All I can say right now is God is good or maybe I should should shout GOD IS GOOD. I am now in Costa Rica. My hear is starting to be broken for the people.
The last week has been uneventful, except for one event. The month or I should say three weeks of Costa Rica are going to be spent in San Jose. The squad has decided to not break off. This means I will spend my time here ministering alongside 25 other people instead of my five other teamates. It is great to be around the squad and to minister with others.
The other morning, Wednesday, I was standing staring at a map of Costa Rica. I felt God calling me to go and pray in a poorer area of San Jose. (I will stop to tell you that we are staying in San Fransisco, the richest area of San JOse). As I was looking at the map, Caitlin came by me. I asked the daily question of “What are you doing today?’ She said that she wanted to go to a slum area in Alajuelita. I said I wanted to go. She said she had no idea how to get there and this started our adventure.
I had to find a YWAM(the place we are staying at) staff member that could tell me the directions. THe only ones that could truly tell me spoke Spanish. Thankfully, one wrote ‘muebleria las Americas croce hacia Alajuelita’ on a piece of paper. She told us to get on the Periferica(I like to call it Peri Peri, anAfrican sauce) bus and show the message to the driver and he would drop us off.
The Periferica is the most unreliable of all buses here. It seems to take anywhere from 5 to 40 minutes to catch. When Caitlin, Kari, Seth, Krystle, and myself arrived at the bus stop I started to pray for a bus. We did see two Periferica buses on the other side of the rode after waiting 10 minutes. We joked that I prayed for the bus and didn’t specify the side. The bus arrived finally and we got on. At first I forgot to show the driver the address on the paper and had to go back. We got dropped off across the street from the bus stop. We only knew this from the bus driver pointing. (I have decided I should know some more Spanish.) We waited 10 more minutes and got on our bus to Alajuelita.
When we arrived in ALajuelita, Caitlin saw a sign for the church she knew the slums ministry was located with. We got off the bus at a park and walked back to the sign. We talked to men that lived at the house. After a few minutes of broken Spanish, spoken mainly by Seth, we were taken to a house of women that was part of the church.
When we entered the gate, I was amazed at the number of woman around the table. They were making coin purses. We tried to explain what we were doing. Seth was the only one in our group to speak any Spanish. We finally got to speak to someone on a phone that spoke English and were told that we would come back on Friday. Even though we found out that we were coming back on Friday, we stayed and tried to talk. We did a lot of sign language, but it made my day. I felt God telling me that he wanted me to be in that place at that time. The house was a ministry of the church for women recovering from drugs. I left the house with a huge smile and couldn’t wait until Friday to come back to the town.
We never got a phone call to get picked up on Friday, so we decided to go anyways and find the church. We found out later that the phone number did not work. This trip consisited of the same members, but Seth was replaced by Jenette. When we got on the Periferica, I told Caitlin that we should take the bus in Alajuelita until it either stopped or arrived back at the park. I had no idea why we needed to do this. Well the bus stopped and we had to get off. We found a school and asked where the church was at. They told us the general direction. We started walking and was met by someone saying “hello how are you?” A greeting I don’t hear very much here. I told the people who were with me that we should ask him about the church. He ended up taking us to the corner and showing us the church. We went into the church.
The people in the church/ school told us to come back to church on Sunday and on Monday we will be showed the ministries that they have. We were taken back to the women’s house for a second time. We had a spontanious time to share now that we had a translator to help us. I was ten times more blessed today than the day before. I left knowing that this is what life is truly about. The women ministered to us just as much as we ministered to them. Thank you Lord for the church in Alajuelita and the way you have ordained us working there. God you are wonderful and your timing is perfect.
