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Exactly a year ago, I was in my home country. 😩😍🇨🇴 #TakeMeBack #SpringBreak16 (at Metro Cable Medellin)

Costa Rica // Spring Break 2016

University of Idaho’s Cru has been sending students to the University of Costa Rica in San Jose for summer and spring break trips for seven years now. Over winter break, I was talking with some friends who were planning on going on the upcoming spring break trip, and as I prayed for direction on how to spend the next semester, I realized I had exactly zero good excuses not to go. (I had plenty of bad ones—I’ve never had a heart specifically for Costa Rica, I was anxious about raising support for a trip so shortly after my trip to Lake Tahoe and so shortly before whatever trip I might take next summer, etc.—but one by one, I was convicted of each). So I told the director of the trip I was going to apply, and I did.

Costa Rica is an extremely religious country. Roman Catholicism is the official religion, with a 2007 survey showing that 70.5% of Costa Ricans identify as such. This is a bit lower among college students, especially at a secular university like UCR, but it still influences their culture tremendously. The students there, whether or not they were religious, were incredibly open—both to talking to foreigners (one girl named Nati told us to take “gringas” as a compliment) and to talking about spiritual things. That came as a shock to me, as the only place I’d ever done ministry before was the United States, where comparatively, people are not open at all. Our culture is one of, “Believe whatever you want but don’t impose your beliefs on me”; theirs is one of “You’re a Christian missionary? Rad! Let’s go eat lunch together!”

However, Costa Ricans still need Jesus just as much as everyone else. One question we liked to ask students was to rate their confidence that they’d get into heaven if they died right then. The answer we got, over and over again, was that students felt unsure whether they were good enough. Several were acutely aware of their sin due to their church background, and they knew that Jesus died on the cross, but few had made the connection of why Jesus had to die. The three verses I shared the most were Romans 6:23, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord,” to explain that we deserve death but Jesus paid that price in our place, Ephesians 2:8-9, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast,” to explain that we can’t be good enough, but that we’ve been saved by grace, not by works, as a freely-given gift, and Romans 5:8, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us,” to explain that because of Jesus, our sin has no bearing on our salvation, and we can be 100% confident of our future in heaven, no matter our ratio of good works to sin.

The beginning of the trip was pretty rough as we adjusted to foreign—well, everything. You have to order your food in Spanish, the temperature was about 50 degrees higher than it was in Idaho, people treat the lines on the roads as guidelines (when there are lines), and you can’t even throw toilet paper in the toilet! Plus, one of my biggest fears came true: the airline lost my luggage. All our team was allowed to bring were carry-ons, but they made us check our carry-ons at the Spokane airport because there wasn’t enough room overhead. Everyone else’s bag made it to San Jose, but mine only made it as far as Phoenix. I’m an extremely high-maintenance person, and everything was in that carry-on: my clothes, my retainer, my toiletries (including my special oil-reducing powder which I feel super gross without). I realized immediately when my suitcase didn’t show up at baggage claim that God was forcing me to rely on Him and trust His plan and timing while lessening my dependence on the things of this world. Luckily, my bag arrived two days later, but in the meantime I had some lovely friends lend me clothes, socks, a towel, and as a complete coincidence, one girl on our team only wears one contact, so she graciously let me borrow the other side of her contact case for both my contacts.

Sharing on campus was, as sharing always is, wonderful. We spent four whole days on campus, a Saturday playing soccer with kids from an underprivileged neighborhood and eating lunch with a lady who runs a women’s ministry in that neighborhood out of her home, a Sunday going to church (they graciously translated for us) and shopping at a tourist market, and two days at the beach. In our time on campus, the 24 of us talked to almost 300 people, and fifteen accepted Christ. In comparison, during the nine weeks I spent on mission in Lake Tahoe, California, 84 of us talked to far more people than that, and saw seventeen come to Christ.

My favorite conversation was with a girl named Monica on our first day. Monica stepped away from Catholicism when she was 12 because she disagreed with a lot of things, and now she’s looking into Buddhism (she likes the idea of reincarnation) and was reading a book by Richard Dawkins. In a way, that was a cool connection, since the girl who was my partner that day’s dad writes books debating Dawkins, so she was the living proof that intellectualism and belief in God are compatible. I also wrote down for her a recommendation of The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel, since she loves reading and said she was very focused on the science and proof of religion. I’m praying that God will present to her exactly what she is seeking—and more than that, that His love would capture her heart in a way mere facts cannot. In our conversation, I talked a bit about God’s love and how He calls all His followers to love everyone the same way He does, and she told me that she’d never heard religious people talk like that before. She recalled a specific priest who she remembered as being extremely hateful toward gay people, and that seemed to have influenced her view of religion over the years.

Our last day, we initiated a conversation with one girl, and about two minutes in, seven of her friends came over and invited both her and my partners Courtney, Rosie, and myself to lunch! They took us off campus to a place called Monster Pizza (you can guess what they served)! It was packed and very noisy, and there were eleven of us at one table, so conversation was pretty difficult, but Rosie and I got to have a spiritual conversation with a guy named Diego, who was two people to my left. Since it was so noisy, I was practically yelling across the guy seated between us, whose name was Todd. Later, after we got back to campus, everyone else had to go to class, but Todd was free for another two hours, so the four of us found a nice shady place to sit and just hung out for awhile. Eventually, we were able to turn the conversation back toward spiritual things, and we got to share Cru’s Knowing God Personally booklet with him! Because of the language barrier, this was a great tool to have with us since we had both Spanish and Spanish-English versions. Often we would ask the person we were talking to to read a section in Spanish, or to translate the Spanish version into English as they went. Although Todd was comfortable in his atheism and uncertain whether the Bible is true, it was awesome to see him come to an understanding of the Gospel. He had a few questions that we were able to answer, but mostly I think he appreciated us just spending a couple hours with him.

That was also the day that I got to cross off the one item on my Costa Rica bucket list: I saw a wild sloth! It was in a tree right in the middle of campus, and it happened to climb down so low that I was able to touch it— so you can imagine what I had to do while Courtney yelled, “No Jenna don’t touch it!”

After our time on campus, we headed to the beach for a few days! We stayed in a nice hotel with a swimming pool and delicious breakfasts. The second day, we went to Manuel Antonio National Park, and hiked about two miles up to the beach, where there were monkeys and raccoons! The water was probably eighty degrees, the sand hotter, the sun hotter still. Lesson learned: next time I go to a beach that’s not the Oregon coast, reapply sunscreen every few hours. My back and shoulders were peeling for a week.

My main takeaway from this trip came from one of our morning teaching times. One of our Cru staff gave a talk on a Bible passage, and he mentioned that the apostles were filled with joy not only in the fruit they saw from their ministry, but also in the ministry itself. They just genuinely enjoyed travelling and proclaiming the Gospel. That day, we were rejected five times in a row, and that was the first time that I didn’t find that at all disheartening. I cared about the work for the sake of the work, and trusted God to reveal results as He saw fit. It’s that kind of faith that is the ultimate cultivator of peace and joy

#Costa Rica #mission #springbreak16