Bienvenido a Jacó, Costa Rica!
It’s been almost three weeks since I arrived in Jacó but it feels like we’ve been here for SO much longer! In terms of accommodations, our ministry host, Ocean’s Edge, has completely blown our expectations out of the water! We have 52 people living under one roof (33 Racers from my squad and 19 from a World Race Semesters squad). Each one of us has the luxury of sleeping in a bed and we have running water, electricity, full kitchens, and the like.
Serving with Ocean’s Edge has looked a bit different than we’ve all expected as well. To start, a really pleasant surprise was discovering how connected we would be with the municipality of Jacó as well as one of the churches in town, Horizon Church. The amount of trust Hannah and April, who founded and operate the ministry, have built up with the mayor and municipality is astounding! So much so that they’ve given us pretty much free reign to paint murals on the walls of the city parks, murals which include various Bible passages! We’ve also been blessed to be quickly invited into the happenings of Horizon Church and their events. Various members of our squad serve at the church daily, we attend their mid day pray sessions, and some of us (myself included) have even been invited in to help lead worship services on Sunday mornings! We’re also very blessed to have an elder from the church come to our base and do group devotions with us 5 days a week! Each of our teams is also given the privileged to be mentored by members of the church on a weekly basis!
In our first few weeks of ministry here, we’ve had a wide variety of different projects to work on. We began with some cleaning and construction projects around the property while we were fulfilling our quarantine obligations post arrival to Costa Rica. We cleaned and organized a few of the buildings on the property, separating junk from usable materials to donate to the community. We reconstructed part of the property by taking out walls and expanding steps to provide more room for group activities and devotions at the property. Finally, we prepared the remaining rooms for the World Race Semesters squad upon discovering they would be joining us here at Ocean’s Edge. What a pleasant surprise and amazing discipleship opportunity that we get to bring in a group of nineteen 18-22 years old into this community we’ve built here! Thank you, Lord!!
After being released from our quarantine we hit the community with some really incredible art projects! Past racers had kicked off these art projects by painting gospel reflecting murals on the light poles throughout the town and we were tasked with taking the project to the next level. Our job was to take the light pole murals and recreate it on an incredibly long stretch of wall in the town’s Central Park! Huge shoutout to squad mates Kailee and Macy for heading this up and getting all the designs sketched and ready for all of us less artsy folk! Another squad mate, JD, was also able to showcase one of his breathtaking drawings on a large wall in a park right next door to Ocean’s Edge!
We haven’t quite finished the Central Park wall project but the mayor and other municipal officials are coming to check out our progress and to record and dance to introduce the main focal point of the mural wall and the underlying message behind it. Keep an eye out for that video!
That’s all for now! Hope you’ve enjoyed this little sneak peek at life the last few weeks!
Interesting projects and accomplishments. Anxiously waiting for the video and possible link to the church service. Who is your cute furry friend? God bless your witness and work! No surfing pics?