Wow, so much to share from this amazing week in Nicoya, part of Guanacaste in Costa Rica. The stories of God´s goodness start before we even left San Jose! There are so many testimonies, but of course at the same time we experienced some intense opposition from the enemy! We got back to the San Jose base for 2 days before we left for Nicoya and during that time we had planned to do 2 ministries: one at the homeless shelter in San Jose and the other with a children´s ministry group called Metro Ministries. I was supposed to go with Metro Ministries along with one of the other leaders (Morgan) and the other leader Elena was supposed to go with the homeless ministry. However, 2 hours before the homeless ministry group was supposed to leave 4 of our teammates got extremely sick, including Elena, the leader who was supposed to go with the homeless group. I ended up trying to take care of all the sick people and then had to go with the homeless ministry group as the leader. I wasn´t really ready and felt really overwhelmed, but I went with the group. It was such an incredible time! We sang some worship songs, help feed them dinner and then one of the girls shared her testimony with the homeless people staying at the shelter. At the end we asked if anyone wanted prayer and about 30 people came up to be prayed for! As we prayed over people, 6 people ended up commiting thier lives to Christ! This was so unexpected and such an encouragement to me especially as I didn´t want to go in the first place, but God had such an awesome plan for us to be there.
The next day we left for Nicoya, which is about 4 hours north of San Jose in Costa Rica. The base in Nicoya is in the middle of nowhere, about 30 minutes from any town. It was a great time to experience God in His creation and enjoy nature. Every day we went to different homes to give out Bibles with the YWAM base in Nicoya. They have an incredible mission that they feel God has called them to do; give a Bible to every home in the province of Guanacaste which is about 10,000 homes. During the week we were there we passed out over 300 Bibles to homes in Guanacaste and saw God´s hand on this ministry! We were able to lead over 10 different people to Christ and see Him deliver many people from drug addiction, suicide, and alcoholism. One story of many that I would like to share with you is a family who we went to their door. The husband-father of the home was outside smoking a ciggarette and we greeted him and let him know that we had a Bible that we wanted to give him. He graciously accepted the Bible and then we asked him if we could pray for him and his family for anything. He then invited us into his house and said yes and that he would like us to talk with his family. We started sharing stories from the Bible with him since he shared with us that he nor anyone in his home could read, but that they love hearing Bible stories. After a great time sharing stories we asked him about his relationship with Christ and he said he didn´t have one, but he would like one. We were able to pray for him, his wife, his son, and his brother in law to accept Christ all together. It was so beautiful to see a whole family come to Christ! It reminded me of the Philippian jailer in Acts 16 who heard the message of faith and immediately went home and shared with his whole family and they were all saved. As we finished praying for the family the sister of the man of the home came in and we shared with her what we were doing. She started crying as she shared about her story. she is a Christian and has been praying for her husband to be saved and go to church with her and he just prayed to accept Christ with us. She also shared how she had struggled with suicide and just the day before had attempted suicide but couldn´t do it. We knew we had to pray for her to be delivered of this so we did and she was freed from it! God has shown Himself so faithful to us!
There are so many more stories to share, but not enough time! Just a little update: the sick people are all healed now, thank God! Two of them had to go to the hospital and one had a kidney infection and the other had parasites and they are doing better. We have had quite a bit more opposition other than sickness and so I ask for your prayers for our team´s health, but also that we would be able to stand against the schemes of the enemy. God has a mighty call and purpose for our team and so I pray that we would continue on with what God has called us to do. We are leaving Liberia, Costa Rica tomorrow morning and will be in Honduras tomorrow night. We will be in Honduras for 2 weeks and then El Salvador for one week and will be back in San Jose in time for Thanksgiving (Nov. 25).
Thanks so much for your prayers for our team! I hope you have been encouraged like us in what God is doing here in Costa Rica! God bless you.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Thursday, October 21, 2010
2 weeks into outreach!
Things are off to a running start in our outreach! We completed our NIKO which was the bootcamp for missions and finished our week and a half in Bocas del Toro, Panama. Bocas was definitely a beautiful place to be! We stayed in a hostel there in Bocas (I had to share a room with 11 girls!), but it was on the water which was gorgeous. We had a great time in Panama and God really moved! We asked the students to pray and ask God to lead them to ministries around the city of Bocas and they did. We ended up working at a nursing home in the city which I mentioned in my last e-mail. Then we picked up trash in the city and made such an impact that the local news station saw us doing it and asked to interview us about what we were doing there so we were on the local news the second day we were there!
The next couple of days we worked in a really poor community which ended up being made up of indigenous people in Panama, which speak a dialect other than Spanish. The community was flooded and had trash everywhere and was so sad and hopeless. It was so cool because I prayed that God would use us to start the community cleaning up after themselves and see that they can make the difference. I walked away for 10 minutes to pick up some cleaning supplies and when I came back, a group of men were cleaning alongside our group and it was so incredible to see God answer so quickly!
For the next couple of days we spent time cleaning up the local park and painting murals on the benches. One of our students met the mayor of the town and he asked us to help them out which was amazing too. Then we spent time again at the nursing home and painted a mural in the rooms of the nursing home patients.
Some of the other things we did was work at a local hospital and pray with the patients of this hospital. We also were able to go into the town and talk with the people who live there and pray with them. We then did some children's ministry in the city and went to a local church. We had a great time with the people and made so many friends there in the town who we were able to minister to. Many nights we would invite people to dinner with us and most nights we had new guests who would join us and hear about why we were there in Bocas. We had many divine appointments in Panama and are so excited to see what else God has in store for us for the rest of our outreach.
I got back from Panama last night and we are leaving again tomorrow morning for Nicoya, a small town in Costa Rica where we will be distributing Bibles to homes. We will be in Nicoya until October 30th and then we will head to Tamarindo, a beach community and then to Honduras on October 31st. Please keep our team in prayer as we prepare to go. We are excited, but very tired and haven't had much time to rest yet. I really appreciate all of your prayers and encouragement on our outreach. It has been definitely a stretching experience for me as a leader. God is teaching me so much about leadership and myself and where I need to step up as a leader. It is stretching, but good and necessary! Praying for all of you and missing you! God bless!
The next couple of days we worked in a really poor community which ended up being made up of indigenous people in Panama, which speak a dialect other than Spanish. The community was flooded and had trash everywhere and was so sad and hopeless. It was so cool because I prayed that God would use us to start the community cleaning up after themselves and see that they can make the difference. I walked away for 10 minutes to pick up some cleaning supplies and when I came back, a group of men were cleaning alongside our group and it was so incredible to see God answer so quickly!
For the next couple of days we spent time cleaning up the local park and painting murals on the benches. One of our students met the mayor of the town and he asked us to help them out which was amazing too. Then we spent time again at the nursing home and painted a mural in the rooms of the nursing home patients.
Some of the other things we did was work at a local hospital and pray with the patients of this hospital. We also were able to go into the town and talk with the people who live there and pray with them. We then did some children's ministry in the city and went to a local church. We had a great time with the people and made so many friends there in the town who we were able to minister to. Many nights we would invite people to dinner with us and most nights we had new guests who would join us and hear about why we were there in Bocas. We had many divine appointments in Panama and are so excited to see what else God has in store for us for the rest of our outreach.
I got back from Panama last night and we are leaving again tomorrow morning for Nicoya, a small town in Costa Rica where we will be distributing Bibles to homes. We will be in Nicoya until October 30th and then we will head to Tamarindo, a beach community and then to Honduras on October 31st. Please keep our team in prayer as we prepare to go. We are excited, but very tired and haven't had much time to rest yet. I really appreciate all of your prayers and encouragement on our outreach. It has been definitely a stretching experience for me as a leader. God is teaching me so much about leadership and myself and where I need to step up as a leader. It is stretching, but good and necessary! Praying for all of you and missing you! God bless!
Thursday, October 14, 2010
update from Panama!
Hello my dear friends and family! I want to apologize first for not writing to you sooner. We have been incredibly busy since the last time I wrote to you and have had no availability to Internet. The last week of teaching ended about 2 weeks ago which I heard went well. The other 2 leaders and I had to leave early for NIKO training (the bootcamp for missions). We trained for 5 days without the students and finally they joined us in Talamanca-Bambu. The students then started the NIKO camp in the jungle which lasts for 4 1-2 days where we lead them through various stretching activities (the activities of the camp are not allowed to be told to anyone unless they have completed a NIKO, so I am sorry for not telling more). The experience of NIKO was a challenging one for me as a leader, but a very good experience of growth and leadership. I was reminded that the best leaders lead through influence rather than power.
We finished NIKO on October 8th and went to Puerto Viejo for a couple of days to do some ministry. Puerto Viejo is a little town on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica. It is mostly a party town where tourists go to get away for a couple of days. This town was hard for many of us as there are a lot of drugs and alcohol and a very hopeless spirit over the city. We visited a youth group on our first night being there and then did a prayer walk along the beach and prayed for the city. The next day we went to church and then the students started initiating their own ministries and they went into the streets and just started sharing with people their stories of what Christ has done in their lives. It was an awesome time of seeing God move in the streets. Our last night in Puerto Viejo I went with 2 students to visit a pizza owner and one of his co-workers. We started by asking him if he would like prayer for anything and he was very open to us and started sharing his story with us. He had been living in Puerto Viejo for 4 years now (originally from San Jose) and the last 2 years for him have been really hard. He has been robbed a couple times and his building almost burned down from some local teenagers. He has been really discouraged and so we were able to come and encourage him to keep going and that God has a plan for him. He was so encouraged when we left, it was awesome!
This last Monday (Oct. 11th) we started our travels to Panama. We ended up in a little island in Bocas del Toro (about 2 hours from the border of Costa Rica). Bocas del Toro is definitely a beautiful place and has been a place of openness to ministry. We started our ministry on Tuesday which was a prayer walk through the city to discover God´s heart for this place. Then we asked the students to pray about the week we are here and each student is responsible to lead a day of ministry in whatever area God is leading them. The first day of ministry was picking up trash in the community. The island is a fairly small and so when the white people started picking up trash it drew a lot of attention to us. The local news saw us doing this and started filming us. They interviewed a couple of our students and asked them what we were doing and why. One of the areas we went to was a very poor neighborhood which was somewhat flooded because of the tides here and the rain. There was so much trash and we just kept cleaning. Many of the locals came up to us and thanked us or started picking up their own trash and giving it to us. It was really a great start to the ministry here. After that, the news asked us to go to the station and get interviewed live for the evening news. They played footage of us helping the elderly and of us picking up trash and just asked us why we were here in Bocas. God is so good...He is allowing us so many open doors through the exposure they are giving us to this community!
Then the next day we went to a nursing home where the conditions are not very livable. We went to bring some joy and hope to the elderly here who have been mostly forgotten. We came and did a little program including singing songs and prepared some dramas, but mostly just talked with them and listened to their stories. While we were there we noticed that their room where they all slept (1 room for all the women, and 1 room for all the men) was very boring. The walls were blank and it was very sad, so we asked if we could come in and paint the walls for it to be a happier place and they said they would love it. So the next day we went and painted the walls of the bedrooms with Bible verse and colorful pictures. They absolutely loved the paintings and were so happy with how it looked when we were done.
We still have almost a week left in Bocas and are still praying about what other opportunities God has for us here. Please pray for us as we continue our time in Bocas...that we may reach the people here in Bocas with a message of hope and the love of Christ. Also, as we have been ministering the enemy is not happy with us. We have had some disunity and negativity in our group and that has made ministry very hard, but we remember that we are not fighting against flesh and blood, but against powers and principalities...(Ephesians 6) Please pray with us as we fight this battle! Thank you so much for your support over this time and I will update very soon with pictures. There are some ministry pictures already up on my Facebook if you would like to see them. God bless you all and much love to you from Panama!
We finished NIKO on October 8th and went to Puerto Viejo for a couple of days to do some ministry. Puerto Viejo is a little town on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica. It is mostly a party town where tourists go to get away for a couple of days. This town was hard for many of us as there are a lot of drugs and alcohol and a very hopeless spirit over the city. We visited a youth group on our first night being there and then did a prayer walk along the beach and prayed for the city. The next day we went to church and then the students started initiating their own ministries and they went into the streets and just started sharing with people their stories of what Christ has done in their lives. It was an awesome time of seeing God move in the streets. Our last night in Puerto Viejo I went with 2 students to visit a pizza owner and one of his co-workers. We started by asking him if he would like prayer for anything and he was very open to us and started sharing his story with us. He had been living in Puerto Viejo for 4 years now (originally from San Jose) and the last 2 years for him have been really hard. He has been robbed a couple times and his building almost burned down from some local teenagers. He has been really discouraged and so we were able to come and encourage him to keep going and that God has a plan for him. He was so encouraged when we left, it was awesome!
This last Monday (Oct. 11th) we started our travels to Panama. We ended up in a little island in Bocas del Toro (about 2 hours from the border of Costa Rica). Bocas del Toro is definitely a beautiful place and has been a place of openness to ministry. We started our ministry on Tuesday which was a prayer walk through the city to discover God´s heart for this place. Then we asked the students to pray about the week we are here and each student is responsible to lead a day of ministry in whatever area God is leading them. The first day of ministry was picking up trash in the community. The island is a fairly small and so when the white people started picking up trash it drew a lot of attention to us. The local news saw us doing this and started filming us. They interviewed a couple of our students and asked them what we were doing and why. One of the areas we went to was a very poor neighborhood which was somewhat flooded because of the tides here and the rain. There was so much trash and we just kept cleaning. Many of the locals came up to us and thanked us or started picking up their own trash and giving it to us. It was really a great start to the ministry here. After that, the news asked us to go to the station and get interviewed live for the evening news. They played footage of us helping the elderly and of us picking up trash and just asked us why we were here in Bocas. God is so good...He is allowing us so many open doors through the exposure they are giving us to this community!
Then the next day we went to a nursing home where the conditions are not very livable. We went to bring some joy and hope to the elderly here who have been mostly forgotten. We came and did a little program including singing songs and prepared some dramas, but mostly just talked with them and listened to their stories. While we were there we noticed that their room where they all slept (1 room for all the women, and 1 room for all the men) was very boring. The walls were blank and it was very sad, so we asked if we could come in and paint the walls for it to be a happier place and they said they would love it. So the next day we went and painted the walls of the bedrooms with Bible verse and colorful pictures. They absolutely loved the paintings and were so happy with how it looked when we were done.
We still have almost a week left in Bocas and are still praying about what other opportunities God has for us here. Please pray for us as we continue our time in Bocas...that we may reach the people here in Bocas with a message of hope and the love of Christ. Also, as we have been ministering the enemy is not happy with us. We have had some disunity and negativity in our group and that has made ministry very hard, but we remember that we are not fighting against flesh and blood, but against powers and principalities...(Ephesians 6) Please pray with us as we fight this battle! Thank you so much for your support over this time and I will update very soon with pictures. There are some ministry pictures already up on my Facebook if you would like to see them. God bless you all and much love to you from Panama!
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