I left for Peru on a brisk early morning in late summer—just that time of year when you begin to feel like fall has come to slowly let out the steam of the boiling summer heat. The drive to the airport was short and quiet as my wife, Carolyn, and I made our way through a city still deep in sleep. We exchanged a sweet goodbye, and I stepped from our car to begin my 3,400-mile journey from home. “This week is to be the beginning of something new.” The electricity of the thought caused my heart to race. My mind bowed in awe-struck humility at the journey I was on.
“Me … For this work God has chosen me.”
I have often heard it recounted that God chooses the least likely and least qualified individuals to do the most powerful work. And here I stood, a young boy before my Goliath. A man “slow of speech” before Pharaoh. You see, I was leaving my hometown of Nashville, Tenn., to go to Comas, a very poor district of Lima, Peru, to assist local Christians in reaching out to their neighbors. The vehicle: savings groups. The goal: addressing the depravity of the human race. I hope after reading that last sentence your eyes popped. Yes, my Goliath was the depravity of the people of Comas. … Ever since Adam and Eve “took from the tree and ate” the world that we live in has had problems. Humankind ushered in a broken world where we regularly show ourselves to be poor. In Comas, Peru, poverty manifests itself in broken governmental systems, lack of economic opportunity for the least fortunate, and inability to meet humanity’s most basic needs. The task that God gave me and my team was to participate in His redemptive work by training our brothers and sisters in Peru how to save money as a group. It is a model that builds community and solidarity, while reaching the world’s most materially poor by beginning to help them save for a wide range of needs, from productive investment to medical emergencies.
In Peru, the evidence of humanity’s brokenness is palpable, but the results of the Fall are not limited to Comas, Peru. The evidence is in Nashville too—in my city, my church, and my home. Fortunately for the world, our job as believers is not to defeat this brokenness but only to enter into the fray—to be like David before his Goliath, trusting in our God to use something simple to defeat something seemingly indestructible, and proving God to be who He is: the one whose “power is made perfect in our weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).
Guest post by Isaac Ezell, regional representative
