This weekend was the annual women's retreat out at camp. Mary Beth was the director of the event and she did a great job, especially with dealing with some changes because two helpers couldn't come at the last minute. 32 women came to the event along with seven women who helped lead the event. Our speaker was Claudia, a Peruvian-born woman living in Omaha, Nebraska that fellow missionaries, Scott and Tami Wade met before coming to Peru. After her first talk last night, Claudia told Mary Beth that some women wanted to get baptized! You might think that that is a common thing at such an event, but it's actually quite unusual, and we decided that I needed to talk to them and find out what they had in mind before I could baptize them. Today, only one of the women was still interested, so I talked to her to ask some basic questions, like why she wanted to get baptized and if she was even a Christian. It turned out that she wasn't sure if she had ever made a decision to accept Christ, so I had the blessing of leading her to Him! Afterward, we talked about baptism with more resolve and I explained that it didn't save her (Christ had just done that!) but it was a way to publicly declare her faith. She decided that she wanted to wait until her son could witness her baptism. I called the pastor from her village and it worked out that he was coming by the camp two hours later, so he stopped in and met with her to exchange phone numbers and they plan on meeting this week! Pray for Matilde (in the beige hat and purple shirt with her back to us) to get baptized and to grow into a woman of great faith!
