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.
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.
Apart from the typical street sounds blending into our secret garden-style peaceful soundscape, we've discovered some sounds that at first we thought might be unique to our street, and have since learned make up the traditional street life of Arequipa. I was able to record a few of them for your cultural learning and viewing pleasure.
The slow death of the visa is naturally for the best in our ever globalising world. But one minor casualty is that the visa -- as a physical object -- has become something of a dying art. Visas were traditionally meant to serve several purposes. They had to easily communicate necessary information to authorities, such as validity and the terms of stay. They were often designed to prevent easy forgery. And they were occasionally used to convey aspects of a country's national character through visual symbolism and imagery. For all these reasons, the visa, in its brief heyday, was (like the modern airline baggage tag) a little-appreciated masterpiece of modern design.
Katie and I spent May and June of 2014 in Tullahoma, TN, working and worshiping with the Cedar Lane church. We were in extroverted overdrive for two months, trying to get to know as many people as possible in this narrow window of time, before we would move to Little Rock and then to Peru. One of the many things we loved about Cedar Lane was Steven Hovater's preaching. We're diving into some more of it.
Robbie Shackelford, known on Instagram as @RobertEarlShack, has been the director for Harding University in Florence for the last 26 years. He’s also my uncle. For the last year, he’s been using Instagram as he “aggressively seeks beauty in every day.” It’s been fascinatingly fun to follow.
Yours truly back in September, in my first ever article for the Team Arequipa Newsletter:
Because of Jesus, reconciliation overcomes brokenness. Hope overtakes despair. Wrongs are righted. And it’s the church that carries on the mission. Christians are to be conduits of God’s presence. Jesus is still the one sustaining everything, and it’s still God’s mission, but Spirit-led people are called to live out the New Creation in the midst of an old one.
And so Katie and I—after 5 years of married life and preparation and 5 months of dedicated time with two sending churches—are moving to a city in southern Peru at the end of the month.
Why? Because of God’s mission.
The bigger story we believe we're a part of is God's. We know the beginning, have a glimpse of the end, and have a humble role to play in the meantime. We believe it's a story for everyone, everywhere. It's what makes every follower of Jesus a "missionary." And it's what gives our life meaning and purpose, whether we're in Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, Zambia, Mississippi, Italy, or—now—Arequipa, Peru.
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.
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.
