Please Mr. Postman

They say the devil is in the details.

He's also in the mail.

The very first time that the main campus of Flamingo Road Church in South Florida mailed a package to us here in Peru, it was sent by first-class U.S. Mail.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, as Jerry Seinfeld or George Costanza would say.

However, it also meant that the package arrived here first-class Peru Mail.

Which means that we didn't receive a notice about it for two weeks.

And which also means that we had to go to the central post office in Lima to retrieve it.

We had to wait 6 hours in line to retrieve the package.

6 hours.

In line(s).

To pick up one small package.

I am not making this up.

The other Peruvians who were in line with us said, "Oh, this is normal. We just make a day of it and come to the post office!"

How long do you stand in line at a post office in the U.S. before you start to get fidgety?

15 minutes? Maybe 20?

Try 6 hours. On your feet the whole time. In lines that were more like cattle herds.

We smartened up and told our friends at FRC in Florida to start to send stuff to us by FedEx. But we quickly found out that's no guarantee, either.

Stuff that is FedEx'd to us may leave South Florida right away, but then might get stuck in Peru Customs for several days while our good friends in Customs hold our package up to the light, shake it, smell it, rattle it around, listen to it, and decide whether or not to stick us with a tax on it. It has taken as long as 9 days for something to reach our door that has been FedEx'd to us from the USA.

There are times when it actually is faster to put someone on a flight to Lima and have them hand-deliver a package to us.

The moral of this story is that one of the biggest challenges in international ministry sometimes can be in one of the seemingly smallest details - shipping. Find yourself a reliable carrier pigeon, and you might just save yourself a whole lot of headaches.