We had a baby! Adileen Kate Daggett was born at 18:46 on 21 January 2016. She weighed 3,030grams, or about 6lbs and 11 ounces. She was 50cm long (19.7") and that noggin was 35cm around. Adileen is amazing, Katie is my hero, and we were well taken care of by the team at Clinica Arequipa. I wrote a bit more about the delivery and our first day at home on our Tiny Letter.
Ten days in we're ever more amazed that this little human being living with us is our daughter.
A first step for learning how to survive in another country is grocery shopping: learning food vocabulary, finding what’s available that’s familiar, learning how to use and love what’s unfamiliar. At first, it’s fun to bring home a whole chicken but after a while it’s nice to know that there are other options. Grocery shopping in Arequipa has really evolved in the last decade. For a long time, the open air market was the only option.
One positive aspect of living in a city is the ready availability of public transportation. Katie and I don’t own a car, but that doesn’t stop us from getting where we need to go. Arequipa is full of taxis, and we occasionally ride those if we’re in a rush or if it’s late. Our main means of transportation, however, is the combi.
Some of the best memories of my life have been made around a table—meals about which I can’t help but say “What a feast!” Before reading this book, I hadn’t connected my own experience of community around the table with the Bible’s motif of table fellowship. John Mark Hicks connects the dots for us from the table to God’s story and invites us to reclaim the Lord’s Supper as a missional meal of which Jesus is the host.
This book challenges the attractional model of church in the Western world with the incarnational model, dreaming of a church which is reborn with God’s mission at its heart. It’s a change of mindset that imagines what happens when we stop talking in terms of us and them, in and out and start following Jesus by reflecting God's image in the midst of.
The authors frame poverty alleviation as “the ministry of reconciliation: moving people closer to glorifying God by living in right relationship with God, with self, with others, and with the rest of creation.” We all have broken relationships that are not what God intended them to be. This book offers a model of ministry to whole people. It aims at walking with the poor as we embrace our mutual brokenness and work together toward reconciliation.
