One week in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. One week in White Clay, Nebraska. One week in Oglala, South Dakota. That is all we needed for our lives to be completely transformed. For our hearts to be broken and the cares of our own problems to be set aside. One week is all we needed to let God speak to us in a place that seems abandoned, hopeless, and desolate.
Many times we don’t realize what a huge impact a simple act has. While in Ica, Peru with a team from Edmonton, Canada we got to see a great example of this. One day we were building a house for a lady who had lost hers in an earthquake.
While we were in Peru this summer building houses we came to the town of El Olivo. It’s a small town of about 3,000 people that I first visited 3 years ago when we first started building a house in that town, because it was one of the hardest hit in the region. Only 2 or 3 buildings in the entire town had been left standing after the quake! I remember seeing how devastated the town was. Most streets were impassable because of the rubble in the street.
On the second river trip of our outreach to the Amazon jungle of Peru, we visited a village called Dos de Mayo. We were told that the village had no church and we were going to evangelise and pass out anti-parasite pills.