Month 4: The Day That Heaven Celebrated

Putting in to words what I learned and experienced during our month in Costa Rica is really difficult.

There wasn’t really one big lesson or skill or takeaway, but I’m sure that I’m sure that I’m not the same as I was when my team arrived at 1 a.m. to a gravel parking lot with 8 guys and a couple wheelbarrows eager to help us get to our jungle house. 

On our very last morning, we got to go to men’s house church and celebrate. 

It was family day so any of the guys who have finished phase 1 in the previous month get to invite their families to church the first Sunday of the following month. 

It was also celebration Sunday for guys who had recently finished certain classes and phases. 

And then we got to celebrate and see our brother Felipe graduate the program and share an encouragement and share his plans for the next season of life. He has plans for a few weeks, to catch up with family and then receive some additional leadership training with Teen Challenge, but after that he said his plans are simply to follow Jesus. 

And then we got prayed over by our friends and brothers. 

And then we all ate one last lunch together, and took our last photos and gave our last hugs. 

And then we went to a river near the property for baptisms. 6 men made the public declaration of their faith in Christ! 

One-by-one they stepped chest deep in the water and were asked, “what’s your testimony?” And one-by-one they’d respond, “Jesus said to take up my cross and follow Him, and so I am.”

And all together we’d said, “en el nombre del Padre, y del Hijo, y el espíritu santo” and down they’d go and up they’d come to cheers and photos and hugs. New life!! In Jesus Christ!! They have decided, to follow Jesus!! No turning back, no turning back! 

And all of heaven celebrated. 

The thing I learned the most in Costa Rica is the endless and unfathomable depth of the gospel. That there is no person too gone or life too broken to be met and wrecked and put back together by the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. 

It’s enough to make you weep in wonder. 

These men and women who once were drug dealers and prostitutes, are now my favorite people to play checkers with and laugh at the dinner table with. 

Jesus changes everything. 

There is not much that separates me or you from the people I met on the streets of San Jose or the men and women who joined the program in the month we were there, coming in scared and in survival-mode, untrusting and unsure about the whole Grace and Mercy thing. 

For some of us, it’s one job, one house, one relationship, one relapse, one moment of hopeless desperation that separates our current lives from a life dependent on alcohol and other substances, selling drugs and bodies just to feel like we can make it to tomorrow. 

Praise the Lamb that most of us are not in that situation, but that we’ve been born into a context that set our lives on a path different from what could have been. 

And pray for the people who were born into situations where their lives got set on a path closer to the father of lies than the Father of Lights. 

Costa Rica was a perspective-shifting, kingdom-growing, faith-deepening month. 

And it also hurt a lot. 

It hurt to look around some nights and feel my heart break for the brothers and sisters around me as I imagined their lives before the moment in front of me. 

It hurt to see two women leave the program after we’d spent a week getting to know them, seeing the light return to their eyes, and watching them come out of survival-mode into a place of hope and rest. 

It hurt to say goodbyes, simply having to trust the Lord with the new friends I’d made, having no way to know whether my brothers and sisters would stay the full course of the program or drop out early and return to the streets. 

It hurt to drive away from the men’s house after church, considering the fact that I may never play cards again in their rainforest treehouse and I may never see them again this side of heaven. 

But it is all the good kind of hurt–the kind that draws you to your knees and closer to the Father’s heart. 

How beautiful to love a place so much that it hurts to leave. 

Please pray for: 

• Global Teen Challenge in Costa Rica. For long term missionaries, for consistent funding, for wisdom and grace and gentleness over the leadership. For the men and women in the programs currently, that they’d cling to the cross and daily pick theirs up to follow Jesus. For provision and peace as a new women and children’s center is being constructed and opened. 
• my new team! There’s 6 of us, 3 guys and 3 girls, and I’m so excited for all the Lord is going to do in and through us over the next few months. We fly with the whole squad to the Dominican Republic tomorrow. 
• a deeper trust that Lord is working all things for good and glory, even the hardest things.