The Good and the Bad: Costa Rica

I won’t lie. It was a rough month. We weren’t assigned much ministry. It was mostly just attending the church services of the pastor and the second half of the month we mixed and poured concrete to give them a floor in their home that wasn’t gravel or dirt. So not much to do. We are told to aim for at least 4 hours of ministry 5 days a week. We were doing 1-2 hours a day 4 days a week. Not enough. And as wonderful as Chichi was our first month we were actually under our hours there as well. So this makes 2 of 3 months with very light ministry. There were a lot of complaints. So many that I would put it in the category of whining.

Some of the whining was because the pastor we were working with was preaching the prosperity gospel and was highly influenced by Joel Olsteen. Some of it was because we spent most of our days sitting around trying not to think about the heat. The pastor and his family also continued to tell us to relax and rest.

The tension built as we continued to sit around and do nothing. And it spilled over as anger at one another. I really wasn’t phased by the lack of ministry or the fact that I didn’t agree with how the pastor taught. I have been researching this trip since my car accident back in 2013 and so have watched a lot of videos about the World Race and knew there would be months filled with down time and times when I wouldn’t agree with everything. I didn’t realize though that I would have to deal with teammates that didn’t have that same knowledge and so would become very upset about it, and a host that would be so unwilling to join in.

It spilled over into a team time and we decided that rather than complain about not having anything to do maybe we should come up with our own things to do. So we did. We planned to go to the park and play soccer and end it with a bible lesson, we planned house visits, we planned a sermon to give during one of the church services, and we planned a beauty for ashes event. But some of the best parts of the month happened on our adventure days.

Our first adventure day we decided to go down to Montezuma beach. Finally I can say I’ve been to the Pacific ocean! Oh! I forgot to mention we had the other SQL with us this month. Hannah. You’ll hear her mentioned a few times I’m sure. Anyway, the waves were really rough and crashing really close to shore so surfing was out. But we did happen upon a turtle rescue and get to watch lots of baby turtles be released. During this event Lindsey and Jose struck up a conversation with a mother and daughter. They were from Austria traveling the world. After we left the beach we ran into them again in town and invited them to join us for dinner. L was very new age and a vegan which made dinner a bit complicated since we went to a pizza place. Jose’s blog has a lot more details about L and what happened with our conversation with her so make sure you go read his blog for those details. But I will say she reached out to us and we met up with her again later.

One of the days we went out and did house visits we ran into a woman, T, on a bike selling things she had cooked at home. We spoke with her and told her what we were doing and she begged us to come to her house and pray for her son with depression. This happened before we every made it to the first house. It just goes to show that when you are faithful and “go” God will put people in your path.

We moved around the corner and started on the street where we girls were living. Hannah decided to check out my skills and pulled me along with her to the house of an elderly gentleman. I’m terrible at starting conversations with strangers. I have no trouble joining a conversation but asking questions myself is something I really need to work on. It was very awkward until Hannah took over and started chatting with him. Then I was able to add to what was being said and share some words of encouragement through sharing a bit of my testimony. It didn’t help that we both had trouble understanding him because he kept mumbling. It was nice to not have to worry about translating it into English though. I’m also not very gifted in that way. I can have a conversation with someone in Spanish but if you ask me to repeat it in English I really struggle with translating it. It’ll have to be a God thing for that to change. Anyway we managed to pray for him and then catch up to the rest of the group who were talking with 3 older women.

We spent a bit of time just listening to the stories of the women and praying over them and after we finished we found out that they all had knee pain so we prayed again specifically for their knees and they all said they felt much better. They told our house mom Yeimy about how we came and prayed over them and that they still felt better even two days later. Yeimy was so excited to share that with us.

We made our way over to the home of the woman who told us about her son. The man of the house was surprised to see us but not at all apposed to us being there. We sent the next 2 hours encouraging and praying with J. He was telling us he was so depressed he didn’t ever feel like getting dressed and going to church but we invited him anyway. He came to almost every service after that. It also happened that we were each giving our testimonies at the services and he was able to hear about some of our lowest moments and how we came out of those seasons so much stronger.

Another man we met was a brand new Christian. He was baptized just before we got there and he was on fire for the Lord. He came and cooked for us 2 or three times during the month because he wants to be a chef and he absolutely should be one. The food was amazing. But then he was in a motorcycle accident and he basically had road burn all the way up his leg and his arm. So of course we made time to go and visit him. We could have done without the story about a guy he knew getting decapitated by barbed wire but I’ll explain my reasoning behind that in a different blog.

The boys were staying in a tiny apartment on a farm next to the church. The man that owned that land was just so kind and caring. He also grew quite attached to Gwen after she did some weed eating for him. I don’t think he had ever met a woman as willing to get dirty and lift heavy objects. The one downside to the farm was that P had a guard dog quite aptly named Guardian. The dog was large and very territorial. The guys had to carry a stick with them when they went to bed at night to help keep the dog away. It got to the point where we would walk the guys home to make sure they weren’t attacked by the dog rather than the guys walking us home half a mile away. One of them decided it wasn’t worth having a bed and so put their tent up in the church halfway through the month. Cant say as I blame them.

By the end of our time in Rio Grande I think we knew the people coming to church better than the pastor did since he never went out with us to talk to them. He always had an excuse and one time he used two different excuses within the span of a few minutes. I had asked if he was going to come do house visits and he said he had a sore throat. A minute later Jacob asked and he said he had to work on the van. By this point in the month we didn’t believe either reason. It was also quite sad to see how much time the couple spent watching videos on their phones. We did manage to get their son to come out with us though and it was encouraging to see that he wasn’t as lazy as his parents.

Our last night we invited everyone out to a bonfire on the beach and we ended up being the last ones there! Also, almost no one we invited showed up and yet there were a lot of people there. It was a fun night of just getting to hang out with everyone and worshipping together before we left.

Its crazy all of the things God did and showed us during that month even with all of the complaints. Overall I would say it was a good month filled with lots of growth for all of us.

…Speaking of growth I forgot to mention the rest of what I learned. So I already said that I learned that I don’t ask questions or know how to start conversations. That’s probably why my friends are all talkers. Besides realizing it myself two of my teammates also mentioned it to me. My first thought was to make a mental list of questions so I would always have something to ask but then I recalled how I am supposed to be in a year of jubilee which includes not attempting to prune or fix myself but give everything to God with open hands. That got me to thinking about how I would go about doing that which led me to thinking I wasn’t being obedient and also that my voice wasn’t wanted or important. On my way to the church for breakfast one morning God closed my mouth. I was in the middle of singing a song when I just stopped. I spent that entire day in tortured silence as my team asked me questions forgetting I was fasting from speaking. That torture of not being able to answer them was proof though. It was proof that my voice did matter to them. That my opinions were important to them. I also noted that I needed to pray for my voice to be more Christ-like. And it was a beautiful thing to realize. I was also supposed to be in charge of team time that night. But we also had a squad devo that we needed to discuss. I was asked what we were doing for team time but knowing we needed to discuss the devotional first I pointed to it on my phone. I figured that since I couldn’t talk I would just turn on a movie or something for my team time afterwards. They misunderstood and even though I turned on the movie after they discussed the devo no one came to watch. And that’s where the enemy struck. A couple months back we had talked together about what we wanted team time to look like and my one contribution was that we all do it together and try to be on time when we decide on a time for it. And no one was paying attention to my team time and I had dealt with skipping my team time the week before because people were complaining about our lack of ministry and then I didn’t get my team times the month before because everyone was so tired from everything in Honduras and the one team time I did get was interrupted. So I sent a very angry and upset text to the team (because I couldn’t talk) telling them how I felt about their treatment of me and my opinion on team times.

I had just spent a day feeling loved and wanted and important even though I couldn’t talk and I let the enemy get to me at the end of the day and twist it all around and make me forget about the day and focus on the one negative and then turn around and complain to my team about it. The next day at breakfast we discussed it and decided to move team time to midday rather than evening because everyone was so tired and Jacob gave me his next team time to make up for skipping so many of mine. A few days later I finally apologized for how I handled the whole thing with sending the angry text and the way I worded it. But I am glad that it lead to moving our team time so that we didn’t have to deal with people complaining about being tired and wanting to take showers through the entire thing.

So many things happened this month even with a lack of direction from our ministry host. I would also say our team grew closer together through it all. It’s the end of month 3 and I feel like we have a good grasp on each other’s strengths and weaknesses, through this month where we spent most of our time asking the Lord what to do, who to talk to, and what to say. I am so proud to be part of this team and I can’t imagine myself anywhere else. With Jacob’s selfless leadership and obedience to make time for everyone he talks to, Jose always speaking Truth into situations, Lindsey pushing us to get things done and always being ready with some great insight, Gwen’s strength of character and physical strength pushing us to work harder plus she’s a prayer warrior. Yeah, I think I’ll keep them.