What´s Next?

February 22, 2011 (oops, out of order)

I stupidly drank a cup of black tea at ten o’clock this evening. Which means two things: multiple trips to the bathroom and no near signs of exhaustion. Ugh. Like I said, dumb decision. It’s a nice evening though, chilly (which prompted my poor decision). My toes are hidden beneath socks and wedged between flip flops—a style I’ve never been very fond of back home, but don’t seem to care too much about down here.

In the 6 months of being in Peru, I’ve noticed that things that used to bother me at home, don’t bother me here.

This realization hit me today as I was preparing lunch in the kitchen and several cockroaches came out to see what was cooking. I have been involved with a few mission trips, two of which involved cleaning houses infested with roaches. Whilst cleaning I thought to myself, “how can these people live like this? I could never live with roaches.” But I’m currently living in nearly the same situation. I’m choosing to live in a house infested with roaches. Spiders sleep, eat, and poop in my house and sometimes on me, and I am constantly sweeping out dirt from my floors. And yet, I don’t seem to be too bothered by it. Maybe I’m just desensitized. I think I see it as a lost cause. Unless this house burns down, we will never be rid of roaches.

I will refrain from sharing a few examples of things I previously had no qualms over for fear of disgusting others and losing friends of the male and female gender.

Now, rather the opposite. I’ve also noticed things that didn’t bother me at home bother me here. For example, evangelism. I’ve attended evangelistic series in the past. I’ve also preached in one. But I never really cared what happened after the meetings. I never put much thought into those who were baptized or what happened to them afterwards. But I care about those things here. I’m not in accordance with the way evangelism has been done here in the past. I don’t agree with the way we have held meetings, baptized a few people and said goodbye. Who will mentor them? Who will lead them? Who will teach them how to be a church family? What happens next? I’m still trying to discover what I can do to help the situation. I don’t want to be content with just seeing a problem but doing nothing to solve it. I don’t want to live life with the same mindset I have about my roach infested house—there’s no point in fixing it, in fact there’s no way to fix it, there will forever be roaches and there’s nothing I can do to solve it so I might as well give up. I’m not content, and I guess that’s a good thing.

Peru is changing me. I think I’ll go kill a roach.