Reflections after a month…

Hey everyone! 

I hope that you all have had an amazing summer! I have had many little adventures since I got home over a month ago! WHAT?! I wasn’t planning on writing another blog, but I have had lots of time to look back and reflect on what the heck even happened in 2021. Recently, I received a text with a picture from the month of March (thanks Aby!). And this photo meant so much…

I’ve never seen it before she sent it to me, but as soon as I saw it, I knew that I was going to write a blog about this one photo. This picture takes everything I’ve been reflecting on and puts it into one frame. I know that may seem like I chose the wrong photo, but I assure you- yes, that’s the photo that captures everything. 

So I’m the guy standing in the back cutting the gringo’s hair!… I wish! 

This was taken on March 30th of this year. I was in a tiny town called Rio Grande in Costa Rica. I’m genuinely unsure how my team ended up with him. We were told to get onto a bus, then a ferry, and our host for the next month would be there waiting for us. We were met by this man,  his family, and his broken down van. And best of all- they only speak Spanish!

The man cutting my hair is Pastor Olger, or just Pastor. His kindness was incredible. He agreed to host 6 young adults for a month in his house that didn’t speak his language very well if that shows his kindness at all! 

This man is one of the goofiest and most wild people that I met on this journey, but only after the sun goes down. He’s like a werewolf- he becomes a different person when it gets dark out! This made his evening church services very fun! It usually had some sort of mini play/ production in it that he would come up with on the spot. In this picture, we were doing our “serious” poses, but I can assure you, he was having the time of his life! He asked if he could shave my head bald as a joke, but little did he know, I was willing to actually do it. The whole time, he was doing his typical little giggles and massive belly laughs as he saw my hair falling to the ground. You can also probably see that my shoulders are covered in baby powder. He thought it was so funny to take a handful of the powder and throw it all over me… multiple times! He was so full of joy in the smallest things. 

He is someone that knows what it’s like to live simply. As you can see in the back of the picture, his house is less than what we would call a shed. The tin walls only go up between 7 and 8 feet. The floor was gravel. Even the inside walls are just curtains hung up! But he could take any situation and see the best side of all of it. One time he wanted to take us on an adventure to a waterfall. On the way, we had to cross a river in his already broken down van. As you would have guessed, it got stuck. Very stuck. Yet the whole time, he was able to laugh. 

Most of our communication was done through acting in general. I was the main translator for the team, yet barely passed Spanish 2. This meant that the words we did say, we had to mean it. It made life so simple. Life moved slow. And it was good. My time at this ministry was my hardest point in being a team leader. It seemed like everyone’s worlds around me were falling apart. Every person on my team during this month had big transformational things going on in their hearts that they’ve never had to walk through before. It was so challenging and difficult. Yet it was the best. I’ve never felt sorrow like I did out there. 

But I also never felt joy like I did out there. The Lord did such amazing things in the hearts of the people we ministered to, in the team, and in me. We were living life to its fullest. Every day was something new. Ministry always looked different. Something crazy always happened. Something always went wrong. Someone was always crying. Yet we were all full of joy. We all could still come to our plastic folding table in the gravel, sit down, and enjoy living in deep community. Living with God and His people is what allowed us to live life to the fullest. Take away the distractions of vanity, comfort, and pleasure, and you’re left with real life. Allow yourself to feel the hard things AND bask in the glory of His presence and joy!! Living life to its fullest is not either/ or. It’s a both/ and. 

My time with Pastor and with the Funderboltz (our team) will be a time that I will never forget. As I look back on the last 6 months, I constantly think “was that real?” and “did that really happen?”. It doesn’t feel like it sometimes. It feels like it was all a dream or like I was in a daze of sorts. This thing we call “real life”, full of comforts and materials that don’t matter, is not living life to the fullest. It’s not real or genuine. We’re so caught up in the mundane and routine frustrations and struggles of “life”. We make the excuses of bills, payments, and commitments, but it doesn’t have to be that way. I have found that there are a huge number of people who don’t have to worry about anything like that, they just aren’t westerners. And you can make the argument that they don’t get to have all the comforts that we have. And that’s true. They don’t. But they don’t need material and artificial comforts to make them feel like they’re living life. Life is good without them. God doesn’t change. He is our life. Being back home and being caught in this routine again, trying to be back in “reality”, I remember that living life to the fullest is such a rare feeling in our world today. We’re too distracted and focused on the wrong things to be fully captivated by the Lord and live in the fullness of life without worry or frustration. How sad it is that the thing that actually is “real life” is merely a dream land that’s untouchable because of these distractions. My heart longs for a taste of real life again, but I guess today I’ll settle for the mundane distractions…

Thanks for reading and for your time!

BONUS STORY:

Some nights, he would run Asa and I to the local shop and get us ice cream cones. Of course he would get a rush out of it because we weren’t supposed to tell the girls we got ice cream and it was our “little secret”. However, they were quickly onto us. It’s kind of hard to leave a tiny house with paper thin walls (literally) and be unnoticed for 15 minutes. He made it apparent through his actions that he loved us a lot and really wanted to have his “guy time”. Thanks again for reading this far if you did!!