The Lord's Day in Arequipa

What a privilege it was to preach this morning in Restoracion Church, the "city church" Don and Christie founded in Arequipa. I spoke on "How to Get Back Up When Life Knocks You Down," from 2 Corinthians 4:8-18....and went 40-45 minutes! Yikes! I didn't intend to go that long. I had asked Robin to give me a high sign when I needed to wrap it up...and she did, for a solid ten minutes, she said! I never saw her. Praise God, nobody ran me out of town on a rail.

After church, we had lunch and lay down for siestas, and then headed to the Seventh of June pueblo for a children's service, which started outside with singing, and then reassembled inside, where both the teens from Villa del Triunfo and the women presented a dance and Robin gave an object testimony.

The day's worship concluded at the Villa church, where we worshiped, the women and youth reprised their dance offerings, and Don presented graduation certificates to those who had completed the year-long discipleship class.
We caught two parades in the course of this day, one in the morning on our walk through the Yanahuara Square to the hotel (we also walked about 50 minutes from the hotel to the city church in Parcapata!), with uniforms and flags. Don thought it might be something like flag day, but someone told our team it happens every Sunday. The other parade was led by the Catholic priest (and statue of the virgin--whatever virgin that village honors) as they walked from house to house through a pueblo between Villa and Seventh of June, blessing the homes along the way, from all appearances. It blocked the street so we had to wait until the homes were blessed and the crowd then emptied into a festival in the village park area.