want it!  We can save it for later!  Use it again!

We are throwing it away, Jakob.

After the bath, I get him dried off and dig the band-aids out of the box that I already packed them in.  He puts the band-aid on by himself and when he pulls the little white plastic parts off the band-aid–you know, the part that sticks to the sticky side?–I kid you not, the boy asks me if he can keep those little white pieces and not throw them away!

No, Jakob, you need to throw them away.

This time there are no tears.  Apparently he was formulating a plan.  While I’m standing there next to him, washing my face, I see him from the corner of my eye looking for a place to hide them on the floor back behind the toilet!

No, Jakob, throw them away.

He steps outside the bathroom and just a few feet away finds a box that’s been taped up.  Very sneakily, he slips the two, little, white fragments of his band-aid into the crack of space under the flap of the box.

This is the part where I gave up, turned my head as if I didn’t see it, smiled real big and tried not to laugh out loud.

The new Seat Belt Nazi, indeed.  Makes me kind of proud.

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Our August Celebration

Posted by Wes on August 29th, 2010 @ 9:09 pm under Mission South America, Peru

Today is the last Sunday in August. So what? Well, right now we’ve got a number of small groups that meet regularly for Bible study and worship times on Sundays. We have several different groups that get together in people’s homes in different parts of the city. These small groups, house churches of sorts have been really great for a lot of reasons. But, in addition to getting together in these smaller groups, we have been combining these three groups and inviting our friends that aren’t in a group yet to come and get together for what we call our Celebration Sundays. And, today was one of those Sundays.

We had a really great turn out this time around… which was encouraging. I don’t know how many people came but the room we rented out for the occasion was pretty packed and we completely ran out of the snacks that we brought. During these times of “celebration” we generally have some times of prayer, worship in song, read scripture and maybe have someone share a short thought… the idea is to have a time in which we celebrate our shared faith in Jesus and enjoy the chance to realize that we are in fact a part of something that is bigger than us and to enjoy the community of worshipping together as a group.

Today we did all of that… but it was also a special day because two of our Peruvian friends decided that they wanted to be baptized. Do you remember Edgar? I wrote about Edgar a long time ago… a story about how I was just trying to go play soccer and he completely got in my way by asking me about my faith. Well, Edgar has just kept “getting in my way” in a good way, dropping by and wanting to study the Bible or just talk about life and faith whenever he gets the chance. We’ve become good friends over the last few months and even though I didn’t know Edgar before, I’ve seen that God has made big changes in his life. He works in a small bus, called a combi, as a “cobrador”, the guy who collects the fare from the passengers. While riding all across town he is constantly telling people about his newfound faith and what God has been doing in his life… a natural evangelist. Along with Edgar, his wife Graciela and her mom, Victoria have been learning about God’s love and we are excited to see how God is working in them as well. Anyways, today we got to celebrate with Edgar as he clothed himself with Christ through baptism, as the scripture says in Galations 3.

Of course, Edgar is one of many of our new friends here. Also, we have a friend, Luis, who has been studying mostly with Justin, who was baptized tonight. Luis is a young single man who works as a guard on the Thompsons street and has become a good friend to us all.

Ok, well, I just wanted to share a little bit about our Celebration Sunday today and some of the stuff that God is doing in the lives of our new friends. Please keep us in your prayers, and especially Edgar and Luis as they continue along the path that God has for them.

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Summer Reading

Posted by Stacy on August 22nd, 2010 @ 9:57 pm under Mission South America, Spiritual Thoughts, The Newest News

Aside from having several great visitors over the past few months and the business of the medical campaign, I have also not been blogging very much because I have been reading instead.  A lot.  And we are moving in a week and a half, so there’s another excuse in advance.

Even though we just passed our one year mark in Peru (woohoo!) and it is winter here, I still am thinking of the months of June, July and August as summer.  For the past several years I have always looked forward to a good book to read over the summer.  This year I read three.  (I’m not a HUGE reader, so three is a lot for me.)  Third Culture Kids, Love and Respect, and Searching for God Knows What.  I highly recommend all three.

Third Culture Kids by David C. Pollock and Ruth E. Van Reken  is a book about growing up in more than one culture.

Since the time we decided to be missionaries and move to another country, we have heard about this book, because Jake and Derek are now “third culture kids” or “TCKs.”  They are not fully American, they are not fully Peruvian.  They make up a culture of their own–a childhood cross-cultural experience.  This book explains and describes so well the challenges and rewards families face because of their different cultural experiences.  At first I thought that this was something I needed to read about later on, but then a friend recommended I read it now and mailed it to me (All the way from Singapore!  Thanks, Jenn).  The wisdom and knowledge and personal stories in this book are invaluable.  It covers the board–it’s not just for parents.  It speaks to adult TCKs, family members, sponsoring organizations, and anyone else who wants to understand how being born or raised in a different culture can shape someone and impact them differently.  I find this stuff pretty fascinating (which probably explains why I chose a degree in Psychology).  I realized after reading this book that you don’t have to leave the country to have a cross-cultural experience.  I think the newest edition of the book explains in more detail what that means and looks like.

Love and Respect by Emerson Eggerich is a marriage book.

This is actually the second time I’ve gone through this book.  It’s divided into three sections–the first is written to both husband and wife, and then it’s split into the “how to love your wife” and “how to respect your husband” parts.  I think the strongest message of this book is how little we know (us wives) about the importance of respecting our husbands.  It’s pretty revolutionary, actually.  I’ll probably be re-visiting this one throughout our different stages of marriage and life as a fresh reminder.

Searching for God Knows What by Donald Miller is a book that has set me free in a lot of ways.

I mentioned this one on Facebook a while back.  It is the kind of book that, as a Christian, you can be proud of and actually want to share it with everyone you know.  And it’s the kind of book for people who believe in God or want to believe in God, and who can respect Jesus but want nothing to do with Christianity or the church.  It set me free, like I said, because I am understanding the message of Jesus in a way I never have before.

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Medical Campaign in Paradise

Posted by Wes on August 17th, 2010 @ 10:20 am under Life and Culture, Mission South America, Peru, Spiritual Thoughts, Video

As I mentioned before, we recently had our first ever medical campaign here in Lima.  We invited groups down from our supporting churches back in The States and had a fantastic response.

We focused our efforts in a community in a part of Lima called Villa Maria del Triunfo and more specifically in an area known as “Paraiso” or “Paradise.”  In this, our first medical campaign, we were really just shooting in the dark on a lot of things.  Sometimes inexperience can be a blessing as well as a curse.  We decided that we wanted to have a traditional medical campaign like most people imagine when they think about such a thing.  We talked with a local government run preschool and were able to use their facilities, which turned out to be ideal.  We had several rooms with doctors, dentists and nurses seeing patients.  Plus another room for vision checks and passing out eyeglasses.  All of this enclosed in a fence with a playground for the kids and space for the adults.  It was perfect and we invited the community to come receive free exams and, if we had what they needed, free medicine.  We saw hundreds of people over the three days we were there.

Also, though, we wanted to do something a little different.  Our ministry here has been one that is not a massive, shotgun approach.  We haven’t plastered signs on billboards and played ads on the tv or radio.  While those certainly have their place, our ministry has all along been intentionally very relational.  We have gotten to know our neighbors and the people that work in our communities.  We talk on the street corners and in our kids schools and play soccer on the local “canchas.”  We do a lot of talking over lunch and generally sharing life with our new friends in a one to one kind of way.  So, we decided we would try something similar with our medical campaign as well.

We formed two small teams with a medical doctor and a few helpers that traveled on foot through the surrounding neighborhoods.  We primarily worked by word of mouth and through many of our relationships in the community, going to visit people in their homes that we knew to be sick and need help.   One of the great things about this approach is that we were able to visit many that were unable to get out of their house and come to the clinic we had set up.  Equally as great though, was that we simply had the opportunity to sit down in these peoples very humble homes and talk with about their troubles, pray with them about their concerns and their health, sometimes drink some tea… we were able to go to them and meet them where they were.

I just put up a post on our team ministry website as well… www.twentyeight19.org.  Go check it out.

Also, John Mark made a fantastic video of our weekend.  Take a few minutes and get some better insight into the kind of neighborhood I’ve been talking about and see some of the faces… of our Peruvian neighbors and our American volunteers.

Medical Campaign 2010 – Paraiso from Twentyeight19 Ministries on Vimeo.

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