8 Weeks

This past week my ReachGlobal “Boss” or, church-planting coach, came to visit Meredith and me in Tarma. It had been a year since he had been here and it was fun to show him all that we have accomplished in 2010. We spent time talking about the future and what we as a team would like to see happen in the next 5 years or so. We talked about my transition as I finish up this season of ministry and head home to start a completely different season of life.
Today marks the start of my final 8 weeks in Peru. People have asked me if the time has gone quickly, and the answer always seems to be yes and no. Each day of transition into a new culture, of learning how to live on my own, doing ministry in different and sometimes frustrating ways made the time seem like it was crawling by. Being away from my family, my friends and Jason has been difficult as well. Yet now that I’m standing here a mere 8 weeks from home, I do wonder how the two years I committed to ReachGlobal has gone. My church-planting coach asked me a series of questions a while ago to help me process through the upcoming change and transition. He asked me:

Where do I want to go before I leave Peru?
Who do I want to spend personal time with?
What is the mark I want to leave on Tarma?
What can I do to help my team before I leave them?

These were valid questions that I have spent several weeks thinking through. The places I want to go are generally restaurants so that I can eat the typical food of Peru that isn’t widely found at home. The people I want to spend time with is a small group since I still do not have personal friends apart from my team and my tutor, Diana. I do anticipate that the hardest goodbyes will be with Stephen Hawking High School and my 60 students for whom I have come to care deeply.
When I think about leaving a “mark” on Tarma, my mind really draws a blank. How can one person really “mark” a community in just a year? What would that look like and how would it be accomplished. To be perfectly honest, I’m not all that concerned with leaving my mark on this place. What I want most of all is to have done all I possibly could to help this team and this ministry advance and grow. I want to come back three or four years from now and see that what I helped start has developed into a consistent, solid and God honoring ministry that is changing the lives of the people of Tarma. Could that be called a “mark”? I suppose. It is really the only mark I am interested in leaving.
As far as helping my team, I have discovered a few practical ways that I can spend these last weeks as I phase out of ministry responsibilities and start packing up my things. The house that Elsa and Meredith and I rent is a three-bedroom, without any closets. When we moved in we realized that we would need some place to store our suitcases, boxes and ministry materials. So we decided that in addition to our apartment, we would rent one room from the apartment next door that would serve as our storeroom. Obviously once I leave Tarma, there will be no need to rent the extra room since there will be one in our own apartment – so one of the things that I want to help my team with is to move out of my room and help move all of our ministry supplies and extra stuff into an organized space in the soon to be spare bedroom. It seems like a silly way to spend my last days in Tarma, but I thrive on organization, and I know that this is something that I can leave my team and my roommates with - something practical.
So there you have it, the grand plan for the final weeks of my life and ministry in Peru.