Yup, that’s a real word. It’s a real place, actually, and the site of a youth camp that I attended along with about 14 other people from OM Chile and 110 Chileans around my age. It was wonderful (and exhausting (but mostly wonderful))!! Each year the Intensive Training group experiences a youth camp from a local church and this year we attended the camp of the church I’ve been attending. I really enjoy the youth of my church (and sorry, I realize I’m using the word “youth” in the Chilean understanding of its age range, somewhere between 18- early 30′s, I’d say), and it was really, really great to get to know people better and deepen friendships. My first year here in Chile I attended a different church. After a year passed, I still felt on the outskirts of the church, just a visitor. Being a preacher’s kid and growing up always involved in the heart of a church, that was really difficult for me and added to my feelings of being unrooted here. I switched churches and began attending a church where I found the services boring but had felt welcome and at-home within its youth group since I first arrived. I’m so glad I made the switch. Especially after this youth camp we went to, I really feel like I have a church family here in Santiago and good Chilean friends. Praise God!
Yup, that’s a real word. It’s a real place, actually, and the site of a youth camp that I attended along with about 14 other people from OM Chile and 110 Chileans around my age. It was wonderful (and exhausting (but mostly wonderful))!! Each year the Intensive Training group experiences a youth camp from a local church and this year we attended the camp of the church I’ve been attending. I really enjoy the youth of my church (and sorry, I realize I’m using the word “youth” in the Chilean understanding of its age range, somewhere between 18- early 30′s, I’d say), and it was really, really great to get to know people better and deepen friendships. My first year here in Chile I attended a different church. After a year passed, I still felt on the outskirts of the church, just a visitor. Being a preacher’s kid and growing up always involved in the heart of a church, that was really difficult for me and added to my feelings of being unrooted here. I switched churches and began attending a church where I found the services boring but had felt welcome and at-home within its youth group since I first arrived. I’m so glad I made the switch. Especially after this youth camp we went to, I really feel like I have a church family here in Santiago and good Chilean friends. Praise God!
Anyway, back to the youth camp experience. What I really enjoyed about the experience is that I felt involved within a church again. One afternoon I taught about evangelism to the entire group (in Spanish for over an hour, whew!). In one evening session I from up front translated to English the message of the visiting pastor, and for the majority of the other sessions translated from my chair for the IT participants who needed it. At the end of the 10-day youth camp we planned to do two days of evangelism in the little town near the camp, so the IT and I prepared ahead of time so that they would be ready to do some clown dramas for the little children and more serious dramas for the adults. As the days of evangelism grew closer, I went with a group to go talk to the manager of the biggest (and only) supermarket in town. She, as well as the owner of the store, are Christians and they offered us the use of their parking lot and sidewalk outside to host our evangelistic activities that we did, like free massages, free blood pressure checks, free haircuts, free hugs, prayer, songs and games for the children, face painting, balloon animals, as well as our OM dramas accompanied by a short evangelistic message. It was a huge blessing to have that site. What came about because of that meeting, though, is that some of the group also wanted to do a flash mob within the store in order to draw attention to what we would be doing outside. Since I have the most experience in organizing flash mobs (having done a grand total of….. one…..), I suddenly became in charge of that, too (though with a lot of help).
The flash mob went well, with the store letting us use their sound system to play a song, use extra uniforms to stage some of our people as workers, and hide some of our people in their upstairs offices. Those five guys came out and stood on a balcony overlooking the store, and when the music started they grabbed the attention of the shoppers by singing at the top of their lungs. As they made their way down the stairs, more males joined in singing from all over the store. At the chorus all of the girls started singing from their different places in the store. We all moved together into the center of the supermarket and sang together, worshipping God. With over 100 people participating and in four-part harmony, it was a pretty cool experience. We then called to the shoppers around us to come outside and participate in what we were doing.
I want to speak more of this camp and I’m also going to post a bunch of photographs (because now that I have my professional camera with me, I got some wonderful shots), but that will be in another post because I need to head out for the day. God bless you!
Chau.
Today at our team meeting, this video was shared as we prayed for the unreached people groups around the world. I wanted to share it with you because I found it powerful. There are so many who have never heard the name of Jesus Christ. What does God lay on your heart? Will you pray for them? Will you pray for missionaries to go out to the field? Will you go?
One of the ministries we have here with OM Chile is the skateboarding ministry. They are a small group of guys who have come to know Christ through the ministry. They now join Yerko, the leader, in putting on demonstrations and sharing about the love of Jesus. Two of the young guys had an amazing opportunity about 6 months ago to fly and join Yerko at TeenStreet Germany, where they did skate exhibitions and workshops. The whole group right now has travelled to CIMA where they’ll do the same. It’s been awesome to see this ministry continue to develop and the opportunities God is giving to them to share His love in a unique way.
So like I’ve mentioned, I write the stories that are posted to OM’s news website. I also, being a native English speaker surrounded by many non-native English speakers, revise and edit others’ stories used for publication, like in OM Chile’s newsletter. I want to share with you a story that a guy from this year’s Intensive Training program wrote recently. He writes of an experience from OM Chile’s Agape homeless ministry, which is a ministry I’m not a part of and so its representation in this blog is sadly lacking. This doesn’t balance things out, but this important ministry should get some attention here.
a homeless ministry friend
Crying silently, but still with hope
Lukas, Intensive Training participant
It’s an experience that I would rather have not had during my time here in Chile, but perhaps it will help me in the future.
It was a Friday evening and, like every Friday evening in OM Chile, the people who participate in the Agape homeless ministry met at the OM house to eat together and to prepare the bread and tea for the homeless. We made our way to Santiago’s main plaza, Plaza de Armas, and headed towards the part where we normally find some of our homeless friends, Colo-Colo, Luis and Diego. This Friday night, however, no one was in the usual spot. After awhile we saw a homeless woman we knew and we asked her if she knew anything about the other guys.
She told us that in the past days, Diego was drinking a lot. He drank so much pisco, a Chilean drink, that it was really hard on his body and his health. They took him to the hospital, but there he died.
The leaders of the homeless ministry, Roel and Nati, went to the hospital to confirm if the story was true, which sadly it was.
For me, this has been the hardest night of my life so far. Since the beginning of my time in the homeless ministry, Diego had been special to me. We somehow became friends as the weeks turned into months, and I remember one time giving him one of my hot dogs and a Coke. Every time I went to him, prayed with him and asked him how he was, he cried. I believe that he was really unhappy about his situation and ashamed for me to see him how he was.
Two weeks before that Friday, Diego had told me that he was fed up and tired of living. I took this seriously, so I asked him if he had accepted Jesus Christ as his Savior and God; that He is the only One who could save his life. Diego told me that yes, he believed. I prayed with him that night and have the belief and hope that one day I will see my friend Diego again in Heaven. Praise God!
Members of our communications team have been putting in long hours to prepare a video presentation about the huge project OM Chile has undertaken by buying a new base. Along with creating a cd of information, videos and cost breakdowns, they have created this video with the overall idea of the project and have posted it to YouTube. Please feel free to share this video. The more eyes that see it, the better. God bless!
In August, OM Chile moved from an office space, a house, and two apartments all into a new base. It’s an amazing blessing to be all together, serving alongside each other. We finally have a nice video created about OM Chile’s purchase of the new base, and I wanted to share it with you. Also, if you’d like to read more about what’s going on here in Chile, or in OM around the world, there’s a really really great OM news site where people post stories and photos of God’s impact around the world, and you can read it here. The Chile-specific stories are here.
Here are also the full website addresses if you’d like to see them all written out:
http://news.om.org/country-news/clq
Enjoy!
I’m excited. The idea I’ve been holding onto for a couple of months now has come to fruition and is awesome. There’s something so satisfying about having an idea, thinking of how best to make it happen, consider what’s needed, what might go wrong, what logistically needs to happen, and then go to it! A few months ago I was looking around online for inspiration for OM Chile’s art ministry, which I was taking over this training year, and I came across the idea to do lenticulars on fences. Lenticu-whats? Basically putting a painting or photograph on the sides of a fence so that when you’re walking past you see the picture at the perfect angle.
A few weeks ago in one of the art classes I asked the Intensive Training group to brainstorm ideas for paintings we could do for the fence. They came up with wonderful ideas. The hope is that we can regularly change the painting so that it becomes a continuing ministry in the neighborhood; that people will come to know our property as the place that always does these paintings; that it would spread God’s message and give us opportunities to speak to people.
We began with a simple idea in order to test out the process and so we made a painting with “Jesus loves you” in many different languages and colors. Since we have at least seven different languages spoken by the people who work in OM Chile, it was easy to fill the painting. The IT did a wonderful job creating the painting. Since this week they’ve gone to live within Chilean families for a cultural immersion, today I and two others actually did the gluing of the strips onto the fence. For future paintings the IT will be even more involved in the entire process, but it was so exciting to see the painting coming clear with each strip we put up. We weren’t even done yet when our next-door neighbor stopped to look at it and compliment the idea, leading into a conversation about who we are, our organization, and what we do. Woohoo! I’ve been pretty pumped all day since we got it up on the fence. I’ll show you some photos as well so you can actually picture what I’ve been chattering on about. Enjoy and God bless!
the IT painting
Full painting before cutting it into strips
getting started
last strips
From straight on, nothing
Start to see it
More and more
Final Image
... you make race time so much fun!
One of the challenges of being a missionary is support-raising. Sometimes it’s difficult to find enough support; sometimes there’s plenty at the beginning but then it drops off. Sometimes a surprise donation comes in or a new supporter joins and it’s a cause for praise. Our supporters at home are crucial members in our ministries and we give thanks for God giving them the heart to serve the way they do.
One of the women in our team of OM Chile has a lot for which to praise God. After raising her support, leaving theNetherlandsand being in the field for a few months, she found that the money coming in each month for her dropped dramatically. She did what she could from halfway across the world, but it was difficult to find more supporters. She prayed, our team inChileprayed, and her core group of strong supporters back home prayed.
We serve a faithful God who answers prayers. Her supporters came up with an idea to raise money that was both creative and fun. They organized a duck race. They rented little rubber ducks, approached businesses about donating great prizes, and went house to house through two villages as well as in churches to “sell” the ducks. Each person who “bought” a duck showed up the day of the race hoping to see the numbered duck they were sponsoring cross the finish line first. All along a small canal people were lined up to watch almost 1,000 sponsored ducks drop into the water and make their way to the net finish line awaiting them at the end of the race. It was a fun, unique way to raise support and also awareness of why they were doing the race, with many people learning more about OM and the work being done inChile.
Although support-raising can be challenging, when God has called us to the mission field, He provides exactly what we need. In the case of our teammate from theNetherlands, He provided creativity and 1,000 rubber ducks to cover the gap in her support. He knows our needs better than we do.
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