Today you will get to see a room transform from being a room into being a Celebration Church Campus. As I write this, I am sitting in Cusco Coffee a place run by an American from California that is like a little slice of the US right in the middle of Arequipa. I will post pics of the place tonight or tomorrow. The mountain you see to the left is the view from the back of the church – not bad huh!

I am fairly emotional as I right this for a few reasons.  I may be getting slightly  homesick. Momma Jo, Matt, Molly, and Miranda – I miss you guys and love you dearly. I’m also 1/2 wiped out and in need of a second wind. Today should be another long one hooking up lights, sound, and preaching to the new church leaders on the concept of Team Building and volunteer development in the Celebration Church culture.

So back to yesterday. We woke up early and ventured out for some quick coffee, followed by our 7:30am prayer meeting, breakfast from 8-8:30 and off to the church. I made the call with both Pastor Mike’s approval to paint the place much like the campuses in the US. So, Johnny, myself, and Humberto went off on a run to get paint.

Now getting paint in Peru is not like going over to visit Matt B. at the Orange Park Color center. It was a great adventure that took 2.5 hours to get 5 gallons of mixed paint and 5 gallons of black paint, plus the needed supplies. They don’t have roller pans, try a 5 gallon oil bucket cut in half and you are closer to reality and no you can’t get your paint, and all your supplies like tape etc, in the same place, you have to go to atleast 3 places spread over maybe a mile..

When we returned pastor Stovall got there and we made the decision to go ahead and get lighting so out the door Stovall, Mike, Mike, and I went to find lighting.

Oh yes, we found lighting. Even a dimmer pack to control 6 lights that I will talk about later and yes, it too was a 2 hour plus adventure.

We returned and got to work on a late night journey of running wires and installing the dimmer pack. But don’t think that it was easy to cut the wires, and no wire nuts or anything like that are available so try electrical tape to do the trick.

Just before we were ready to get the lights fully operational a huge BOOM like explosion happened in the room. Sean Kelly one of the interns flew 3 feet into the air as he accidentally plugged the speaker plug which looks very much like an electric plug into the wall causing the SONIC Boom. Well both Johnny and I had electric wires in our hand, we looked at eachother in relief thinking we were both dead.

But as you can see, we pulled it off.

Amazing. Doesn’t it look a little like Celebration! I will take some more pics of the progress today.. We love you guys dearly!

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