Fertile Ground

Thank you God for people who have a heart for the ones on the streets. Jorge, Elizabeth and Carmen have been God-sent. Seriously. I am so grateful to have them on the streets with me.


 As I stood waiting for Jorge and Elizabeth today, I just observed all that was going on around me and I realized that it was so incredibly noisy and chaotic out there. Just so much noise, so many people jostling one another, so many cars and vehicles all trying to go where they're not supposed to. A cacophony of sorts. I couldn't imagine actually living there everyday with the constant buzzing of people all around. So many people, yet all so lonely.


We saw HN first and Jorge called him over but he was reluctant to do so as he was drinking with his buddies and he was embarrassed to be caught. He sheepishly came over but avoided direct questions that Jorge was asking him and when HH came with his baby, E, HN saw his escape route and went for it. HH told us that J, his girlfriend, gave birth yesterday to another baby boy. At 7 months. A premie. They hadn't known she was pregnant, which scares me because she is small, and I know she drank even while she was breastfeeding E, so if she was 7 months pregnant and they didn't know it, how big is this baby and is he healthy? The hospital sent them home today and according to Henry, they're both well. 3 babies and she's only 19 years old. Oh Lord.


We asked him about LG, one of his brothers who also live on the streets. LG had received the Lord, had been pierced by the Word and had wanted to change his life around when we last saw him. I gave him a NT bible and told him to read it and not to use it for any other thing except honour it as it is the Word of God. He said he would honour it. And then we never saw him again. Which sucked, cos we wanted to know how he was doing. When I saw HH tonight, my one thought was, how is LG. So I asked. H said that LG placed himself into a rehab centre along with his other brother, Jr, about a month ago. We took down his last name so we can go visit him there. I am so incredibly happy that LG took the step to change his life. I really am hoping to visit him this Sunday.  


The police had been doing raids on where the girls are and when we went up to where they are, they were on the alert for the cop cars. EM, one of the girls on the street, had her wall up today although she said she was planning on going to church this Sunday. Please pray for that to happen. SJ hadn't been drinking today so it was good. EM from our team talked to both of them tonight. I talked to KA and she's in problems based on her decisions. I asked her if she had any friends to talk to. She said no. I asked if she would permit me to be her friend. She said I already am. So I invited her to go for coffee to talk more about what she was telling me as it was really hard because guys were trying to get her attention tonight. The good thing was, she swatted them away telling them she was in a conversation. :-) Please pray that we can go out and talk more on Thursday morning this week. 


All in all it was a good night. We are so thrilled about LG and Jr. Please pray that we get to see them and teach them more of the Word. 


Oh, and on a sidenote, we went to visit Mr. G. P at the hospital where my husband was at and gave him a bible and told him that when he got scared to read Psalms. I'm trusting the Holy Spirit to remind him. He was so sweet, telling us that we are both in his hearts. :-)

Mr. G. P, the Elderly Lawyer

Hello? What does Siembra SOW have to do with a lawyer, and an elderly one at that? Siembra doesn't have anything to do with him. But Jesus does. A whole lot. He died for Mr. G. P. and rose again so that he may have life and life abundantly. He loves Mr. G.P. a lot, a whole lot. And Mr. G.P. needs to know that. He heard it, he received it in his head, received the Lord because he wants that and the peace that he heard that he can receive from Jesus. But, he doesn't know how to let go of his fears so he can receive the peace. 


Who is Mr. G.P? He was one of  the reasons my husband was taken ill so he could be placed in the same ward as Mr. GP's ward mate at the hospital. Reason number one: so that God can be glorified through the miraculous healing He did in my husband. Reason number two: Mr. GP. Mr. GP is so annoying he has pushed away all the people who are supposed to care for him, his son, his daughter and his wife. He buzzes the buzzer to call the nurses every 10 minutes. Even through the entire night; something my poor husband could attest to. He calls his son and daughter and wife every hour. No one visits him and when his son comes, it's to sit and read the paper after telling him to be quiet because he can't bear to argue with him.


Mr. GP is afraid of going home and being alone and possibly dying alone. He has been at the hospital for more than 15 days for hip surgery but he is fine enough to go home. He is terrified that  his son would discharge him against his will. Terrified that he has to be in a house alone. His son has said he has hired a nurse for him in the house. But he is terrified. So fearful. So lonely. He had me call his wife and daughter and neither would respond to the calls and after the second call, they turned off their phones. He reminds me of my paternal grandfather. In his fear of being alone and unloved, he pushed everyone away too. I didn't understand what caused my grandfather to be so annoying then. But I feel that God is giving me a chance to understand Mr. GP and to share with him God's love.


We have shared the gospel with Mr. GP and he has received the Lord but I haven't been able to break through his fear to help him understand God's immense love for him and what He wants him to have. I felt that I broke through a little today when I talked about how God cares about him more than the birds in the air and that God would keep taking care of him through people and would not leave him alone. He teared up. I realized then that he doesn't know what real love is.  I have the feeling that he has ordered people around when he was younger and is used to having his way because he can buy it. So, the people around him have been obligated to be with him not because of love but because of contractual obligation or other forms of obligation. And he has no idea what real love is.


My husband was discharged from the hospital this afternoon and now as it gets closer to bedtime, I can't get Mr. GP out of my mind. I keep feeling his fear, his loneliness, his desperation to not be alone and I wish I could be there to at least pray with him, to talk to him so he knows that Jesus loves him. And he doesn't need to do anything to receive His love. We need to go back to the hospital tomorrow to pick up copies of my husband's records and results and I want to go visit him again. Maybe if he is going to stay at the hospital indefinitely, I will ask if I can go visit him. But in the meantime, all I can do is pray for him. 


Please pray for him too. He needs to know that he matters. 


As a human being.


And because Jesus loves him too much to just leave him alone.


Thank you.

Glory to God!

The CT scan showed a bulge in my husband's artery in his brain and he had symptoms of an aneurysm. They took an angiotomography of his brain yesterday night and there is nothing there. God healed him. To God be the Glory!!!

 Thank you so much for praying. 

Huge Prayer Request

If you're reading this tonight, please pray for my husband, Luchin who really needs a miracle. Depending on the results of a tomography scan he had done tonight, he might need surgery to remove a brain aneurysm. We are praying that God removes it and strengthens the wall of his artery so there is no need for him to go through with it. He is under observation at the hospital as I write this.


Thank you.

Growth

I couldn't go out with Jorge and Carmen tonight as Luchin was ill and we had to spend a huge chunk of the day and evening waiting at the hospital to see a doctor. 


Carmen told me that things went really well tonight. HN went up to them and got prayed for and then he went and brought a friend who prayed to receive the Lord. Other guys came around too after watching that and Jorge and Carmen spent some time with them. I'm glad, as the guys had been no shows for the last two weeks and I'm really glad that Jorge and Carmen can do this on their own and that the guys have accepted them. Definitely God's favor!


The only girl Carmen got to talk to tonight was EM who told her that she was finding it harder and harder to go out to the streets to work. The Holy Spirit is definitely at work!!!!! As EM talked to Carmen and Jorge, the police came and rounded off all the girls in a raid except EM because she was with Carmen and Jorge! Carmen didn't miss a beat in telling her that God protected her because she chose to talk to them and not work the streets. 


We really need to find a place to rent as a drop-in centre/office there soon. We can't have all these people give their lives to Christ and then have no follow up. Please pray for the right place and the right price rent. We haven't found anything yet.


I'm really glad that the work continues even when I can't go out with them. For a while there, one of the team was really afraid to go if I couldn't go because there was an incident with a mentally ill person throwing bread back after receiving it. However, now that the team knows that this is indeed a calling of God on their hearts and that God goes before them and that the same Holy Spirit that resides in me is in them, nothing can stop them. This has been on my heart a long time, to be able to raise up local leaders with the same vision to eventually continue the work.


Please keep praying for each one of the team. We covet your prayers as we constantly need to know what God wants us to do next and which step to take. 


Also for protection and wisdom and discernment. And love and grace.


Thank you.

Out There Once Again....

Kinda difficult hitting the streets today. Death is such a weird thing. Makes you think and remember. We went straight to the girls today after looking for the guys and not one of them was to be found. The girls greeted us and you could see how LG's death had affected them. Not many of them were there. EM was absent, thankfully. SJ was there but not drunk.  


I got to talk to SJ and got to share the Gospel with her and gave her a bible. We generally don't give out bibles unless we've talked to the person and it's a bible that has newsprint paper for the pages and not fine paper so that they can't roll it up and smoke weed with it. I had been thinking about LG's three kids and how they now had to deal not only with her death but with what she did when she was alive and how everyone now knows. The mockings they would have to deal with, the name callings. And when her husband remarries, how would the stepmom treat them knowing that their mother was a woman who worked the streets? I posed these questions to SJ. I told her that so many of them say they're there working for their kids but really, have they thought of the repercussions if their kids found out and how it would affect them? Were they really helping their kids or making things worse for them? She listened and when the cops came she made me walk with her so that it was not obvious that she was waiting for clients. I walked and talked. We prayed for healing for her coughing. But she wasn't ready to receive Jesus. She wanted the bible though. I just pray that the bible gets used as a bible by her. She said she will call me when she gets a new phone chip. Please pray that she does. 




LG's death hit everyone hard. It hit me hard too because I could see through her façade and saw the pain within that she tried so hard to hide with her hard as nails exterior. It was hard and weird being there tonight and knowing that one was gone. And the fact that many of them weren't there tonight revealed that it hit them hard too and they are probably thinking of making changes in their lives. 


Please pray for them all, pray that through this, they would be open to the Word of God, to truly wanting to change their lives around. Please also pray for me to be able to distinguish and remember faces and names. Thank you.

At The Cemetery

We went to LG's funeral yesterday afternoon, not being able to make the wake. I badly wanted to see her face. Such a rarity for me since I normally avoid as best as I can without offending the family of the dead looking at the dead person in his/her coffin at wakes. But this time, I really wanted to know if she faced death peacefully or was terrified. Not out of curiousity, but just to know if she had another opportunity to encounter Jesus even if it was in her unconscious state. SJ was the first person I saw at the funeral whom I knew. She was bawling her eyes out saying she needed to change. I took the opportunity to talk to her about change. 

 Most of them were drinking up a storm and partying.  EM was there but with her little girl and it didn't look like she was partying with the rest of them. So strange for me to be at a funeral and everyone drinking to get drunk. But then different cultures and social classes deal with death differently. I look at this and just make mental notes and observations of how to understand the girls and how to counsel them better. CC was there with her mom and sister and invited us to her restaurant. When I spoke to her last week, she couldn't find money she had taken out of the cash register and had sent her daughter to go looking for it. We prayed on the phone for the money to be found and I had forgotten all about that. She reminded me of it yesterday and said that right after we prayed the money was found on a table. Weird? No, just God. Saw CL too and she said she no longer works the streets but then it was rather difficult talking to her yesterday.


This is the first time I've been to a cemetery here in Peru and it's different. All of those cubicle like things in the photos contain a body. They're like long drawers and a body with or without a coffin depending on what the family of the deceased can afford gets put in there and then the opening is sealed with cement and words inscribed on it to identify the deceased, etc. 


All I know is that we need to keep going down to Ciudad for the girls and guys. Maybe we can't see too much change now but we will keep hitting the arrow on the ground and we're not going to stop at 3 strikes. We will keep hitting and hitting because you never know if the next hit will be the one that brings the harvest in. 

Goodbye, Liz.

Sometimes it's hard when we think we believed and had faith and things didn't happen like we thought they would. I don't think we can ever understand the whys and hows of things that happen only that God is in control, He has a purpose and that whatever the enemy seeks for evil, the Lord will turn around for good. And sometimes things happen to humble us. To remind us that it's God who is in control and not anything we do or say or declare. 


LG died this morning. The International Day of Women. A beautiful woman of 29 years of age who looked older than she was except when I saw her in the hospital bed. She had 3 kids and had spent her entire life basically on the streets and on drugs. She didn't live on the streets but she spent her time there and when we met her, she had already been selling her body for a long time. The last time I spoke to her was about 2.5 weeks ago. She said she didn't believe that what she did was a sin.  I tried to converse with her a little after that, not to pummel in the fact that I disagreed with her, but more to let her know I still cared for her no matter what she thought. She had on her wall and when I asked if she was ok, she said she was tired. I told her if she needed to talk I was there to listen cos she looked closed off and distant like she had something on her mind. She smiled and said no, she was just tired. The next time I saw her was in a hospital bed, unconscious. And 2 days after that, she was dead.


She didn't know she was going to die the last time we spoke. She was determined to defend her stance and what she did. She was not going to let God in because she didn't want to change, she was afraid to because she thought she could do no better. And so she challenged me with her statement. 


I spent today wondering what I could have done differently, how I could have helped more, shared the Word better, prayed better, declared life over her more. I don't know. I felt I had failed. God gave me a task and I failed. She died. And I have no idea if she called out to Jesus in the spirit while she was unconscious or if she remained stubborn even then. Luchin says we will know when we see her face at the wake tomorrow. He tried to tell me I couldn't have done anything differently, that she had to make the decision. I couldn't make it for her. Yet, if I had shown more love, shared the Word better, maybe she would have understood better and decided to receive the Lord into her life. I just want to know if she made the decision for Christ. I don't want her to be separated from Him forever in hell. 


But then, as bad as I might feel, it's not about me. It's not about what I could have done better or differently. God is in control. And I believe that He who loves us so much did give LG another chance to know Him even while she was unconscious. Perhaps only when she was in that state could she actually hear Him and what He had to tell her. Perhaps it was only in that state could she actually understand His love for her and choose Him. And perhaps, when she did make that decision to choose Him, He took her to spare her more pain and misery in her life here on earth as she would probably have gone back to doing what she knew best. 


I don't know. I only know that I need to go to her wake tomorrow. I also know that I need to love the other girls on the streets more unconditionally and I also know that God is using this all to speak to them in a stronger way. All I know is that what the enemy intends for evil, God will turn around for good. And I trust my God.

Update on Liz

We went to the hospital today and seriously, God opened doors for us to be able to see LG. At the door to the ICU, Luchin and I were looking up her name on the list posted up and we mentioned aloud her name and a lady standing by us asked how we knew LG. We told her and she then said she is LG's aunt. God put it in her heart to trust us and she put down my name as one of the visitors for Liz today. With ICU patients, only 3 are allowed each day and there is only one hour of visitation each day. LG's husband and mother weren't going to go today so I got to be put on the list. Coincidence? No, not at all. Completely God's favor. 


I got to go in first and I had been praying for wisdom and discernment on what to say and how to pray. It was really a shock to see her. She looked so young, so vulnerable without her shield of makeup and she was naked except for an adult diaper and a light bandage covering her chest. Tubes snaked in and out of her body and she was unconscious. I told her who I was, told her that we care for her, that we are praying for her, that many people are praying for her and that she cannot give up. She had to fight to live and that she has to tell God she needs Him and that she wants to live and that she needs Him to help her. Then I prayed for her, declared life over and into her, kicked out the spirits of death and infirmity and told her to choose life, to want to live as God is the giver of life and He wants us to choose to live. I prayed like crazy and spoke words of life as much as I could before the nurse told me to go. I noticed that as I told her to not give up, to fight to live, her chest rose and fell more violently. I believe she hears, that her spirit hears and responds to the Spirit of God. It was hard to see her like this. It is hard to see any person in the fullness of life in this position. But I know that God who has never left or abandoned her before is with her. 


I am believing that she will rise out of that bed and be whole and strong. I believe because with my God all things are possible. I believe because it's not a coincidence that everything happened the way they did. I will keep vigil in prayer for LG. 


Will you help us pray for her? 


Thank you. 

What The Enemy Intends for Evil, God Will Turn Around For GOOD

One of the girls who work the streets really need your prayers and intercession tonight. Her name is LG... and she is in ICU with a pulmonary viral infection because of having done terokal and cocaine. Her case is terminal and the doctors have given her days to live. I believe in a God who is bigger than our problems. I believe that He who came to give His life on the cross for us has conquered death and is the physician of physicians. He is our Healer and Saviour. So as you read this, please pray for LG. Pray that she will give her life to Jesus and that she will be healed. She needs us more than ever to pray for her. Luchin and I will go and visit her in the hospital tomorrow. Who is LG? 

She has been one of the hardest to reach or even to talk to as she has hardened her heart so much. Yet, she is one who cries during the night when no one sees. The Lord had given me a word of knowledge for her once and I told her that He sees and hears her when she cries at night and she confirmed it. God has this under control, he knew all this would happen. I'm praying that through all this He will be glorified, that through all this LG will be a testimony and reach the other girls for Christ. With God, nothing is impossible. 

FR showed up today and I could finally give her the bible I had promised her. She wants to go to church with us and I now have her phone number to call and check up on her to meet for chats and reading the bible sessions. Last week, I called CC to see how she has been as we haven't seen her in a while. She is fine and has started a restaurant around where she lives and hasn't been out on the streets for three months now. She invited us to go visit her and the restaurant. Now we need for her to know Jesus. She goes to a Mormon church so she thinks she knows the Lord. Please pray for her as well. We hope to be able to go visit her later this week or early next week.

Tonight was a football night and none of the guys were around. Most of them take advantage of ball games to rob and to make mischief. Even if they don't belong to a gang per se, when it comes to football games, they take sides and use that as an excuse to fight with other "fans" of the other team and to rob the spectators. Last year, we almost lost a guy who got stabbed in one of these football games madness. 

I'm thankful for the team; for Jorge who is a prayer warrior and a man of faith, for Carmen who is sensitive to the Holy Spirit and a woman of faith with a way of reaching out to the women, for Elizabeth who has a compassionate heart to want to see the guys and women set free and for Luchin who even though this is not his calling, accompanies me when he can to reach out to these ones and to take pictures so that people know what it is that we do. And I'm thankful for you, our reader, who continue to pray alongside us. 

Let's never stop believing that El Shaddai, God Almighty, will turn around for good what the enemy intends for evil.