Costa Rica - Trip Update

I wasn't expecting to have internet access here in Costa Rica, but it turns out that our hotel has (limited) wifi that my room is close enough to that we can pick up a signal. My roommate Ashli brought along her laptop, so here I am with an update.

So much has happened since I got here that there's no way that I'd be able to write about all of it here. Maybe after I get back from the trip I can do some posts with more detailed stories, but for now I'll just give a quick update.

There are 22 people who are part of this trip, and we're split into 4 teams. Mine is the largest with 6 people. Jerry is our team leader, and then we have Kathy, Missy, Erica, Tiffany and myself. I'll post pictures of my team when I get home and can load my pictures from my camera. We were assigned to a church and attended it on Sunday morning. We also helped with the service, and I ran the children's ministry (there were only 7 kids that day). I've realized that all the year's I've spent in children's ministry, whether as an observer or leader, have prepared me for this trip. At first I was a little bit thrown off when the very first thing I had to do on my first day, before I even fully understood what we were doing, was to run a Sunday school. But God had prepared me for that day, and one thing I've realized is that children are the same everywhere. It doesn't matter if they're North American or Costa Rican, they all act the same way.

The second half of Sunday and all of today we spent evangelizing. How this works is each of us gets paired up with a translator (and our translators have all been amazing!) and a national. Our translators are obviously there to translate, and the national is someone from the church who wants to learn how to evangelize. Now, I have quite a few stories I can tell you about people coming to Christ, however what is really standing out right now to me is what is happening with the nationals. Since we get to each lunch and dinner with our team, including the nationals and the translators, we've gotten to talk to them quite a bit. Today one of the nationals told us that he never knew that evangelizing was so easy. He never knew you could just go up to someone and talk to them about Jesus in the way that we have been. And today us North Americans were stepping back a little and letting the nationals share their testimonies when we talked to people. It's been amazing to see how the nationals from my team's church are getting so on fire to spread the Word.

We also do cell groups in the evenings, so that we can disciple the new believers. It's the most encouraging thing ever when someone that you prayed with to receive Christ comes to the cell meeting! I've been doing children's ministry during the cell groups as well, but I should get to take part of one of the cell groups at some point this week, so I'll save talking about that for later.

For now, I'm going to go to bed because my legs are exhausted (San Francisco has nothing on the Costa Rican hills that my team gets to walk on!). I will end by saying that my team and everyone on this trip has been wonderful, and I'm really glad that God worked it out for me to be here!

Please keep praying for us!