Back in San Jose

Well, officially my outreach is now over! We got back from Puerto Viejo on Sunday night and we just had a day off. The last week in Puerto Viejo was pretty incredible. The town of Puerto Viejo is a small town where a lot of hippies go to live. The town is known for smoking pot and chilling at the beach. We joined up with a local church and a local missionary from Minnesota who opened a coffee shop with his wife to use to partly support himself and be a part of the community there. This coffee shop also had an ice cream shop in it and a lot of tourists would go there to hang out as well as the local people. The hotel we stayed at was on the beach and we ended up getting it for completely free! The couple who own the hotel wanted to bless us...they are Christians also and were praying for a group to come down to their town and minister and so they wanted us to be blessed there.

The first days we were there we did a prayer walk around the city and prayed over what God would have us do there. We came up with a couple of ideas and during the week we implemented those ideas. My group had a stand we set up in front of the coffee shop/ice cream place where we handed out free iced tea. It is REALLY hot in Puerto Viejo so we figured people would want something cool to drink. We handed out Bible verses with the ice tea and had many opportunities to talk with people about God and why we were there. I met several people who were Americans living in Puerto Viejo. It was fun to be able to speak in English again too. I spoke with one lady who was from California and now has been in Puerto Viejo for five months. She said she was deceived into a false job and now can't make it back to the U.S. because she doesn't have enough money and is into drugs. Now she is working for the missionary at his coffee shop and is open to God. When she came to Costa Rica she was sick with Hepatitis C and says the missionary prayed for her and now she is completely healed. God is really doing something in this town.

We had a group that went out doing "shopping" ministry. Now, I know this sounds strange, but in a town where their main industry is tourism, they have many shops! We wanted to be able to bless the shop owners so a group went out and gave out flowers with Bible verses to the shop owners and prayed for them. One particular shop owner was so blessed he started to cry and share that our group was an answer to his prayers. They started to share with him about God's love and he said he now realized God is real.

Another group started a surf ministry while one group went around and picked up trash in the city. It is so amazing to see people's responses when they see white people picking up trash voluntarily. They expect the tourists to be taking things which is why they come, but in the opposite way we came to bless the city. We learned in our DTS about something really important which is called coming in the opposite spirit. Many times the enemy will try to stop us with something and we need to come against him with the opposite spirit. In this particular community, we noticed that the people feel like the tourists come to take things from them and there is a resentment towards the tourists. We knew coming into this community that we had to come against this idea in the opposite spirit if people were going to listen to us and so the picking up trash ministry really opened doors for us for people to listen to our group and even bless our group.

The last night that we were in Puerto Viejo we had a big community event. We invited all of the city to come to the beach and we had a pretty good turn out. We had a girl from our school of worship play guitar and sing and then we did a couple of dramas and had one of our guys share his testimony. It was such an amazing way to end our outreach on the beach. Then we went back to our hotel and prayed for the owners of the hotel and the staff. The owners wife was crying as she shared with us how much of a blessing we had been to this community. God has been so good to us on our outreach! It was not what I had expected outreach to be, but then again I couldn't have asked for much better!

In the next couple of days before our graduation this Thursday,we will be debriefing about our outreach and the DTS. Please continue to pray for me as I prepare to re-enter normal life and the U.S. I am still asking God specifically for direction as to what to do. Thank you so much for your continued support and prayers! I love you all and am excited to see you in two weeks!