Thanksgiving and prayer

Happy Thanksgiving to you. I write this morning with a lot of praise in my heart. We want all of you to praise the Lord along with us for the great emotional, mental, and spiritual renewal and healing that has taken place over the last several months. If you want a more detailed insight into our heart read the update on our web page (thelistros.com), if not, just know that God is good and faithful. I would not say that we are at 100 % yet but hope is a very precious thing.
We are still traveling and visiting supporters. We are in Kansas right now. Please pray that our Suburban will hold up. We have put over 12,000 miles on the truck since we purchased it in June – an adequate vehicle but not in the greatest shape. We leave next week to travel back to SC. Pray for continued safety as we continue with this part of our ministry.
Upon our arrival to SC we will be making and setting in stone the decisions you have been praying about over the last several months. Much has changed on the field since our departure. Many new options are opening up for ministry as other doors, formerly open, are closing. Sorry to be so cryptic about this but God’s leading in the details of future ministry has not been very clear – we want to wait and share firm details with you. Our quarterly news letter is being held off a few weeks in order to include the new information.
Pray for the meetings to happen in the coming weeks.

Pray for:
Sara and Gaston in Tarapoto. They have made some changes but are still very overburdened financially and are finding time for spiritual growth difficult to reserve. Pray for a hunger in them to see the importance of time with the Lord.
Pray for Mil Palmeras church – new elders are in place and the sending of their first full-time missionary, Isaac and family, is being postponed til next year as he gets a year of experience on the elder board.

So thankful for you,
Amy Listro

Praying for answers

It is very difficult to put the last four months in to words. I have to admit that it is fear more than anything else that keeps me from sharing and that has kept me from sharing up until now. We have truly spent the last several months visiting with family, friends and supporters. It has been a blessing to see everyone, but it has also been very hard. Everyone, of course, wants to know how it went. “How was Peru?” It seems like a no brainer but that has been the hardest question for us to answer. Peru was a very difficult time for our family. Lots of great things happened (those were the highlights of the quarterly newsletters) but there were a lot of dark times as well. I shared with a friend, who was shocked when she found out that it had been so difficult, that I didn’t share a lot of what we went through because people might think we were . . . I was going to say schizophrenic , but she finished my sentence for me . . . . “that you were what? Human?” That statement cut deep. We haven’t tried to be evasive but we have also found that the reality is, often people don’t really want to hear the bad stuff and really, everyone doesn’t need to know all the details.
So that is the news flash for today. We are human. We had a very rough time of it the two and a half years we spent in Peru. Burn out is real. It is a devastated place to be but I am also here to attest that God is faithful and he has brought us out of that very dark place. We have been greeted with such love and compassion everywhere we have gone. I confess that I assume no one will understand and that others will be standing in judgment of my family, but that has rarely, if ever, been the case. We have been covered in much prayer; prayers for blessings, prayer to remove curses on our family, prayers to restore us, prayers for our future . . . .we cannot express how much we appreciate the prayers of so many. We are in a good place now. We can even look at the last two years of hardship and see good in them. We have been in a pit of darkness and without hope and have come to a place of new hope. God is ALWAYS faithful.
Hope is something I don’t think any of us can truly understand until we have been in a place where we don’t have it. It is kind of like good health, you don’t really think about it unless you don’t have it. Paul talks about hope in Romans 5. However, it is not the happy scriptures about how great faith, hope and love are. Rather, hope is listed in a progression. First come trials and hardships, then perseverance, then if you keep on keeping on, your character is proven and not until then do you have hope. We now understand hope in a way we never have before. We have it and we aren’t letting go. God is faithful and he loves us enough to allow the hard times to grow us into more compassionate and mature people. James says that we should count our trials as joy because they will help us grow to maturity, lacking in nothing.
We are still in a place of healing, but we have come a long way these past several months. It is interesting to think that we came home purely to raise more support so we could go back, but God knew better what we needed. We needed time out of ministry to assess, grieve, heal, and grow. That leads us to the inevitable question, “So, what’s next?” I wish we had an easy answer for that. We are praying, talking, and investigating along with SAM what options exist. Things in Peru are changing. The church has caught the vision for reproducing itself and SAM is reorganizing and re-equipping to carry out the SAM 2020 vision in Peru. Are we still going to proceed as our team had planned? Probably not. Things are changing. Mil Palmeras has new elders, leadership in the community is coming together in prayer for the community. So, how then do we fit?? Please pray along with us for answers.