12/20/10
Jaco is a little beach town in Costa Rica. A big tourist place to come especially if you are a surfer. Our ministry has been a little different since we arrived here last Wednesday. Ministry usually looks like whatever our contact wants us to do or assist them with. Our contact here is great, but she didn’t really even know that she was the only contact we had. We were basically dropped off at our little beach house and left. In fact, she thought we were associated with Mercy Ships and said something like, “Where’s the boat?” This was pretty funny. Jaco beach is not a bad place to be left at all. We are staying maybe a half a mile from the black sand beach. It’s cool to watch the surfers. I have not attempted surfing yet, but plan on it before we leave.
So we have just been meeting people in town, shop owners and tourists. It’s a small town, so it’s easy to get to know people some. We have done worship around town. Last night we were just on a street corner singing and Allan was playing his guitar. One night we were on the beach and were invited to this huge bonfire. All the guys there are surfers and work for the surf school. Christy got a lesson out of that. I may get her to show me what she learned.
There is also a skate ramp on the property we are staying on and guys come and skate on that in the afternoons. Mostly they hang out with our guys. I haven’t watched much of that, but there have been a lot of falls. Saw one yesterday that looked painful. Allan dropped down on the ramp once and was down flat in less than a second. As a nurse, I’m not a huge fan of the ramp. A lot of the kids don’t have a lot to do, so it’s nice for them to have some place to hang out that doesn’t involve drinking or drugs.
We were introduced to a women named Bleu. She does many different things and knows everyone it seems. She is a North American that moved here about 5 years ago. One thing she does is work with the prostitutes. She does this on Friday and Sat. nights because this is when it’s most busy. She goes to the most popular bar, sits outside nearby and offers to pray for or just talk to the girls that walk by. Many of the girls in the past have wanted her to pray with them, for themselves or their families. Bleu never wants to make the girls feel like she is so much better than them and offer prayer. We all know that we are sinners and Bleu herself will be the first one to talk about her rocky past. She was a heroin addict for two years. She always promised God that she wouldn’t let it kill her, so on the night when all the blood vessels in her face broke and she knew it would kill her soon, she stopped.
The first night we went was Friday night and just sat at the park near the Beatle Bar. I saw many prostitutes, probably at least 60 different girls in one spot. You see many guys too and this was the hardest part for me. None of the girls really stopped that night when we tried to talk to them. They would say thanks and maybe later. One did ask us to pray for a friend. Mostly we talked to the guys. We talked to these young guys that were just in the park and invited them to come and skate. While talking it was easy to get distracted from what was going on with all the prostitutes and men, but focusing on it was really hard to watch. The cabs were just lined up outside ready to take the guys when they got a girl. Most of the men were North American which is no surprise. As I saw this one group of middle aged business men getting into a van with all these girls, I had to remind myself that they need God just as much as the girls. They may think they are happy, but their lives are really missing something. I would start to feel physically sick if I thought about what was going on and that it seemed so accepted.
A lot of the girls are from the Dominican Republic. They make better money doing this job than many other things and send a lot of it home to their families. They could do different jobs, but do also admit that they like the money and nice clothes. Many also start using drugs to numb their minds to what they are doing and then have to keep working to support their habit. It’s a bad cycle.
Keep praying for my team in Jaco and for all the people we are meeting. My favorite place to just sit and watch people or blog is the Taco Bar. They have the best fish tacos too. J One day I was there and these three guys from DC started talking to me. It’s a popular question to ask people where they are from and why they are here. This opens it up to tell people what we are doing. A couple of the guys were lawyers and the one that did the talking was an Atheist. He presented his view for why there was no God as a legal case. The main question was if God is all powerful and could stop bad things from happening, why doesn’t He? It’s a good question and one of the hardest to ever answer because God can do miracles and has the power to do whatever he wants. I had to go all the way back to the Garden of Eden and how sin entered the world. God did not create puppets. He created us with free will. He desires for us to choose Him, but He wants it to be our choice. We have a lot of freedom. I told Allan(the Atheist) that we could still be living in a perfect world or God could stop every bad thing before it happened, but then we would all be perfect and pretty much God’s ourselves. It would also remove any reason for Jesus to have come to earth and be a sacrifice for us.
There are some questions I ask or people ask me that I will never have an answer to. Why did God create the world in the first place knowing exactly how it was going to end up and every evil thing that was going to happen? Allan talked about the millions of African’s dying of Malaria every year and all the babies born with HIV and people he has seen starving. He is an immigration attorney and many of his clients are from Africa and he has been there and heard their stories. The things he has seen have proven to him that there is no God. They have proven to me that we, people that claim to be Christians need to be His hands and feet because we have messed up His perfect creation. I’m not really sure why God created us all in the first place, except it says in the Bible to bring Him glory. I know there is a constant battle going on between good and evil in the world because I feel it. Our squad parents always say, “Love wins.” When questions in my mind start to get hard, I just remember that love wins. In the end evil will be judged. I’m thankful that is not my job. For now I just know I’m supposed to show love and if I can show people the One who can love them more than anyone else, that will be enough.
