"It doesn't work but it's really pretty"

I'm listening to Beirut, A Call to Arms, as I reflect on the past two weeks. This album reminds me of Costa Rica because I listened to it on my flight to San Jose when I was trying to prepare myself for the unknown. How incredible it's been to see communities helped, people changed and myself stretched as we all go about life trying to figure out how to love people.

A team from Ohio was here for 10 days building a home for Joselin, a 17-year-old mom whose four month old is adorable and will now have a dry place to sleep. The guys helped complete one house and built another one from the ground up. Rebecca and I came to Jasmine on the last day to help paint and it was definitely a team effort as we all tried to paint around the banana trees and the barbed wire fence that was right up against the house.

The guys also had the project of cleaning/fixing up a stove for Sandra's family, who cooks outside on an open fire. It was so incredible to see this family get a new stove, and I was amazed by the guys who carried it down the ridiculously steep terrain to get it inside their house. I was standing on the sidelines, not helping at all with my exclamations of fear, as they efficiently carried it down the "path" of like 45 steps. The down side to this story is that Sandra doesn't get enough voltage for the stove to work (she said, "it doesn't work but it's really pretty"). The team hired an electrician to check it out and we're in the process of getting her a gas stove or helping her get a permit to hook up the right cables to the electric one.

Rodney and Cindy's son and his family are here visiting for the week and after that our good friend May will be coming (also known as Best Time Ever 2009). The next team doesn't get here until the middle of March so we have a break where we will organize our English classes, put our files in order for the person who takes our place and get some rest. I added photos to my photo album, so take a look if you want to see more photos from the past two teams.

Where shall we buy bread?

Another team from Mountain View, Va., left this morning at 5 a.m. First of all, it has been such a spiritual blessing to have two teams from Mountain View come to Costa Rica to serve - their church sends two or three teams a year to work with us and I have loved getting to know everyone.

Before the team got here I was a little apprehensive about how the week would go because of our lack of resources (or maybe just my lack of knowledge of what our resources were). The team did a VBS of sorts for the kids in the community and I was envisioning riots or chaos in the planche. As you can see from the photo, the kids are lined up anticipating a water balloon toss and there's no craziness. We had some volunteer translators and prepared team members who worked together to produce an organized and safe week for the children.

It's so refreshing to see how God uses what we have, even when it doesn't seem like enough. The other day I was reading in John. John 6:1-15 to be exact. Although I've read this passage a million times I was struck by what Jesus said. This particular passage is about feeding the five thousand with five loaves and two fish and Jesus' way of doing this miracle really impacted me. It says, "When Jesus looked up and saw a great crowd coming toward him, he said to Philip, 'Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?' He asked this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do."

Now, the first thing I thought was why would Jesus test him in this way? Especially if he already knew what he was going to do...so Philip said there wasn't enough money (how many times have I said that?) and Peter pointed out there was only a boy's lunch there, so how on earth would that feed 5,000 people? And I realized how often I do that. How often I look at my resources in my own hands instead of in Christ's hands. I was blown away by the simple question that Jesus asked. I think He wanted to know if Peter and Philip would trust him to provide instead of pointing out the obvious (hello, of course there's not enough money or food to go around).

So my new prayer has been to give God my resources daily - my thoughts, my gifts and everything else. And to trust that He can do far more than what I can do.