This afternoon David and I were pruning our rose bushes in front of our house. We had the door ajar, but didn’t think of the inevitable situation that would arise…A gust of wind, brought on by the approaching storm clouds and rain that was hanging over our neighborhood (Larapa) slammed our door shut. We, did not have our keys, our phones, or the ability to “break in”. There are metal bars welded to the front windows and our front door lock is a deadbolt. They are not coming open. (Please keep in mind that as a pregnant woman now, I must use the bathroom more frequently.)

David continues cutting the rose bushes (after failed attempts to move metal bars) and I asked God, “who is going to help us? which house do I go to?” He said the yellow one across the courtyard. I banged on the metal gate and a petite Peruvian woman answers. Trying to not sound panicked, but also getting my point across using Spanish and charades, I explain our situation. She grabs her keys and offers them to use on our door (not working). Then after brief introductions, Elisa, helps me knock on the other 10 doors in our complex and ask if anyone has the number to our landlord. Out of the 3 people that are home/come to their doors no one does. Great. I even beg our neighbors for a small child or a toddler that could potentially squeeze through the metal bars. No such luck stealing babies.

Now it’s drizzling. A man in the lime green house next to Elisa, whose name is Julio, suggests getting his ladder to climb in through our top window. David explains that he just fixed the top window (which wasn’t closing properly and 15-minutes before rose pruning, he latched it). David heroically scales the ladder anyway and after concluding with Julio that our window is only 10 soles to fix if he punches through it, we can manage that. Luckily, as Dave is about to continue hitting our window out with a set of pliers, the window trim pops off and he can push the window open. GRACIAS A DIOS!! Dave climbs through the window and unlocks our house.

Crisis adverted…this time. Thanks to some of our new neighbors (who will probably never forget our first impressions of being the stranded gringos who lock themselves out of their new house). We were and are so grateful to Elisa and Julio for their willingness to help us when we needed it. It got me thinking, would I be this helpful to our neighbors in the past? I think in the past that I would have panicked even more.   God was teaching us today through some divine encounters with neighbors are priceless.  God also gave us the humor to deal with present circumstances and to open up relationships that otherwise may not have started. He also taught us that before Baby Carter gets here, don’t leave the house (even if your just doing yard work) without your keys. Do you have your house keys with you? Are you on good terms with your neighbors? Good. Lesson learned. Because one day, you will need each other in situations “como esto.”

Now off to finish baking the pumpkin snickerdoodle cookies for our neighbors. Gracias Elisa y Julio.

A recap of what WE (YOU, included) have seen God do over the past year of partnering with us in Cusco, Peru:

1. Our first day in Cusco (Oct. 3rd, 2012) we started off like this:

NOW, (since Oct. 9, 2013): we feel so blessed to have moved into a furnished ready-to-move-in house! The Lord is so good at providing our new family a house to rent (2 blocks up and 1 block over from the YWAM apartments). Stay tuned for a house tour…

2. Then, from October 2012 – January 2013 we were blessed to be paired up with these guys to learn Spanish:

Amauta and Jimmy

NOW: Thanks to their long hours of practicing with us, having grace for our mistakes in language learning, and taking us on some crazy adventures around the city, we have a pretty good understanding of Spanish. Both Amauta and Jimmy continue to be amazing friends of ours and have blessed us with their friendship as well as being our Spanish tutors. We can now interpret Spanish for outreach teams/our DTS school.

3. Last year, before coming to Peru, we prayed for a lot of things. One of those requests was for an honest landlord. We got this guy: Roque Milton Vasquez Medrano (who has been a God-send and an answer to prayer!)

(and we also met Dave Snyder who was equally cool to meet).

4. We also prayed for community. God also let us rekindle friendships with old friends. Pictured here is the beautiful, Laurinda Rapp. We worked with her at Camp St. Christopher in 2010-2011. Then she went off and did her DTS in Australia while we went off to do ours in Thailand. Then she emails us to say that she’s staffing another DTS outreach and we get to host her—crazy. Never thought we’d see her again, but we got to live in the same building again for 2 months! God’s humor is funny that way.

5. Our purpose for coming to Peru a year ago was to “learn how to pioneer something from the ground, up”. God partnered us to work with the Allens–Jordan and Joy. Our original plan was to be here 1 year, but we are so thankful that in December 2012 that God gave us discernment that we would be here longer. Jordan and Joy are great leaders to learn from!

NOW: We prayed for more YWAM Cusco staff to join us, and Saulo and Edgar came too! Now, we are a team of 6.

6. We had no idea 1 year ago, that God would pioneer a DTS in September 2013 in Cusco (after almost 20 years without a YWAM presence in the city)…

NOW: But God is faithful to his promises and He delivers what He has ordered. Now we are discipling Maddie, Nicolas, Bailey and Logan in our first bilingual DTS and it is going so well! God is growing their faith in so many ways. We honored to staff such an awesome group of people!

7. We were able to make a trip home and see family and friends:

(photo credits: The Haldeman’s and Jen’s parents)

AND THEN, some family and friends came to visit us in Cusco:

(David’s parents and the Strauss’)

8. We have been praying for a baby and God heard our prayers and blessed us with one!

NOW: We can’t wait to see what God has in store for our amazing, little family of three! No matter where we go in the world, we are going together.

We love each and every one of you! Thank you so much for your prayers, encouragement, financial gifts and commitment to partner with us over this past year! We really could not be here without the support of an amazing team behind us. Look what WE did, together, with the Lord!! Here’s to year #2–ready to keep dreaming BIG with God and see him do even many more awesome things in Cusco!

“To Give Light” is the phrase used in Peru to describe having a baby. David and I thought, what a perfect and beautiful analogy to speak over OUR BABY (who will be brought to light in this world sometime in late April, 2014.). We are so thrilled and excited that Daddy God has chosen us to be parents for such a time as this! He could have chosen any of the 7 billion people out there, but he chose us. Wow! Praise God, the author of life, for creating life, THIS LIFE, for us!!

Baby and Jen are doing great and everything is normal and healthy. We had our first appointment this morning and had our first ultrasound. Baby is 5.5 centimeters long, has a great heartbeat and we got to see Baby’s head, hands and feet. Praise God, all is well! 

Here’s to the good news! Just wanted to share it with you!

Love, 

David, Jen and Baby Bear

 

The first 2 weeks of our discipleship training school, DTS, have been very busy, but an exciting transition of learning and excitement. One of our students from Lima had some unresolved family issues at home and felt she was unable to continue with the school because she was needed at home. After praying with her and respecting her decision where she felt called to go, our school is continuing with 4 students: 3 American and 1 Peruvian. Because our school is small and intimate, it’s exciting to watch how we have become a close-knit family already. We are already seeing the benefits of having a bilingual school because our Peruvian student is picking up so much English and the Americans are all having to use Spanish. David is mentoring one of the guys and I am mentoring both girls, and we are both leading the guys/girls small groups.  All of our students are already growing in their faith in the first 2 weeks and it’s amazing to see! They are hungry to know God in a deeper way and we are seeing them all step out of their comfort zones and try new experiences.  For example, last week when our base director taught “Hearing the Voice of God”, we led the students on a “treasure hunt” (prayer outreach) in the city. They may have started out nervous, but they were able to pray for one man, encourage and talk to some women who were selling trinkets (one of which was our friend Vilma, who we have prayed with before on a treasure hunt. She is probably used to strangers asking her if she wants prayer by now!).

This week, David and I have the honor of tag-team teaching on “Worship, Intercession and Fasting”. We are passionate about all of these topics and we plan on incorporating some lessons about dream interpretation (God communicating with us at night) and some inner-healing prayer. God is leading us to give the students new ways to worship him (ex. through worship art) and new experiences through prayer (ex. prayer-walking around our neighborhood, or prayer-walking over a huge map of Peru–to intercede for the country and other YWAM bases). Some students came to our school barely feeling comfortable to pray their prayers out-loud. Two-weeks later, we are seeing students volunteering to pray over us (as their teachers this week) and their peers.  They are interceding for nations and people that they have never met.  Other students have never been given the opportunity to be creative (exploring art, drawing or music).   Now, they eagerly pick up watercolors and a paintbrush when we have worship music without intimidation. A spark has ignited underneath them that there is more to learn and see of God’s character and they are craving more. Give them MORE Lord!

Jen teaching on “laying a foundation of prayer”

 

 

 

 

(Jen, David, Joy, Jordan, Saulo and Edgar)

David had a dream this week that “[he] was looking down on a chessboard. Rocks started to fall on all of the squares, except on the squares where we were standing.” When he asked God for the interpretation of the dream later, he said that our staff team was “unified and complete”.

Saulo is a friend from Tuesday Night Prayer For the City. He did his DTS in Brisbane and is also a dentist. He was working at a non-profit clinic in Cusco, but then felt like God was telling him to do something else. We told him to pray about joining our staff and he did. He is also a downhill mountain bike enthusiast, who has his national downhill race next weekend on the mountain behind our neighborhood.

Edgar is from a few hours away in Juliaca, Peru (close to Puno and Lake Titicaca). He is a Pastor of a church and did his DTS in Iquitos, Peru. He has also worked with the YWAM base in Pichilemu, Chile. A few months ago we were praying for more staff (the Allens and us) and we asked God to give us the names of people who were to join us. The name that I felt like God was giving me was “Edgar”.  I asked if anyone knew an Edgar in Peru. Jordan immediately thought of this guy and called him. We actually forgot about him in the next few months that followed because we knew he was pastoring a church and thought his delay in responding was a “no”. Yet, he called Jordan 2 days before staff training and said he was moving to Cusco to join us on staff!

This week, We, the YWAM Cusco staff have been seeking the Lord so much about our upcoming DTS. A month ago, we weren’t really sure if it would still come together. A month ago, we only had 1 accepted student and we had to tell him that if the budget didn’t work out with the number of students we need to run the school, we might have to cancel. The last month has been a time of God taking every opportunity to remind us that the DTS is going to happen, but on His terms and by His grace and provision. We certainly have faced a lot of opposition and moments where we weren’t sure if anything was going to work out, but God always shows up to take care of us. He wanted to communicate to us that no matter the amount of striving and worrying that we weren’t going to be able to do this on our own strength.

Fast-forward to today, August 16th. Today marks the “soft deadline” for students to apply to our DTS. Today was the day to pray, do we move forward with this, or do we cancel? Truthfully, we have accepted 2 students to our school (4 if you count that we feel good about 2 more but are waiting on some of their forms to arrive). The American-administrator in me wants to say “ok, we are done. If you missed the deadline, you’ve missed the deadline.” But if God acted that way towards us in extending grace we would be in trouble. So we prayed and heard God say to run the school for September 18th and he reminded us (in so many ways about how he is faithful when we obey) and that He can provide “the more”:
1. We have the budget for the school even with small numbers
2. We have Saulo and potentially 1 more Peruvian on staff with us
3. Even though we didn’t see all the money come in on our HopeMob campaign, The Lord helped us crunch the budget
4. He is bringing the right students to us for the right time
5. in one week we had 3 applications come in

Staff training starts on Monday for the next 2 weeks and we are very excited to get going now that we are officially going ahead with the school! David and I are so excited to start discipling these guys!

Our surprise guests this week at Tuesday Night Prayer was the Outreach team from YWAM Iquique (Chile). They have been serving the past month at different churches in Cusco. David said that they led worship for the Pastor’s meeting last Wednesday and it was awesome to witness and be a part of. Picture a group of five 18-20 year olds were leading worship and commanding the presence of the Holy Spirit to come invade a room of thirty 50-70 year old men. And The Lord showed up.

They came Tuesday night, cooked us a fabulous Chilean meal and led worship and prayer for our city. They encouraged us as pioneers and shared experiences from their DTS. They are wonderful friends that we hope we can visit on our outreach next year.

This week we had some of our amazing friends from Charleston who used to be a part of our small group, David and Ryan Strauss, come and stay with us for a few days as they were “passing through” Bolivia and doing the Inka Trail/Machu Picchu. It was so great to see them and catch up. They blessed us tremendously with a wheel of cheddar cheese from La Paz. You should ask David Strauss how he got to feed a llama and what happened to his eye on the trail….and then you should check out Ryan Graudin Strauss’ new book “All That Glows” coming out in February.
That being said, you are most welcome to visit us in Cusco! (Now that they did it and it wasn’t so scary….)

Prayer Points:
1.We are still praying for our DTS students to apply! We have many inquiries, but we want to see commitment in applications and references to come in on time. Our deadline is August 16th (coming up very soon).
2.Also praying for a Latina to join on staff.
3. Our house

Praise: An update on how faithful God is to his words, a few months ago He gave us the name “Edgar” when we asked for names of staff. Jordan knows an Edgar in Juliaca who is a pastor but had a previos commitment to his church. Honestly, we had forgotten about him because he was unsure if someone could fill in for him. Edgar called Jordan personally this week to say that he would like to apply to be on staff with us! even though he’s not “official” yet, it has been really neat to see God call someone by name and then fulfill his promise months later!

Praise: a team from the YWAM Iquitos base came last week and we were super encouraged by the base director, our friend, Joe. We took him out for dinner and 4 hours later we came out with some awesome words of wisdom for pioneering, for our DTS, for life and plenty of great stories. Thanks Joe!