Revelations Through Roses

A couple weeks ago, I had this revelation that I wanted to share with you. It seems to be a good summary of how the first few weeks of this Counseling School have been going and the things I’ve been learning about (although there are so many, I could never fit them all into a single blog!).

I was outside the YWAM base walking through a flower garden, and stopped to take some photos. I noticed one rose in particular that stood out to me. I got my camera ready, then realized there was a plastic bottle on the ground next to the rose, definitely about to ruin my pretty picture. I was super annoyed because Spain is really great about keeping garbage cans and even recycling bins available in public areas like this garden, and there was no reason that somebody should’ve littered and thrown this bottle on the ground instead of a trash can.

That’s when God gave me this vision. I saw the same scenario, but with God standing in my place. He reached down to remove the bottle, and the rose grew arms to slap away His hand. The rose said “That’s mine, don’t take it away from me!” To which God replied “but this is trash, it doesn’t belong in your roots”. The rose said “I don’t care, someone gave that to me, and now I have to keep it”.

God showed me how I’m like this rose. He wants to take away these lies and hurts that other people have thrown into my life, but I look ridiculous saying “no don’t touch that!” because sometimes I trust in the words that people have spoken over my life more than the truth that God wants me to believe. Things like I’m not worthy of love, I don’t have as much to offer as another person, that person judged me so everyone will judge me. He told me that He wants to restore me to the beautiful creation He made before I had let words from others define my identity.

This is the fateful rose. Isn't it lovely just the way God created it?

A big part of this school has been learning the foundations of counseling, which means the foundations of Jesus’ love for us, because that’s the power that actually heals more than any technique or treatment plan. While reviewing these foundations, it shows how much more I still need to grow, and thankfully this is a great place to start applying those principles! This vision of the stubborn rose has been a great visual for me the last couple weeks, and I hope that through sharing what the Lord is speaking to me, He will bless you with that revelation as well. 

Another Prayer Update - A Week With A Michigan Team!

If you're a part of my weekly prayer email list, you've received this message in your inbox. But I wanted to share these great updates with everybody!

Hey everyone,

This last week, YWAM hosted a team here from Michigan. One of the leaders, Brenda, is a nursing instructor and has a passion for women in sex trafficking and prostitution (yes we are going to be best friends). Before they arrived, she contacted us in Hefzi-Ba wondering if she could get connected with the women’s ministry. We invited all the women of the team to join in ministry, and we had such a good time with them!

Friday night, we took the ladies out to the plaza to give pedicures to the women in prostitution. This is something Becky has been doing for the women every few months or so as a way to show love to them. So me and Raegan have been practicing our nail art on each other – I never thought this was something I would be dedicating so much time to in preparation for ministry! Thankfully the new girls we trained in on Friday before we went out to the plaza have natural talent, and were able to do a great job on 8 of the women that received both pedicures and manicures since we had enough people to jump in and help.

Giving mani/pedis, massages, coffee, and love to the women working in the Plaza.

On Monday afternoon, we hosted a women’s craft workshop making barrettes with supplies brought by the team. Once again, we had 8 women show up, and some of their young daughters made barrettes as well. Peruvians love all sorts of hair clips and things, so this was a big hit with the women here. The most exciting part was that one of the Plaza women came with two family members! We always invite the Plaza ladies to our women’s events, but they don’t generally feel comfortable enough to come to our events. The fact that she came and brought others with her shows that we are gaining her trust and that God is working in her heart! Hooray!!! :)

Prayer requests from this last week: Some of the team members would like to come back next summer to work with Hefzi-Ba! Details have yet to be figured out, but please keep them in your prayers whenever possible as they figure out the logistics and follow God’s direction. We were so blessed to have these girls join with Hefzi-Ba for a short time, and would love to see them return to Iquitos!

I’m still physically not so hot… I got meds yesterday for an infection, and have head cold or allergy symptoms. Being physically exhausted all the time makes it harder to be spiritually/emotionally healthy, and I so appreciate your prayers in these areas.

Thanks so much friends for being a part of this season of life with me :) Talk to you soon!

-Sarah

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Some of you may have received one of my business cards or post cards with my blog info from a garage sale or from a friend, and I so appreciate you checking out this page! Hopefully you'll be blessed to hear about the work that God is doing in my life and through the work of Youth With A Mission Iquitos, Peru.

If you're looking for any more information at any time, please leave a comment or email me at somecallmered35@gmail.com. I'd love to tell you more about YWAM Iquitos, the women's ministry I'm working with inside of YWAM which is called Hefzi-Ba, about missions in general, or how to contact me when I'm back in the States from August-September 2016!

Thanks for visiting,
~Sarah

Updates and Answered Prayers

Once again, this was an email update I sent to my weekly prayer support team, and decided to share with everyone. If you'd like to receive more updates like this and commit to praying for me regularly, send me a message with your email address or use the comment section below!

Hello friends!

This last week has flown by in a blur of busyness! Monday night, I finally gave my kickoff presentation about human trafficking at the YWAM base. It was mostly for the YWAM family, and we had a few invited guests. All day Monday, I had new obstacles coming up making things difficult and discouraging, but after a shaky start, the presentation continued and in the end, everyone said that it was really fantastic information. I got a lot of feedback about things to change, edit, or take out due to cultural relevance or other differences, and I’m excited to keep these presentations going in the next few months!

On the note of trafficking presentations, today (Saturday) was my second speaking event at a youth camp hosted by a local church in Iquitos! I had a half hour of speaking, a half hour of question and answer time with the youth, and some time afterwards to talk with the leaders. This was actually the most confident I have felt about one of my presentations, I think that it went extremely well! The encouraging part about this one was that I was able to share for a bit today, and I will be back with this same group in 2 weeks (plus more youth who weren’t present at the camp) for a more in-depth presentation. The students asked excellent questions, a lot of questions I’ve never been asked before, so that shows me they were really attentive! The leaders also commented afterwards that they didn’t expect the students to have so many questions and be so interested in the topic, although they knew it was really important information for them to learn. They’re looking forward to seeing a more full presentation later on, and I’d like to think the youth are also going to be very interested the next time around!

A fun story about this camp opportunity: I had been praying about this presentation beforehand, asking God which things I should focus on more or if He had any specific things to say to this particular group about trafficking. I felt that He put on my heart a couple of statistics about the effects of pornography, which I always talk about (the subject of porn) in my presentations because so many trafficked people are used in pornography, I want people to know that supporting the sex industry in this way is supporting trafficking. So I made a point this week to re-check those statistics, and although I didn’t actually share them in my presentation (because I totally forgot), two separate boys asked about those specific stats in different questions, and I was able to give the answers because I had been reminded by God to look for them. He just constantly reminds me that He knows us on such an intimate level, and He truly has every part of our lives planned and held securely in His hands.

Another big event this week was the beginning of Hefzi-Ba women’s meetings after over a year-long pause! This was a first for Raegan and I, but Becky had put on these events for years as part of the women’s ministry. The format is similar to a youth-group kind of setting, where we have a game/activity, worship, a teaching, and small group time to discuss the message. There were 13 teen girls and women overall (not counting the 6 of us leaders), and we all felt that it was very successful in terms of women reached and the fun we had together during the meeting! I’ll be uploading pictures soon to Facebook… Make sure to “like” the Hefzi-Ba Facebook page to follow our ongoing updates!

Thanks as always for your continued prayers. I hope that your dedication to the ministry of Hefzi-Ba is as encouraging for you guys as it is for me! Until next time, ciao ciao!

-Sarah

Here I am speaking at the Vida Abundante church youth camp on February 27th!

Prepping and Prayer Requests

Hello everyone! This was originally an email being sent to my team of prayer supporters, but I decided to share it with anybody interested since people have been asking lately how things are going. If you'd like to receive my weekly prayer updates and commit to supporting me spiritually by uplifting me regularly in prayer, send me a message or comment below with your email address and I will gladly add you to the list!

Things have really kicked into gear around here and I am so thankful to be busy, but have made some poor decisions (involving questionable street food…), and am feeling pretty sick the last couple days. I would so appreciate your prayers for a healed tummy and restful sleep!

As I mentioned before, last week we met with Paola, the director of the Public Ministry (a government organization) working against the trafficking and exploitation of minors in the Loreto region –our province. One great thing to share right away is that she is not only a Christian, but just happens to go to my church here. Coincidence or God’s doing? (I’d say it’s the latter). She gave us some materials to use during my trafficking presentations (DVD’s about stats in Peru which makes me very happy! Also some brochures and stuff), and gave us really great contact info to look into. She is very interested in attending and assisting me in my future trafficking presentations, and she said her friend would most likely want to come along, who just happens to be the chief of the regional police unit appointed to trafficking cases. Sounds good to me! It never ceases to amaze me how God opens doors when we take steps of faith J

This week, I will be giving my trafficking presentation at the YWAM base! I also already have my first outside speaking engagement set up! Becky was asked a couple weeks ago by someone she knows at a church in Iquitos if she would be willing to give a teaching at a youth camp at the end of this month. The topics they wanted her to teach on were things such as sexuality, abuse, pornography, etc. Those are things she’s never really shared on before, and she was hesitant to agree, but was quick to volunteer her friend who had a very good presentation on sex trafficking (guess who that would be?). The youth leader was really interested in that, so Becky and I met with him last Friday to get more details. What’s actually happening now is that Becky will be giving one teaching, and I will give a teaching on sex trafficking the next day. I’ll share more details about the camp as it gets closer. But as I explained to Perci, the youth leader, about the different types of presentations I’m able to do about human trafficking, he decided it was too much good information to pass up, and he wants me to come back on a Saturday in March to share with the whole youth group instead of just the ones that are attending this camp. This will be a more in depth presentation since the teaching I’m giving at the camp will be 30-40 minutes long. It’s funny because I didn’t ask for either of these opportunities, he really came to us. I was just starting to get nervous that I wouldn’t have enough time before I come back to the States to get connected with churches and fit trafficking presentations into their schedules. I had just the day before been sharing those thoughts with the Lord, and then without me even suggesting another longer presentation, Perci asked if I would be willing to do another one for a bigger group of people. Once again… it’s incredible how God continues to open doors as we take steps of faith!

I’ve been pretty excited to share this with you guys, and I hope you’ll be joining me in prayer this week and throughout the rest of my time here (42 days left)! I definitely enjoy giving these presentations and am happy to pursue them, but I forget how nervous it makes me to speak in front of people until I’m shaking beforehand… so please don’t forget to pray for my nerves! I’d also like to ask for continued prayer for the planning of future Hefzi-Ba ministry, as our first big women’s meeting is planned for the last Friday of this month! Lots of logistics to take care of, but we are moving forward! Hooray!

As always, thank you so much for being faithful in supporting me and the work that God is doing through Hefzi-Ba and YWAM Iquitos. I can’t do this without every single one of you backing me up!

The Response That Shocked Me

Once upon a time, one of the women on staff here, Lety, approached me asking if I’d like to join her and another friend who were planning to go to Puerto America, a village on the River that has less than 10 families, and has only recently learned of the love of Jesus. When I heard that one of the main focuses for this trip was to hand out bibles to this newly Christian community because none of them had ever read the word of God before, I was already excited for the things that would happen on this adventure. We were going to get to know the families a bit more, do some worship services to show them how to praise God, have an early Christmas celebration with them, and do some games with the kids. This week of ministry sounded like the perfect time for me to get away from the city, experience the heart of the jungle again, and be reminded of God’s love for the Amazon region. I couldn’t wait to go!

It occurred to me just a few days before we left for the trip that I could make this a bit more personal to my ministry goals, and asked Lety how she felt about me giving a presentation on preventing human trafficking while in this community. She said she thought it would be really good information for them to know, since I’ve shared with her how common it is for children in particular to be trafficked from the smaller villages with hopes of finding better education or jobs in other areas, only to be put to work in labor or sex trafficking. This was a new challenge for me, since I’ve only ever shared in cities before where people are relatively familiar with what slavery used to look like, and may have heard terms like “trafficking” or “exploitation” before. But this community doesn’t have much contact with the outside world, so I had to re-think almost my entire speech, and present it in a very simplified format. This made me pretty nervous, but I also knew the importance of sharing these things with Puerto America to help them be aware of the dangers that can easily be prevented when you know what to look for in a potential trafficker.  

Before and during my presentation, there was one woman in particular named Claudia who was very enthusiastic to hear about human trafficking, and really wanted to make sure that all the adults in the village were there to learn about it as well. She was very responsive while I spoke, and kept saying things like “yes, that’s exactly how it happened”, or “that’s exactly what my experience was like”. At the end, we asked if she would be willing to share what her experience had been. From my understanding up to that point, I figured she knew of someone who had been trafficked, or she personally had been exploited at some point in her life. What she actually shared shocked me, and was incredibly powerful.

7 years ago, Claudia’s daughter had been trafficked straight from the village we were in. The trafficker was a widely trusted adult because she was the previous director of the village school. Claudia started becoming concerned when she never heard from her 13 year-old daughter, and felt that something wasn’t right. Apparently, this director had trafficked many girls, telling their parents these kids would get better education at a school she had connections to in the city, and sent Claudia’s daughter into Iquitos where she was trapped in sexual exploitation for a long time. The woman who watched these trafficked girls (not sure if this was a brothel owner or just the guard), by the grace of God, had a special fondness for Claudia’s daughter, and tried to keep her safer than the other girls being sold. I say safer because she was still submitted to terrible things, but not as often as the other girls that were there. This guard would ask her “when is your mom coming to rescue you? Why isn’t she here yet?” Claudia had searched everywhere for her daughter, checking all the ports and airport with identification, but nobody had seen this girl. Claudia told us “when your child goes missing, as a mother, you never stop searching. You never stop looking for your baby”, even though people from the village had told her that her search was pointless, and that she was crazy for thinking something bad happened to her daughter without any proof. Since Claudia shared this story through heavy tears, it was a little difficult to understand exactly what happened in the end, but what I think she said was that this guard helped her daughter, giving her access to a phone to call Claudia to tell her where she was hidden. Shortly after, Claudia was able to rescue her daughter! She is safe now, living in Iquitos with other family members, and going to school.

This village needed to know the signs of human trafficking. They obviously needed to know many years ago, but for Claudia’s sake, it gave her a lot of closure to have me speak on the topic. Now the rest of the community believes what Claudia was saying happened to her daughter, and will be able to prevent it from happening to any of the rest of their community members, even though that school director had left their village years ago. This was a response I never expected in a million years to happen after one of my trafficking presentations, but it made me so grateful that God had put it on my heart to share this information with Puerto America. He obviously knew that Claudia’s heart was still hurting from that experience, even though her daughter is now safe. He knew that I had planned to go to this village just with the intention of ministering in other ways and being completely content to do so, but He had bigger plans. He chose to use my gift of knowledge on this subject to heal Claudia’s wounds from the past, and keep this from happening to their community in the future.

Our Lord continues to amaze me every day with His faithfulness to me, and to the lost and hurting women in the far corners of the Amazon. He intimately knows each individual heart, and never stops wanting to draw closer to us, just as Claudia never gave up on the hope of seeing her daughter again. I hope this story shows the fruitfulness of everyone’s support of my heart to minister to the women here in the jungle. What an encouraging trip this was! Please leave a comment here if this impacted you, and check out pictures of my time in Puerto America on Facebook!

This was the group I shared my human trafficking presentation with. Claudia is directly in front of me in the photo.

River Trip Prayer Requests!

I wanted to share with anybody interested about this awesome opportunity I have to go out to a River village next week to serve alongside some YWAM Iquitos women! I was originally just going to send this as an email to my group of prayer partners that I update weekly-ish, but I feel that this specific week will need a lot of spiritual covering and blessing. Please join me in prayer for this trip, and let me know if you'd like to receive weekly updates like this to pray for my ministry daily!

Hey everyone,

More details about my upcoming river trip: We leave on Monday! I can’t even say bright and early, because we’re probably leaving before the bright and early even starts… The lancha (public transport on the river, usually a two level boat) leaves at 7AM, we will want to get there at about 6:30 to get situated with all our supplies and things, and it’s a 1.5 hour trip to Nauta, the port city, from the base in Iquitos, without counting the loading up supplies and other transportation, etc. So like I said, we will be leaving before the bright and early J. From Nauta, it’s about a 10 hour trip up the Rio (river) Marañon, a channel off of the Amazon, and that’s not including any stops we’ll be making along the way to drop off other passengers and such. It will be a very long day of travel, and the same on the way home.

Once there, the plan is to do some kids’ programs, church services, possibly a program for youth/teens if there are more than a couple teenagers, door-to-door evangelism (which may be more like spending a few hours per family just getting to know them by doing daily activities with them like cooking or farming – this is a much easier way to share the gospel with Latino culture because they are all about relationship rather than information), and I’ve asked Lety, the leader of our trip, if I could possibly do a human trafficking presentation, and she said that would be great! I was already excited about the trip since Becky told us that she’d like to go as well, because it seems like such a great opportunity to serve together as a team and bond through a ministry that is not directly our own. With the 3 of us, (Becky, Raegan, and myself) I think we can use all the help we can get to form a solid friendship before our actual ministry takes off, to see how we each function in ministry without the pressure of it being our own women’s ministry. I hope that makes sense in words formed outside of my head… But I’m even more excited because I’m not just going to support Lety and her desire to serve in the river communities, but making it a little more personal by sharing about human trafficking for the first time in one of the jungle villages! I’m also praying that this will be the first of many opportunities like this since raising awareness about the issue is one of the best ways to prevent it from happening.

I’d like to really ask for more serious prayer for this upcoming week on the river. I’ve been sick the last few days with a pretty intense cold, and it’s wiped out all of my energy. I am praying and declaring that I’ll be healed and refreshed by the time we head out on Monday, because the river is physically straining regardless of the ministry we’re doing. It’s hotter, there’s no electricity or running water, and the Spanish will be constant instead of just sometimes like it is here in the city, which gets to be very tiring. I’d also like to remind you guys that I’m not on any medication to prevent malaria, which is not as much of an issue here in the city, but definitely a possibility out in the jungle villages. But we have a God who is more powerful than sickness, and I am trusting that you will all be joining me in daily prayer for our team’s health and physical safety!

I also ask that you be praying for the spiritual atmosphere of the village as often as you remember; that the people we are there to serve would see something different in our hearts and be drawn towards Jesus. That if it gets difficult or frustrating, that we would still have the patience and love for each other to work through issues or get over our own pride and be able to work effectively together. That the people would have open eyes, ears, and hearts to receive everything God is wanting to share with them through us. That this would be a trip that leads to a village full of God’s continual love, that they don’t have to depend on foreigners to come in to feel a sense of the Lord’s presence – this is common with villages around here, that they fall away from their walk with God until another evangelist group comes in to “fill” them again. And that overall we would have fun and enjoy the untouched beauty of this far away Amazon community!

I hope you’re all excited along with me, and I thank you so much for being a part of my team of prayer warriors! This is such an important part of supporting me and supporting God’s work here in Iquitos, and your prayers make such a difference. From Monday till Sunday, I won’t have any phone or internet access, so I will let everyone know when I’ve arrived safely home! 

Ciao!