We traveled eight hours on a boat, it was a fast boat, on a slower boat it would have been twenty-four hours, so I was thankful it was fast, but still it was eight hours with a one year old who had just begun to discover that walking was his new hobby. The other not so exciting thing about an eight hour boat ride is not really wanting to go to the place you are headed. We live in a city in the selva, jungle, of Peru. It is not a very modern city, but the place we were traveling to was even less modern and the bugs were even worse. And without a fan, the heat really starts to get to you. But that isn’t was this story is about. We arrived in the village, said hello to friends and ate as usual. Then the next morning we got in another boat, a slow boat, for six hours. It was also a small boat. No room for walking. But again we made it. But again six hours is even less fun when you are not so sure you even want to be going where you are going. I became even less excited, if that were possible, once we arrived, because once our boat had stopped, I began to itch. My back, those hard to reach places, were on fire with itch. The bugs had welcomed me. I wanted to get back on the boat and leave right then, but of course we didn’t. Let's just say that this was the hardest two and half days of my life (but not really, it was hard though). The villages in Peru are a hard place to be, there is no relief from the heat, the bugs are every where and are always biting. There is constant dirt, it doesn’t matter how hard you try to keep everything clean (this isn’t a big deal to everyone though). I was volunteered into helping the cook, because well I am a woman and all women know how to cook, right? Wrong. Not this city girl (I never considered myself a city girl, but I know for sure I am not a native woman), basically what happened was I stood around looking helpful, while my native friend did everything and then I cleaned up (which I knew how to do). This village had been contacted once before, there were only a few believers at this time. That night we sat around at one of the houses and began to speak more of Jesus. It was a church service, but it was. It was a bunch of believers sitting around sharing about how good God was, we shared some songs and prayed with those who wanted to accept Jesus as their Lord. This was why we had come. The next day I spoke with this group about how to speak with God, how to pray. It was my first time to share anything like this in Spanish. I am not sure how much they understood, but it was one of the reasons that I had come.
Our theme on this trip had been, count the cost. What are we willing to pay for these people to hear the gospel? What was I willing to pay? A little bit of comfort? Was I willing to itch and be hot and dirty, for their sake? To see my son covered in bug bites and worry every second he is going to get parasites? People always look at us as missionaries and think we are so great to leave our homes and families and life in our comfortable countries to go and be uncomfortable and we do those things, but we are uncomfortable and we cry and we complain and we are not as joyful as we should be. Sometimes it’s about obedience and not about the excitement. Sometimes we just obey, even without having joy. Sometimes we just do what we gotta do, because we gotta do it.
