air

It seems as though I have made it to the surface once again.  When things get too hectic, the only option is to drop the options and unfortunately, due to our difficulties with internet access, that means bogging and updating.  We said goodbye to the team from Calvary Jupiter.  They were here for just about a week, working with us at the house and in the local high school.  We had a great time with them and really enjoyed both seeing some old friends and making some new ones.  It was also great to see what an impact they had at the school...evidenced by the fact that between 60 and 80 people showed up for our youth/skate night...many of them students that don't normally come.  We (Amy, the girls and I) feel refreshed and thankful to have a church that gets behind us in such a major way.  It means a lot to see their care in action.  

We have another team coming in a few days, so I am busy preparing for their arrival.  That means going through budgets, setting up transportation, meals, etc... which can be quite a bit of work.  We are looking forward to AJ Rhodes's arrival this weekend as he is going to help us with the team.  Dexter, one of our local friends, is also going to be a huge help in getting everyone around from place to place.  we'll be working with Ronnie and Tammy, who used to be on our team but are now pastoring the Baptist church.  They ran into a similar problem with their house and we are going to be helping them get ahead in some areas that were stalled.  More to come.  Thanks for following.

San Jose? Again?

We are getting prepared for yet another trip to San Jose. None of us are excited about it but it has to be done. Last year, about this same time, Amy had a small, benign tumor removed from her back near her spine. The doctor told here that it was a type that could recur and if left untreated, could eventually become malignant. He made sure to tell her to keep an eye out and if she found more, to call. Well, about two months ago she found another suspicious place on her hip. She has an appointment tomorrow afternoon, so we are heading in early. If she has to have surgery, we will wait a couple of days before we travel back. We'd appreciate your prayers and I will make sure to post again once we know what's going on. It has been a hectic year but we know that God is in control.

Makena! Makena! Makena!

That was the chant yesterday as Makena was carried off of the soccer field at the end of a brutal match-up between the Rio Negro kindergarten (Makena's school) and the Manzanillo kindergarten. Two weeks ago, Makena's class was slaughtered by a combination of 4 and 5 year olds that had been practicing and a few parents that blurred the line between "helping" and cheating. Yesterday, after two weeks of practice in the blistering heat, Makena's class stood tall and took the battle to their tiny opponents.

When Makena first started practicing, she was easily distracted and had a hard time following the game. Then, her coach tried her out as the goalie. She found her calling in life and immediately began an ascent that ended with her being carried off the field on the shoulders of her teacher and several other parents, all to chants of, "Makena! Makena! Makena!." It was one of the funniest things I have seen since we have been down here and we laughed hysterically. She is now a local celebrity of sorts (having helped her team to win by blocking multiple goal attempts by the other team). Makena simply said, "I was embarassed." We were very proud of her and also very much enjoyed the opportunity it gave us to interact with other parents and students. Here's to hoping that God uses all of this for His purposes. What a day.

One of the things I don't like

I don't like snakes. The other day, I heard a first person snake story that made my skin crawl. Andres, one of the first kids that became a Christian several years ago, told me what happened to him a few days before. He and his mom watch houses for people that are on vacation or are absentee landowners. Right now, they are watching a farm up in the mountains. Andres was out working the other day, gathering bamboo with a couple of other people that live at the farm. He was walking through grass that was about shin height. All of a sudden, he felt something hit his heel from behind...hard. He turned around and saw a terciopelo (fer-de-lance) thrashing around with it's teeth stuck in the heel of his rubber boot. Reflexively, he swung his machete and cut the head off about the same time he saw it. The body was flopping around behind him. He started freaking out at this point and tried to pull off his boot. One of the people that had been working with him yelled at him to stop. When he stopped and looked, he realized that the fangs had gone all the way through the boot and there was venom dripping off of them. If he had pulled his boot off, he would have been "bitten" by a dead snake and would have suffered the same reaction. They ended up having to cut the boot off around the head of the snake to get it off cleanly.


One thing you should know... The fer-de-lance has been called "the most feared snake in the western hemishere" both due to it's aggressive nature and the potency of it's venom. I would have passed out. Anyway, it gave us a good opportunity to talk about God's plans for our lives. I told Andres a long time ago that God had a plan for him. This reinforced it for me. Hopefully, it reinforces it for him.

In other news, it has been pretty crazy with just Amy and I trying to keep up. We are talking with a soon to be couple from Texas that are very interested in moving down to partner with us. We are excited about that. There are some other opportunities as well and we are praying (and ask you to pray as well) that God will provide.

I also just finished several days of meetings with our director from the States. Those meetings went well and I am excited about future possibilities within Alternative Missions. We have a long road ahead as we gear back up after the loss of Whit. There is no way we can do it all...especially in our own strength. Please pray that we'll get the temporary help we need while others are preparing for the long haul, through language school, etc... We will continue to look for God to provide opportunities to share Him with those around us.

I'll write about Makena's soccer game later. It was one of the funniest things I have witnessed since we moved here. Cool and funny.

"The crazy one" has us all laughing most of the time.



One last photo...we added palm leaves to the front of the house for about $100. It came out looking pretty cool and provides the protection we needed from the rain for our stairway.

At last

Wow, it's been a long time since I posted. There are some good reasons for that but even so, I can hardly believe how long it has been. We are finally out of survival mode and are living in our new house. It is not finished...still quite a bit of work to do...but it is liveable and that is huge. We had no running water in our rental house for the last four weeks we were there. That meant bringing water in jugs to flush and do dishes and going elsewhere to shower. Just taking care of simple tasks like that took up so much time on a daily basis. Now that we are in the new house, things are starting to settle down. For the first time in nine months we have hot water and don't have to go to that bathroom in a bucket if we wake up at night. The bathroom in the previous house was only accessible from the outside and you definitely don't want to walk around outside at night in the jungle.

We also have ceiling fans and are dry...two incredible things that we still can't get over. Right now, we are reveling in the small things. Credit to our move goes out to the team from Calvary Chapel Jupiter who helped push us over the hump. They spent five days sanding, varnishing, painting and building in order to take the house to the point where we could move in. Thanks to everyone who has been praying for us as well. Life has taken a sudden turn for the better.


After two months, there is quite a bit of other news to tell as well. First, a few weeks back we had the privilege of baptizing Pablo. We got to know Pablo almost two years ago when he first visited from Spain looking for land to build a surf camp. Pablo ran into a lot of problems during the construction of his first cabin (imagine that). He also experienced quite a bit of loneliness being apart from his family. It was during this time that we became friends (through a shared love of the surf). Pablo spent quite a bit of time in our home eating and hanging out. As God began working in his life, he began coming to our house church...something he had never experienced before. Little by little, he was drawn to God. One night about a month ago, I had an opportunity to sit and talk with Pablo before church started. The conversation came to the point where I asked him if we wanted to give control of his life to Jesus. Without hesitating, he said "Yes. I need to do that". He explained that when he was younger, growing up in the Catholic church in Spain, he had felt God calling him into a relationship. At the time, he said no...he had other things on his mind. After years of running into dead ends and coming to the end of himself...God was still knocking. That night just over a month ago, Pablo prayed and told Jesus that he wanted to follow Him. We baptized Pablo two weeks ago...eight people on a beach in Puerto Viejo...but a whole lot of happy witnesses in Heaven.


I also had the privilege of speaking at some friends' wedding a couple of weeks ago. I'll post a couple of photos now but will save the story for a soon to be written update. The wedding was one of the most beautiful I have ever seen and God provided a way for us to make him known publicly.


Finally, we are sad to be losing Whit Hazelton who has been working with us for the past eight months. Whit came down last September to serve with us long term, but as things go, he is now returning to the States this coming week to get married and live with his future wife and son. It has been an incredible experience to work and serve with him and we are sad to see him go but wish and pray the best for him, his future wife Kristin and her son. We need your prayers as Amy and I are now solely responsible for everything, including weekly skate sessions, house church, youth nights and administrative duties. We believe that God has placed us here for a reason and are trusting that He will send the right people and give us the right ideas at the right time. Please pray for us as we need a minimum of one to two people, preferably a couple or a family, to join us in the near future as even our legal status as a mission is in jeopardy. I will focus much of my efforts over the next two months on recruiting new staff members, both from the states or locally, to join with us. Thanks for your prayers and your interest.

Water and other events

Well, we've had quite a bit going on lately. Just for kicks, I took the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale test (which rates a variety of life events such as job change, death of a family member, illness, etc...on a point scale) the other night just to see where I rated and found I was well over 300 points. Actually, I came in at 321, which places me in the "severe life crisis" area with a 79% chance of a major health change. Interesting.

Anyway, we've been working hard to get into the house. We've given up on finishing and are hoping at this point to make it livable. One of the last big items we've been struggling to complete is our septic system. Last Tuesday we finally found a backhoe to come out and dig the pit. The next day I drove to all three hardware stores trying to find the right type of rock to put in the drainfield. Non of the stores had anything. I finally tracked down a trucking company and was able to have a load delivered. Now, our house is on the other side of a very steep hill that basically requires a four wheel drive just to climb. Because of this, the truck had to drop the rocks at the bottom of the hill which meant that we had to haul around 12 cubic meters of boulders over the hill, one truck-load at a time in our pick-up. We spent three days working on this and still aren't done. The day after the back-hoe dug the hole, the sides caved in. We worked on that all day the following day and got it opened back up again only to have another day and a half of torrential downpours fill the hole with water and mud. Yesterday, we started over again. It is incredibly difficult to get anything completed here.

Thankfully, things are going well with the skatepark and with our church. We had our monthly cookout on Friday night and there were quite a few youth that showed up in spite of the rain. At one point, the winds and rain were so hard that the movie screen blew down and we were all huddled against the office door trying to keep dry. At least the food was good. Church continues to go well as we work our way through Romans. Tonight we'll be watching a movie about the events that took place in Rwanda several years back called "Beyond the Gates" Two weeks ago we studied in Romans Chapter 5 and took some time to specifically talk about Paul's words regarding sin and grace. Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. Tonight, we'll talk some about the existence of true evil while we watch the evidence of God's grace in the midst of horrific events. It is a great movie and truly illustrates this point.

Next week, more work trying to get moved in. We could really use some prayer in this as our next door neighbor continues to make threats towards me (which is another stressor that I don't need at the moment). Thanks for following along with us.

Sometimes

I don't get homesick too often. I moved out of our family's house at the age of 17 when I went away to college and within six years I had lived in Tennessee, California, Hawaii and Arizona. I'm used to being away from friends and family (although that doesn't mean I don't miss them). However, every now and then a wave of nostalgia hits and I find myself wishing I was somewhere else. It happened around Christmas time when we got hit with the terrible rain and flooding...we wished we could be with family for Christmas. Today of all days it hit while I was driving in to prepare for church.

Today is Superbowl Sunday. I am not a big football fan and haven't really followed it much at all since I started surfing about 25 years ago. Yet, here I was, driving by the beach, wishing we were heading over to some friends' house to hang out, eat some junk food and watch the Superbowl. Obviously, it's not about the game...it's about the people. People that were a big part of our lives that we don't get to see any more. Every now and then we are reminded that there are sacrifices to doing what we do...big ones (like being away from friends and family or not having reliable running water for over six months...) and small ones (like laughing at the half-time commercials with people with whom you share a sense of humor). It has been over a year since our last visit to the States and we don't anticipate being able to come home until late July. It isn't as long as my parents spent in East Africa without a trip home, but it is a long time.

Tonight, we start the second half of Romans Chapter 5. Important stuff. Important concepts for us all to understand. We're born into a world filled with and infected by the disease we call sin. Just like smallpox was introduced to the Americas by one infected sailor (with terrible repercussions for everyone else in the "new world"), sin was introduced into the world by one man...Adam. Thank God that there's a cure for sin (unlike smallpox at the time). Thank God that life and reconciliation came through the one man Jesus Christ. Yeah, I'd love to be kicking back watching the Superbowl (for real) but this is a good thing too. Pray that this reality is grasped by those in attendance tonight... because understanding this; really, truly understanding it makes all the difference in the world not only in the long term but in how we live our lives on a day to day basis. The reality of God's grace and forgiveness is just a little bit more important than my desire to sit on a real couch and eat chips and drink a Coke.

I received this quote a couple of days ago. It really made my day. I hope you enjoy it too because it applies to everyone that is serving God anywhere at any time and in any way.

John 6:53-71
Just the other day someone said of a friend, "This man is destined for a great ministry," by which he meant he was headed for the big time - a high profile church with a big budget.
It made me wonder: Why do we think that God's call is necessarily upwardly mobile? Why wouldn't He send His best workers to labor for a lifetime in some small place? Aren't there people in obscure places who need to be evangelized and taught? God is not willing that any perish.
Jesus cared about the individual as well as the masses. He taught large crowds if they appeared, but it never bothered Him that His audience grew smaller every day. Many left Him. In John 6:66 it is written that, "at this point many of his disciples turned away and deserted him", a fickle attrition that would have thrown most of us into high panic. Yet Jesus pressed on with those the Father gave Him.
We live in a culture where bigger is better, where size is the measure of success. It takes a strong person to resist that trend, especially if he or she is laboring in a small place.
But size is nothing: substance is everything. Whether you're pastoring a small church or leading a small Bible study or Sunday school class, serve them with all your heart. Pray, love, teach by word and example. Your little place is not a steppingstone to greatness. It IS greatness." David Roper

Making disciples in a small, obscure place. Sebas baptizing Anastasia two Sundays ago.