A whole month into the World Race already! My team and I left our Costa Rican host on Saturday, and it was very bittersweet. We had a great month working with these hosts and the goodbye was a hard one, although we were also very excited to have our first debrief with the whole squad and see the rest of them again. We will have 4-5 debriefs this year and it is a time to connect with the whole squad and the leadership team and learn from them while processing what went well this month with our hosts and what we can improve for other months. For this week we are staying in a hostel in Jaco, Costa Rica and our leadership team has met up with us for encouragement, processing, teachings, and reflections. We will be leaving for our second country, Nicaragua, on Friday!

One story that I wanted to share with all of you was on the last night of staying with our host in Los Chiles, Costa Rica. We felt so blessed to have a host that cared so much about us, and this was really reflected by the way that he so intentionally wanted to teach us things and get to know us. He asked us all to grab a rock and write our names on it. We then took these rocks up to a clearing in the jungle that he calls “the sanctuary”. Once here, he read us the story in the bible of Jacob’s ladder. In this story, Jacob is setting out for a town called Harran. He stops at the end of the day and takes a rock to lay his head on to sleep. That day the Lord revealed to Jacob that He was in this place and that He was encouraging Jacob along the way and was seeing Jacob’s dreams along with him. Jacob rises the next morning and reflects on the fact that truthfully, God is in all of the humble places such as this one that Jacob was currently in. He takes the rock and makes it the beginning of a pillar, anoints it with oil and he says (Genesis 28:20-21) “If God will be with me and will watch over me on this journey I am taking and will give me food to eat and clothes to wear so that I return safely to my father’s household, then the Lord will be my God and this stone that I have set up as a pillar will be God’s house, and of all that you give me I will give you”.

We took all of the rocks with our names on them and poured oil on top of them just as Jacob did as an act of building a temple, and Tony prayed over each one of us as we were leaving his farm. There is a place in the Northern Costa Rican jungle with over 400 rocks that have been brought to the sanctuary as an act of worship and these rocks will eventually be the foundation of the steps leading to the school that will be built here. I am honored to have my name on one of these rocks and to have been a part of the story that is being created here out of obedience into what God is creating in this place.

Thank you again for all of your prayers for my team and for our mission this year.

With love,

Claire