Revelation

Happy Thursday everybody! Here is the revelation that hit me yesterday while I was speaking to a reader.
age 11-I was baptized
age 22-married
33 years I have been a Christian
44 my age (I have now been married half of my life! Thanks, Pat!)

I didnt say my revelation was profound. Quit trying to read something important into it!

Miguel did not show up for his appt yesterday. Maybe it was one of his bad days. He is scheduled at 3 this afternoon and I am praying that he comes. Marie has a reader named Percy that is really searching and may be getting close to a decision about Jesus. Please join us in praying Acts 26 18 for him and for all of our readers.

There is an LST team here in Lima from Lubbock Christian University. They are 3 students who are here for the exact dates that we are. We actually met them in the Atlanta airport on our trip and we are planning to get together with them while we are here. It will be nice to have easy-flowing conversation with someone! There is another team of adults from the Dallas area arriving next week for a 3 week campaign. We hope to meet them too as they owe us money!

Marcela, our hostess, left last night for Nashville. Her husband, Jacobo, used to be the preacher here at Lucyana but has been preaching at a Spanish church in Nashville for 5 years. They keep their house here and let visiting missionaries and church members use it. We miss Marcela around the house-very weird without her. She may return in about a week to finish up an inventory on her hardware store. But she needed to get to Nashville at least for a quick visit because her children (3 daughters married to Americans and living in different states) were there waiting to see her. They expected her last week when Jacobo returned home (the day we came to Peru) but she had to stay due to the business. Please pray for her. There are problems with her books and she is afraid the business will go bankrupt and she might lose her home. A preacher from another town has been staying at the house to help her and he is still there with us. Very nice guy but we cant speak to him, he has zero English but loves on us anyway.

We dont like laundries. Most of mine and Erins clothing did not make it back to us with the delivery yesterday. We stopped in this morning on the walk to work and got most of the missing items but what a hassle! We kept saying Ours are the only clothes with English on them!! Of course, the laundry lady doesnt understand a thing we say.

If youve noticed, I am not using quotation marks or the apostrophe. Cant find them. These keyboards look just like ours but things are not where they are supposed to be. For example, the dash is where the question mark is, the question mark is shift dash, the / is shift 7 key, the ( ) are shift 8 and 9, and heres the best one...@ is Alt 64. Our little brains are fried after an internet session! So, if anyone knows where the apostrophe and quotations are on a Peruvian keyboard, please help.

Voices

Can I take a minute to tell you about Miguel? He is 21 years old, an electric guitar player in a band (I am keeping him far from Erin!) and one of my favorite readers. We are spending 3-4 hours each week discussing Luke, Jesus, and how to live a Christian life in this world. He has been a reader before so I am stopping at each lesson that he has already done and we are discussing what he remembers about it and any questions he still has about that subject. Today, we spent a long time talking about temptation, prompted by the story of Jesus in the desert with the devil. He loved 1 Corinthians 10 13 when I showed it to him. He asked How do people live without God and the Bible? We talked about hope and that God and His Word give us reason for living.

I want to ask you to pray for Miguel. At the end of our very first reading session, he asked if he could stay a few minutes longer to share something with me. He asked me to pray because he was having a very difficult time with his studies and with concentration because he is hearing a mulltitude of voices in his head. Well, I figured out very quickly that God was going to have to speak through me on this one-a little out of my league! I asked him some questions about what the voices were telling him to do, etc. I told him about a disease that strikes young men about his age sometimes and encouraged him to find a doctor that specializes in these things and get some medicine to help him. Today, I asked how he was feeling (he has 3-4 bad days each week) and he said he was still looking for a doctor but wanted to ask me if I thought that the doctor must be a Christian for it to work. Such a sweet heart in this young man.

So, would you please pray for these voices to leave him alone, let him rest at night? Also that this disease would not worsen before he finds help and that he would find just the right doctor and medicine to help him?

Thank you loved ones. Missing you today!

Encouragement

Thank you so much for your responses. We are hearing from so many of you and it carries us through our days. So glad you are enjoying our adventures and mishaps! We want nothing more than to be used for your entertainment!

We are feeling more at home here as we begin our second week. At the moment, we have run away from our babysitters to spend some time on the internet. Hope it doesn´t cause an international incident. If you read in the papers that we are missing, it is an exaggeration. We miss you all, can´t stand the thought of being away from you for 5 more weeks, but aren´t suffering from homesickness. It´s weird though how you can be tootling along just fine and something will hit you. I was feeling great this morning, ready to get busy with my readers and took a minute to look at my love cards for the day. There was one from my sister and her family and I just lost it. In a good way, but unexpected. I wish I knew which days to bother with mascara and which ones not to!

Our first party last night was a success. We started 40 minutes late. You think people at Park Plaza are late? These Peruvians have you beat hands down. We had about 25 readers/visitors in addition to many church members. We played a mean game of ¨spoons¨ (has nothing to do with Will) and then played ¨take a hike¨. They loved both games, love to compete. Several students stayed for the worship service afterward and 3 other visitors scheduled reading sessions with us for this week. I made choc chip cookies from a mix that I brought from the States and they were a hit. Our desserts are too sweet for them but they inhaled these cookies!

Okay, let´s talk about our living conditons. To picture our street/neighborhood, envision what you´ve seen on tv about Harlem. It´s not that dangerous and we are never alone but that´s what it looks like. Every building is a store front, all covered by iron bars. Even when they are open, the bars are closed-you just knock and they let you in. Most people live above, behind, or next to their business. Marcela, our hostess, runs a hardware store with a walk-up window. There is a little door next to the business that goes to the house. You walk down a dark, short hallway and enter the living room. There is a dining room and a very small galley kitchen. Up some narrow stairs are our bedrooms and Marcela´s. Erin and I share a small room with bunk beds. Booker and Marie have adjoining rooms at the other end of the hall. All of us share a bathroom. We have a shower but not always hot water-I was a little shivery this morning! Behind the dining room, outside, are some stairs that go to 2 more floors with rooms that open to the outside. These are all usually full of visiting Christians, etc. Sometimes church members spend the night here since many live 1-3 hours away by bus. We are really appreciating the comforts we have in our US homes! Sarah and Deborah, it´s about as clean as the apt. in Kiev used to be.

They are such sweet people and loving toward us. Millie (age 18) spends every morning with us and our readers. This morning, she showed us how to take our laundry to the cleaners, another new experience.

Not through with all my thoughts but out of time. We have readers in 15 minutes and must get back to the church. Thank you all again for your encouragement of us. Sorry I can´t answer each email, we only have about 30 minutes/day on the internet. We miss you and are already looking forward to seeing your faces again.

HERO!!

Funny story. Yesterday was our day off for the week and a couple of the brothers from the Lucyana church took us to see the Pacific Ocean. It was an hour´s taxi ride away which, in this culture, is enough to age you 50 years. The cars, buses, 3-wheeled motor taxis, etc get within INCHES of each other. Apparently, as long as you honk, you can drive anyplace in the road that you choose. AGHHHHH!

We went to a district of Lima called Mira Flores (means look at flowers) where many Europeans have summer homes. It is lovely. We climbed down stairs for about 30 minutes, no kidding, to get to the beach level from the shopping level. It is winter here and only in the sixties so we didn´t plan to swim. While Booker and Marie stayed up on over the wall with our babysitters, Erin and I climbed down onto the black beach, rolled up our pants, and waded a bit. Luis, one of our babysitters, wanted to take our picture and made us stand there long enough for a gigantic wave to soak us from behind. Very funny, Luis. Glad you enjoyed that.

We are trying to rinse our feet off and get our shoes back on when one of Erin´s flip-flops gets eaten by a wave. It is carried out with the tide and we just have to watch it go. It deliberates for a few minutes and decides that it will not ride the waves back in to us. So, is she going to go barefoot all the way up 30 minutes of stairs and into town to Payless (there really was one)? Luis, wave boy, starts looking for someone to help. Next thing I see is this gorgeous, buff, blonde guy in swim trunks running down the stairs like he´s on tv, right past us, and dives into the surf to rescue that shoe! He comes out, hands it to Erin while we are just cracking up. We make such a big deal about thanking him that he says he feels like he saved a life! He is from South Africa and was on vacation. I took a picture of him with Erin, can´t wait to show it to you all.

We spent some time listening to native music in a park and then spotted a modern cinema. Yes, we got to see Pirates of the Caribeann. The movie was in English but the crowd was definitely enthusiastic South Americans!

Many of you are asking about our daily schedule, where we live, etc. I just have a few more minutes here in the internet cafe so I´ll tackle our daily work schedule. On Sundays, we worship with the church for about 3 hours, have lunch, work on party preparation and set-up. Sundays at 6 pm are our parties where our readers can bring their friends and interact with the church members. We want them to have a relationship with the brothers and sisters so that when we leave, the church can follow up and our readers are not only attached to us. Monday thru Thurs, we work with our readers. We are out of bed at least by 6 30 am, if not at 5 with Mr. Rooster. We get ready, have quiet time, breakfast, and meet at 9 in Marie´s room for a team devotional. At 10, we are at the church to meet our first readers. Each session is 45 minutes long, meeting one-on-one, discussing Luke or Acts. Many of my readers have been LST readers in the past (2 of them have read the previous 4 years!) so I am reviewing Luke with them right now, just discussing some of the stories, what they remember, and any new ideas we find. At noon, we walk to the cook´s house for lunch, then have a few minutes rest, which we are usually spending in an internet cafe, staying in touch with LST and our families. At 2, we are back in reading sessions until 7 when we go back to the cook´s house for dinner. We are finished at 8 except for Thurs evenings when we go back to the church for Bible study/worship. At home, Erin and I usually stay up and play cards or read while the Murphy´s go to bed! Sometimes we spend time visiting with our hostess, Marcela, or others that are at the house. I´ll write about our living conditions on another day.

We miss you all and are thoroughly enjoying your cards/emails. That is so important to keeping us going! Thank you for all your prayers, we feel them in a physical way.

One more thing...
All of my girlfriends are whining about us having a cook. I just have one thing to say..... nana nana boo boo.

Committment and Spoilage

Our readers are so precious. We have new ones walk in every day that we are working at the church so that they can make appts. We each have 5-7 readers, most of them come every day. So we have full reading schedules and are getting great time with each reader. They are so incredibly eager to meet with us. Some of them travel 2 hours by bus to get to the church. One of my readers works 8-8 and cant make during our reading times so she is using her vacation time for our meetings. What committment! They are so friendly and loving. We are being well taken care of.

We even have our own special alarm clock. About 5 am each day, there is a rooster outside our window that begins helping us wake up. Some days he just goes on for a little while, other days he goes on for hours because other roosters down the street are answering him. We have no idea what they are talking about but it better be how to escape because we are going to introduce him to the ax soon!

Have I told you about our cook! Yes, I said cook. Her son is a member of Lucyana church and she is cooking for us in her home which is located between our house and the church where we work each day. She cooks traditional Peruvian food and it is really delicious! We are eating more than we do at home since she makes us a large meal for lunch and dinner each day. And it costs us less than $2/person/meal. Patrick, I am coming home spoiled. Consider this your warning! Someone tell Kyle Graham that we had ceviche for our appetizer at lunch today. Yummy! Will Spoon, cant wait to talk recipes with you.

We are on our lunch break now. We had our meal and stopped by the internet cafe on the way back to work. We all have full schedules this afternoon and a Bible study with the church tonight. Our stomachs are bothering us today. Please join us in praying that God will block the tiny germs that are attacking us!

We miss you all. Dios te bendiga. (God bless you)

Here we are!!

Hello all,
We have arrived safely, with no mishaps and all of our luggage! God is good! We landed about 11pm, spent an hour in immigration and customs, then headed for the exit to see if anyone was there to pick us up. There was a group of smiling Peruvians in the throng of people who had been looking for us for more than 2 hours! Each one kissed each one of us (one cheek only) and that ïnstant family¨thing started. They are so precious and we seem to communicate despite the language barrier.

We were settled into bed by 2 am, too keyed up to go to sleep! After about 5 hours we were up again, ready to hit the day. At 7 tonight, we have an information meeting with all of those interested in our program. We can´t wait to see the faces of those we have been praying for for several months. Tomorrow will be our first reading sessions with some of those readers. We are ready to get to work!

Lima is beautiful. We walked outside this morning to find mountains right next door! The weather is great and we can´t wait to see more of the city this weekend. Thank you for all your prayers, we feel them!

Tears

I've never cried so much before a trip! Every year, our enemy throws something at me to try to get me to stay home. In 2004, it was my children. In 2005, it was my dad's health; he was still in the hospital after emergency heart surgery (and darn near losing him) just 2 weeks before my departure date. This year, it has simply been the heartbreaking idea of leaving my family and job that I love for 42 days. I thought with Erin now traveling with me, that would be better and it is. But, thanks to my friend and office roomate who shall remain nameless (Fran!)and her acccomplices, the faucet has been turned on. I was fine on Sunday as our team was called to the front of the church and prayed over by the elders. I was fine with all the goodbyes, blessings, promises of prayer, and hugs. I was even fine during the video of graduating seniors because none of them live in my house. On the way home, I opened the big manila envelope that (Fran) gave me, saw what so many of you have done, and totally lost it. I'm not very easy to surprise (but getting more so as I get more clueless with age) and it freaks me out a bit in a good way when things have been going on behind my back. In this envelope were cards. Wait, not just cards, but lots of cards. At least one for every single day I am away. Crying now, again. And, there is an envelope for every member of the team, even the latecomer! It is 5 am and I have already looked at the ones dated today. Cried through them all. Some anonymous person even shared a quote from Elvis. No, it had nothing to do with "burning love". I know that some of these cards are from church staff, elders and their wives. No idea who else might be lurking in that huge stack of love. So, thank you, thank you, thank you for your elaborate show of love and support to this team of weak, weak people just trying to keep up with all the blessings He showers on us through you. Gotta grab perhaps my last real shower and make a flight. Next time you read, I'll be posting from Lima. (Fran) promises that more surprises await. Bring on the kleenex.

Family Affair

Wow, what a whirlwind week it has been! Not only is it a LOT of work to prepare a job and a family for me to be gone for 6 weeks, but one of our team members quit the team on Wednesday, 5 days before departure. This sent me scrambling during an already crazy week as you can imagine. But...our God always brings a blessing! He dropped a name into my head of a young woman who has the following qualifications:
1. She has already said yes to this work once.
2. Her application has already been approved by Let's Start Talking.
3. She knows quite a bit about the work already, even though she's never been on a trip.
4. She knows more Spanish than anyone else on the team.
5. She has no job at the moment to interfere.
6. I'm crazy about her.

Yes, my oldest daughter Erin is completing our team. I am so, so thankful that God is letting me do my favorite work with each of my daughters (youngest daughter traveled with me in 2004).

I know God saw this coming a long time ago and had this blessing planned for us. I finally have peace about leaving the rest of the Sweeneys now. Thank you, Father. You are a great God!

Please pray that we will be organized in our packing and that we don't forget anything!

Hello everyone! Welcome to our adventure. On May 21, 2007, four adults will be leaving home and families for 6 weeks in Lima, Peru. For one, it is the first time out of the US (still waiting on that blasted passport!), for the rest of us, it is the first time in South America.

We will be living with native Peruvians, shopping, traveling, worshipping with them. We are working with a ministry called Let's Start Talking. We will be offering free conversational English practice, one-on-one, using the book of Luke from the New Testament of the Bible. This is a service that anyone learning a new language gets very excited about! To better a life in any country in the world, its people must have a better usage of the English language.

We have been training together for several months and now have just 2 training sessions left before our departure. I will update just a couple of times before we leave and then will fill you in on our adventures on-site as often as possible.

I'm looking forward to having you join us as we experience so many new things!