At the end of March we, along with the Blairs, traveled to Cusco to be a part of this year’s Peruvian Mission Summit. This is a yearly retreat where missionaries from Peru meet together for several days. There were families from Lima, Huancayo, Cusco, and us from Arequipa.
Gary and Francis Green were able to join us again this year for the retreat. The Greens work in missionary care with Barnabas International. We had some very brave babysitters to take the 20 kids while all the missionaries spent the morning hours before lunch with Gary and Frances.
The Greens had picked out “pilgrimage” as a theme for this year’s retreat. We walked through what it meant for us to be on a pilgrimage as followers of Jesus and also looked at examples from the Bible of pilgrimages.
One of my favorite things we looked at was finding sacred people, sacred places, and sacred times. This looks different for everyone and looks different in different stages of life, but they are all essential for supporting a healthy pilgrimage. Sacred people are the people that you can trust and confide in. Sacred places are the places that you can find God (a certain chair in your house or maybe it’s walking through your neighborhood, or hiking through the woods). And sacred time is the time of day/week/month that you set aside to just be with God. We were challenged to figure out our sacred people, places, and times and then use them to better our personal relationship with God so we can in turn be better pilgrims on this journey.
It is always so encouraging to be together with the other missionary families and to be with people who understand what you are going through while at the same time learning from each other’s experiences in their corner of Peru.
Thank you to Gary and Frances for being such a blessing to our families and thank you to the other missionaries that were there for being a part of the Kingdom in Peru and sharing your lives with us.
