we are alive and well! safe and sound in dallas.. debriefing with our team!
thanks for all your prayers. we love you!
Coming home...
We fly home tonight! Pray for safety and easy transfers and ease as we move through customs!
We will do some final updates this weekend after we return home! Thanks for all your prayers.
We leave Lima at 11:30pm tonight, arrive in Miami at 5:30am central time, and to Dallas just before 10am.
LOVE YOU!
Fish Fish Fish Fish Fish
Good evening from the fish capital of the world - Chimbote, Peru. It might not actually be the fish capital, but it sure smells like it. Its a lovely coastal city... and i'm pretty sure its famous for its fish. there are boats everywhere!
anyway. i have a wonderful story! We were at our last drama site today..and Hughey and i were at our usual post behind Barney and this Peruvian girl came up and sat with us and spoke to us in clear english. It was good to hear - but quite foreign. She asked where we went to school... and she said she went to school in Missouri! i'm from missouri! She goes to Lee's Summit North High School in KC! What?!?!? Her family is from Lima and they moved to the States 7 years ago. Her English is impeccable. She works at the Sonic on Langsford! Anyway. I walked through the gospel with her.. she said she believed... i pushed some... she didnt really respond. I asked her if she had a relationship with Jesus and she said she did... so. Continue to pray for her. Her name is Cris/Kris.. she's 17. i might see her tomorrow and definitely plan to see her after i return home.
Chimbote has been wonderful so far. We are staying in a beautiful hotel. The weather has been gorgeous. The fish smell is only mildly overwhelming. Our students are doing wonderfully. They are giving everything they have during these last few days of ministry. We will do ministry all day tomorrow and half of the day sunday. We will travel back to Trujillo in the afternoon and rest. We will do some debriefing stuff on Monday and then take an overnight bus back to Lima on monday night. All day tuesday will be shopping in Lima and then we fly back overnight! We arrive in Dallas wednesday morning, Lord willing. We will finish debriefing with the teams from other countries and then return home to Little Rock and KC on Friday morning. I cant believe its almost over. the Lord has been so good already and i cant wait to see what He has in store for the last week.
we love you all. thanks for being wonderful!
Huam is no bueno interneto
I`m not gonna lie. Internet here is terrible. So sorry Again for the lack of posts. We do love all of you I promise!
But here we are, last night in Huamachuco, and what an experience it has been. we have done about 5 dramas a day since we have been here and have seen incredible amounts of people give their hearts to the Lord. Our students stories of divine encounters have been very encouraging. Its inspiring to see the enthusiasm in new believers faces. Today, during our last drama, one of the men that had given his heart to the Lord offered to allow us to use his home to help start a church. He was extremely eager to learn more about Christ and begin meeting with other believers. This has been a true answer to prayer for us and the nationals we are working with. This is a very dark place without a church. But now this is a dark place with many new believers and the beginnings of a church.
By the way - the cheese here is rocking awesome.
Despite the heaviness, we have seen God move in incredible ways in our personal lives as well. Many of our students have begun to critically evaluate where God is calling them and they are hearing His voice like they never have before. We had a worship experience the other day in which every student felt the presence of God strongly in their hearts. Many of the students were crying and on their faces before God as they felt Him move. It was phenomenal.
Kristin absolutely wiped out the other day. Dont ever let her run on concrete floors in Chacos. Unless you want to laugh. (In my defense - hughey did not move one muscle when i fell. He didnt even come to see if i was alive. I felt so loved.) (In my defense - had I moved, I would have dropped about 5 gallons of water all over the floor. and I did ask before I started laughing.)
Sorry for the inability to comment. I am going to try and figure that out now. Cause i have really been missing yalls lovin. Thanks for all your prayers. Pray for perserverance as we enter the last week and a half.
Much love, Hughster.
Piña and the mountains.
Well. Sorry that its been a few days. We were in Santiago de Chuco from Tuesday to Friday and the internet there was as slow as molasses. We moved to Huamachuco yesterday, and will be here until Wednesday. The beauty is breathtaking here.. quite literally - cuz i have asthma. Ha!
The students have been doing so great. They are fighting against the tiredness of the altitude... and we love them. alot.
Piña is the spanish word for pineapple. If you really knew me you would know that the clear gummy bears are my favorite because they are pineapple flavored. And, if you knew me REALLY well you would know that piña juice is one of my favorite Peruvian things. My mom keeps telling me you can get it in the States, but i dont believe her. So. In lieu of my addiction to all things pineapple flavored, my dear partner has taken to calling me Piña. and im quite fond of it.
The Lord has been doing marvelous things. Both of these cities are without Bible believing churches, so our efforts, along with Titos follow up will hopefully get the ball rolling. Pray about these things. We leave Tito with a stack of response cards in each city, and its pretty much only him doing all the work afterwards.
Well. We love you alot. We are so thankful for all your prayers. Continue to pray for my roommates dad and for the Hugheys who arrived in Peru early this morning for 3 weeks.
Blue Skies and All Kinds of Rain.
Ok, so here´s the scoop...
I believe Sunday was the last post day. (Our apologies to those of you asking for more posts...) Monday we left Chiclayo at 8 in the morning, took a fantastic, stinky bus ride back to Trujillo. We arrived at about 12, got some much needed rest, and went to the mall the afternoon. After a some grocery shopping we went to Tito´s house where his wife had cooked up some incredible spaghetti and homemade sauce. Quite delectible. A fun taxi ride, semi-restful night of sleep, and then on a bus at 8 wonderful o´clock again to head to Santiago de Chuco! All I´m gonna say is many liquids were ¨spilled¨ on this lovely ride up the mountains... Finally here, we rested a bit and then sent students out to prayer walk. It was the group consensus that this city is very dark and desperate for the light of the gospel. Many students stated they strongly felt God is going to do a great work here. And we have already seen the beginning of that. God moved in mighty ways this morning and many people have already come to know a relationship with Christ. God´s glory is phenomenal. I only wish you could see first hand what we are seeing every day. Words will never be adequate.
More apologies for lack of updates, but it will probably be the weekend before we can update again.
Pray for our students strength. The spiritual warfare is here. But our God has All Authority.
We love you guys.
We´re moving on...
I hope the title incited a memory of a Rascal Flatts song.. but here at Awe Star we dont listen to secular music, so dont quote me on that.
The past few days have been wonderful. Excuse our lack of posting. My sweet mother reminded me that i have to keep the people happy. so here i am, trying to keep smiles on all the faces.
We finished up a busy week of drama performances last night.. on the 4th of July! My favorite holiday! Our precious students have done 40 dramas since last Sunday. thats pretty incredible. The gospel is being proclaimed in Peru and for that we can praise the Lord!
this afternoon began a few days off. I enjoyed mine with a 2 hour nap. Yes, Nita and Jamie - a 2 hour nap! It was splendid.
This evening we had a talent show! The prize was this stellar turkey made out of seashells - made by our good friend the Street Vendor. Precious Berned won for memorizing Colossians 3:1-17. He´s pretty awesome.
Tomorrow we go back to Trujillo for one night, and then off to the mountains on tuesday! I cant wait for the beauty of the mountains. Its my favorite part of Peru!
thank you for your continued prayers. We battled some illness this week, but your prayers pulled us through. Thanks for much for partnering with us!
Also. My (kristin) dear roommate, Megan´s, father is in the hospital in Nashville... please pray for her and her father and for a recovery. This poses alot of questions, i´m sure, but dont ask them. Just pray.
We will have more pictures on the next post. We love you!
Chiclayo and Empanadas
Well well well, Chiclayo it is.
We´ve been here for 4 days now, and still no sign of llamas. New believers are on the rise however!
Our sheep have been doing an incredible job sharing their faith and the gospel. Even though most of them have never been on a trip like this, they have all stepped up to the plate and are very eager to speak or do ministry or serve in whatever capacity they can. MOMs and POPs are straight up phenom. They jump at the opportunity to lead and serve. The other night we had to have the CCs sit down with them and basically tell them to take it back a notch because they were taking our jobs. Ha! Of course they were all relieved because they said they had no idea how they were going to keep doing as much as they had been. Which is good. I wanna keep being a TD.
Yesterday we saw one of the coolest experiences so far. After doing the drama, our sheep went out and began to talk to a relatively small crowd; so, most of the people were ministered to fairly quickly. But one of our students felt drawn to a young boy that had come up after the drama. She 
led her group over there, began talking to him, and found out he had never even heard of Jesus. So of course she poured her heart out and shared the gospel with him and he prayed and asked Christ into his heart. How beautiful is that? And what a fresh reminder. We live in such a dark world and the enemy does everything in his power to silence the name of our savior. We must continually pour out Jesus to everyone we have the opportunity to come into contact with. And that´s what every contact is - an opportunity. We never know if we could be the first person to ever show Jesus to someone.
Yes. That´s him.
And today we had empanadas for lunch. theres the connection to the title. (this funny part was from me - kristin. the rest of this was from hughey (jordan)).
Now, Stacy, this is what a compass looks like...
One of our favoritests...
HOLA FROM PERU........................
We could not be more excited to be in this beautiful country! The Lord has done so much already, and we have only had one day of ministry! We spent all day thursday, friday, and most of saturday traveling. It was a good thing to arrive in Chiclayo on Saturday night and know that we had a home for a week.
Today we worshipped with a local church here.. my dearest partner, and musical genius, lead the church and some of our students in a special music adventure. it was marvelous. they did wonderfully!
We spent the afternoon doing three dramas in this community. The Lord moved. He allowed His presence to hover and gave our students great courage and boldness on their first day in a serious language barrier. These are good things.
To Hughey (original): hughey (jordan) has helped me with my bag multiple times. you raised a good son - he just had a major lapse that day.
To my beloved sister: the picture is coming soon. uploading will be an adventure.
To all of our friends... we love you. continue to pray. we have a rockstar team. be jealous.
Funny stories from scorching hot dallas...
Hughey says: Dallas today, Peru tomorrow!
KristIn: Our team set a record today - we did drama training all day in the HOT Dallas sun, and they did not complain one time.
Amazing today, asombroso manana.
We have survived 2 half days of drama training, 1 full day, and countless hours of teaching. The Lord has moved - His presence has hovered here this week.
And, thank you Jesus training is finally over! My rear was sore last week, and now thanks to wonderful drama training, my all is sore. (However, a bad daddy song is coming out of all that practice, so just brace yourselves...)
Tomorrow evening we fly to Lima, Peru over night. And then midday Friday we will head further north to Trujillo, Peru on a 9 hour bus ride. We will spend the night there, and then spend 5 more glorious hours to our first final destination - Chiclayo. So. You can be praying for travel in the next few days.
So, the other day KristIn and her sister went to Walmart, main purpose to find me a watch. They get there, spend a while looking and then call me to tell me there aren't any good ones, so I proceed to tell her that I'd prefer a velcro one, and it has to have a built in compass!
Needless to say, my sister and i searched for a good ten minutes for said watch. We couldn't find one with a compass. There were several dials and such in all the faces - but we didn't really know which ones were compasses... So. We returned to Hughey (Jordan) with his money and without a watch.
I couldn't really understand how you would be unable to tell whether or not it had a compass on it. It's a fat knob on the side that spins!
(Hughey never said that it would be on the side!)
So, last night, leaders make a Walmart run, KristIn and I proceed to the watches section, I walk up the kiosk and immediately grab a watch EXACTLY like I had described.
Moral of the story: Hughey is a jerk. Just kidding. But really, we looked long and hard for a compass. We got an A for effort.
And an F for:
eyesight
sense of direction
and very basic knowledge of a compass.
The End. We hope you enjoy this post written by the both of us. We love each of you! Thanks for your support. Pray for our students and their immediate fears, pray for the health of our contact in country, and pray for the Lord to already be at work among the people of Peru.
Thanks for the laughter!
Moral of the story: Hughey is a jerk.
It's OV!...
...until tomorrow.
Well, we've just finished our upper echlon leader training, my stomach is full, and my backside is sore. What can I say, good teaching is exhausting! The teaching truly has been incredible, but sitting and listening all day long fully evinces the well known fact that I can't sit still for more than 2.5 seconds. And that's no fun if you have to sit next to me. Tomorrow's a big day! Not only do we get to get up nice and early to travel to Dallas, we get to meet our MOMs and POPs, the student leadership underneath Dutter and I. Very exciting to see who God has brought to help lead our teams.
Is it legal to write a Response to Comments in a post? :
- Mr. Rod and Mrs. Kathy: I thank you for your prayers. Only you know exactly what I'm dealing with here. And can I say I'm glad to be dealing with it? She keeps it interesting. (And Kitkat[is it ok if I call you that?], we knOw she's jealous...)
-Mom, you're crazy.
-Marti, you're already one of my favorite people. Seriously.
So now I think I'll discourse on the title of this blog as I realize that hasn't been done yet and I'm going to have to be the one to explain it...
The reason we went with "Peruvian" is kind of difficult to understand unless you really look into the deeper, abstract ideas that this trip represents - we're going to Peru.
"Eisegesis": the introduction by an interpreter of his own ideas into a text under explication. It is the opposite of exegesis. So that's what our goal is - to take what we see and do in Peru and feed it back to you along with our ideas of how this changes lives. And maybe, just maybe, God will use our thoughts and words for His glory, because that is the ultimate goal - to be broken to the point that we allow God to interpret everything we see, infusing His own thoughts, not our natural, imperfect ones, so that we may grow closer to the heart of God and give continually more glory to the Father.
Much love to you all. And thank you for your prayers.
Training dearest training...
Its Kristin.
We have completed day 2 of leadership training here in Tulsa and lived to tell about it!
Yesterday after we arrived, we transported to the church where our training would be held and Hughey would reside. We trained all afternoon and ate ungodly amounts of food provided by the lovely people at the blessed Ridgeway Baptist Church. We slept hard last night after we both got up before 5 yesterday morning to get to training!
Today we conquered CPR training. We are prepared to save your lives! And our students. But hopefully not, Lord willing. Morning training and logistics this afternoon and then we spent the evening with the youth group here - 5 of which are travelling with Awe Star this summer! Good news. Its been wonderful so far.
Not a ton of funny stories to recount. Full days of training on Thursday and Friday... and then off to Dallas on Saturday. Early.. my favorite time of the day.
Pray for focus and stamina in the next couple days. I'm learning that sitting and taking notes all day long can be completely exhausting. Continue to pray for our students! 5 of them will arrive on Saturday - these are our student leaders. They will lead up smaller family groups within the team. And then all of them on Sunday!
A special thanks to our moms who have chosen to love the other more than their own child. We appreciate it.
Hughey...
For those of you who read this blog that I do not have the pleasure of knowing, I just want to make sure you understand: My name is Jordan Hughey, not Hughey (Jordan). No, I am not part of witness protection and KristIn is not giving away my true identity by putting Jordan in parentheses. But I do go by Hughey, because of the massive amount of Jordan's that attend the great Union University. I'm a freshman there and have had the horror, wait wait, honor of getting to know KDutt from there. I originate from Little Rock, in the beautiful natural state. A great southern place to grow up, unlike that heathen Yankee place KristIn calls home.
Now for the few of you reading this that I do know, don't tell the rest of the people I know, but you are my favorite child. If I had a coat of many colors, I would give it too you. While I don't, I can offer you coca leaves which are the remedy for any kind of ailment.
Oh, and if you comment of my posts, bonus points.
I do need to thank my partner in crime, KDutt, she is responsible for connecting me with Awestar, and for that I am eternally grateful. Also, being that most of my humor will come from making fun of her, I'm going to go ahead and thank her for that too.
God has already begun doing a work in the people of Peru, and we are so grateful that He is allowing us to have a part in His mighty plan. The more we pray over this trip and the closer we move to God the more exciting it gets because we see more and more clearly how awesome and powerful he is and how willing he is to "open the floodgates of Heaven" if we give all of ourselves.
We hope you will be a part of this with us. The greatest thing you can give are your prayers because we know the more we bathe this trip in prayer the more God's glory will be shown.
And there is nothing greater than that.
Thanks to everyone for your support.
"Now show [us] your glory."
Exodus 33:18
Kristin.....
Welcome to our blog! Hughey (Jordan) and i are going to attempt to keep people all over the world updated with this little guy for the next 40 days. Let me warn you from the beginning though - Hughey is a funnier writer than i am. Fight the urge to be disappointed when you see that i have posted.
If you're a friend on Hughey's (Jordan), you dont know me. I'm from Kansas City but i go to school with him in Tennessee. He's a great friend and i'm blessed to serve beside him this summer!
If you're a friend of mine - thanks so much for your love and prayers! I couldn't do this without you! I think you're wonderful. And i'm looking forward to sharing this experience with you. Especially on our super cool blog.
Training starts on Tuesday! I am spending the last few days at home with friends and family, trying to avoid my packing crisis, and resting up before the craziness begins!
On Tuesday we head to Tulsa. The leadership for our trip, a trip to Chile and a trip to South Asia will be there. It will be a grand reunion! Then on Saturday morning we head to Dallas. On Saturday, our student leaders arrive and on Sunday the students come! We will train them on the drama and numerous other things until Thursday when we go to Peru! A long training, but beneficial and helpful.
Anyway. We'll try to update as much as we can. Ask questions. Leave messages telling us of your overwhelming love.