The fun starts!

It’s hard to believe I’ve almost been in Costa Rica for a month! I’ve really settled in, and I’m loving it so far. The culture here is really warm, welcoming, and loves to make you feel welcome into their family.

This week, our topic of the week was ‘The Nature and Character of God’, which was a pretty heavy topic. Our speaker, Carlos Penning was really knowledgeable, and on fire for God! We covered a lot of ground in five days, my head is spinning from everything and I’m still processing!

One of the biggest things I’ve been processing is that God doesn’t make ‘bad things’ happen to people. He’s not passing judgment on people when terrible things happen. Since we’re made in the image of God, we can assume that God is capable of feeling everything we are, but multiply that by infinity! That means He loves us with a ferocious love that we can’t even comprehend! We assume that God is in charge of everything, good AND evil. We quickly forget that our world is full of sin and pretty messed up already. God isn’t someone who forces Himself on us, which means He let’s us make our own decisions, which ALWAYS have consequences. People always ask, why does bad stuff happen in this world? Why don’t we ever ask ourselves why so much good stuff happens that we don’t deserve?

Enough about classes though…that’s literally just a tiny snapshot of what I learned. This week flew by, on Sunday, I did end up going bungee jumping, and I’m so glad I did! The rush of jumping 420 feet with some cords attached to your feet is intense! I conquered my fear (with a video to prove it!) and would do it again for sure!

On Monday we had a dance party for a staff member who was leaving to go back to Canada. We all got to learn some Salsa, Meringue, and we even pulled out some North American dance moves. Someone was so excited that he jumped so high he broke a light! Since it was a Latino dance party though, we quickly cleaned up and carried on with the dancing!

Wednesday night we had an awesome night of base worship and I got to pull out my bass, which was so exciting! I played with the base worship team here and had a blast! I’ve really missed playing, and it’s great to get back into it.  We’re having a twenty-four hour worship/prayer night starting at 7:30 on Friday night and I’ll get to pull out my bass again for that which will be great.

On Thursday we had local outreach, so we headed to an orphanage that will be opening soon, just to help them paint, landscape, and clean the building. It’s exciting to be a part of something so important and something that they need so desperately here. The people who are running the orphanage were so grateful for our help and kept saying thanks, but we really just want to bless them and help them create an awesome home for the kids who need one!

Tomorrow I’m going out with a ministry on base called ‘Metro Ministry’. I’ll be going out into a poor neighborhood close by, just to hang out and play with kids! I’ve gone once before and had a great time. The kids are so excited to play with us even if some of us don’t speak Spanish fluently (I’m working on it!). Before I do that though, I’m playing from 5am-7am as part of the twenty-four hours of worship and prayer so I’ll be getting up pretty early. On weekdays I usually get up at 5:30 am to run, then I start making breakfast at 6:00, so it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch to get up a bit earlier.

I’m also planning on checking out the market in downtown San Jose tomorrow (Saturday), which is filled with super awesome stuff. Bags, shoes, food, clothes, jewelry, all that fun stuff that ‘gringos’ like me like! So my day will be pretty full!

One thing that God also put on the hearts of two staff members and a few students, is the need for dance while worshiping. Even though I’m no ballerina, I love dancing so I’m super stoked that we’ll be meeting as a group to start incorporating this! My DTS is full of people who have an incredible heart for worship, apparently staff here haven’t seen a DTS here with this ever. So that’s super exciting too!

All in all, I’m loving it. I’m learning to love the ‘family life’, it’s still hard having limited personal space, but it’s worth it for what I’m learning here!

-John 17:24