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I just wanted to send out a quick update to thank those who had prayed. As you might have read in our last post, the whole Godzwa family traveled to Mexico City in order to present ourselves to the Immigration Officials and receive our work visas. Well, from the photo to the left, you can see that we made it to Mexico City, but that is just the start of the great news that we have to share with you!
Thank you for your prayers!
Tags: Visa
“The City” in the U.S. is of course, New York City. It is one of the most important centers of commerce and culture in the country, and, who can forget, it is also home to the best team in baseball, the New York Yankees. However, when you speak of “The City” in Mexico, you are speaking of Mexico City, the nation’s capital and home to about 32 million people.
This Wednesday we will have the opportunity to travel back to “The City.” We were most recently there this past August, when we received our invitation to work in Mérida. This time we will be traveling in order to receive our official religious visas, which will give us more freedom to work in Mérida and throughout the country. We’re happy to finally be through with this process as it has meant mailing of lots of paperwork and dealing with lots of waiting. Still, God willing and the thumb prints don’t smudge, we’ll have those important documents in hand this Thursday.
Also, we’re looking forward to getting together with other missionaries, including friends from language school, Peter and Delia Breit and Josh and April Amiot. Their children and ours we’re good friends in Costa Rica, and we’re glad to have another chance to allow them make memories as well as catch up with them on their lives and ministries.
So this week please be in prayer as we head out to “The City.” Pray for safe travel, for the complication-free reception of our visas, for patient easygoing kids, and for protection in and around the metropolitan area.
Tags: Visa
We’d like to say thank you to all who had been praying for us as we travelled to Mexico for our meeting with the general presbytry there. Here are some things that did not happen:
Here are some things that did happen:
We now are facing the task of packing up our apartment here in Costa Rica in order to prepare for our August 13th departure. Please continue to remember us as we go through this time of transition.
As many of you read this post, we will be preparing for our first taste of Mexico this weekend as we prepare for our meeting with the national church leadership there in Mexico City. Please pray for the following:
Keeping with our theme of lasts, we’d appreciate your prayers today (Friday) as we go through our “final exam” here at CINCEL. Kelly and I will each be sitting down with a professor for a “conversation” of sorts in order to plot our oral proficiency in Spanish. That’s the reason for the photo of Joseph’s mouth above. Please pray that we will be able to put into practice all that we have learned in the past year, and that the results of this exam will be an encouragement for the both of us to continue our learning even after we graduate from our program.
Tomorrow, July 2nd, is the date for the Mexican presidencial elections, and as it is in America, the political structure can change tremendously with the election of a new administration. This new administration will be the administration under which we enter the country, apply for residency, live, and work during the remainder of our first term. Please pray that:
When I wrote down my thoughts at the beginning of the year, I intended to form a base from which to work, a foundation on which I could build the rest of my missionary life. But, as many of realize, our intentions are not always what get carried out. My conversation teacher, Giselle Mata, says, “Hay algo entre el querer y el hacer.” As I have reviewed my concepts for living, I have found that in some areas, I have moved forward, but also that in several, I have lagged behind, or fallen flat. I guess that is precisely the reason why many don’t make resolutions, because they are afraid that they can never live up to them. On the contrary, I believe that without a clear goal we’ll never know when we have arrived, or possibly we’ll never arrive anywhere. With a goal it is easy to see when you have failed, but without one it is impossible to know when you have succeeded.
Evaluating the past 5 months, the areas in which I have failed the most have been in the areas that have required taking time. Not that I haven’t been without excuses. This morning, for example, caused me to find a car that could borrow to take a lunch that my daughter forgot to her school and make it back to attend chapel at CINCEL by 7:45 AM all after running 3 miles and getting the boys showered and ready. I say this not to complain, but to show that time is something that has a tendency to slip through my fingers. Unless I mark out a place in time intentionally, I never get the time that I need to do the things that I believe are important, like pray with purpose, read the Bible allowing the words to affect my soul, and be an intentional spouse and father. I have been recommitting myself to these priorities.
In recent days, Kelly and I have started reading a devotional “My Utmost for His Highest” together. It has served as a springboard for sharing our feelings and out prayer needs like never before. But it would never have been realized unless we had put aside the books for a few minutes in order to share this time together. This last weekend, Joseph and I went on to a Father/Son camp. The picture above is of Joseph and me along with a few of the friends that we made there. We spent time learning to build fires, (campfires), shoot BB rifles, and roll in the mud. Certainly none of these activities was necessary on its own, but the time that I spent with him was priceless, especially as I got to see him pass to the altar on Saturday night to accept Christ.
We received a statistic from DeLonn Rance, a fellow missionary and AGTS professor that said that 90% of missionaries spend less than 10 minutes a day in prayer. Why: I believe for lack of time. I can understand this. I see my time taken up with homework, study, projects, preaching, and miscellaneous activities everyday, but I can’t allow them to be my excuses. I need to take time, time from the urgent in order to do the most important. How about you?
Well you can’t tell from the picture, but this week found Jonathan sick for the third time in 2 weeks. This time with a fever. We are now in the start of the rainy season here, and like what happens in the States during the onset of winter, it seems like people come down with sicknesses during this time of year in Costa Rica.
With the kids in the Kinder program here at CINCEL it has been quite a ride. The ladies are doing there best to keep up, but sickness has taken hold of many as the children pass germs more readily because of the need to stay indoors. Today, the day Jonathan went back, three were sent home with fevers or symptoms of infection. So pray, please, for the kidos. When they’re down it really adds to the pressure of learning and adapting to the language/culture.
Now of course with sickness comes the great variety of home remedies, and Costa Ricans have an abundance. (One that was prescribe for the stomach flu that hit last week was a rice/cinnamon drink.) Now one home remedy that most believe in is the use of a tepid bath to bring down a high temperature. The only problem is that, here, bathtubs are almost as scarce as dish washers!
So what is one to do with a sick child, and no tub in which to give a bath. Well, if you are a missionary, you improvise! We hauled 11 action packers full of clothes and household stuff to Costa Rica. Their size and shape made them perfect for the taking on the plane with us, but the one-piece plastic construction also makes for a great substitute for a tub for a toddler with a temperature among other things. (Fellow missionary Kevin Stewart used one of his for a bassinet for his newborn.) So, the night before last, Jonathan got one of only a handful of baths in Costa Rica. Only this time his plastic tub also doubles as a suitcase.
That brings me to the last part of the post. Why are bath tubs so scarce here in Costa Rica? Well, the first answer that I received to that question was that it was because they were so expensive. However, is it because they are scarce that they are expensive, or is it because they are expensive that they are scarce? (If that confused you email me and I’ll explain that subtlety.) So in probing deeper, Kelly found that the Costa Ricans believe in taking cold showers. They feel that the cold shower helps their skin to stay younger, and helps their breathing as well. (One teacher explained that deep breath that one takes in when entering the cold stream is good for the lungs.) In fact, missionary Jon Dalahger when hosting a building team had to have electric shower heads installed in homes where the construction workers would be housed because none of the homes in that area had hot water tanks. So, according to one theory, since tubs are usually for taking baths in hot water, the fact that Ticos shower in cold water made the tub unnecessary.
So, if you are planning trip to Costa Rica, don’t assume your hotel will have a tub, or hot water for that matter, and if you are traveling with the kids, you may be surprised at how versatile your luggage can be.
Update: 6/7/2006 Jim Cottril has included this post in his compilation of missionaries blogging about culture on Missionary Blog Watch Check out his comments and the other posts that he has included.
As I had mentioned in a previous post, the country of Costa Rica has only two seasons, the wet and the dry seasons. We have enjoyed about 3 months now of dry sunny weather, but for the past week except for yesterday, it has rained every day. The picture above is a view of the storm clouds rolling in once again.
It’s funny how the changes in the weather can bring about a thoughtful attitude, but activity in the blogsphere has helped push me into a pensive mood as well. A post written by Amy Maxwell has caused me to think a bit about our lives as Christians, and how we view our relationship with God. Her question was a question about how we pray. Amy, along with her husband Joel, is now in the process of a personal storm of trying to pay off the debt of a failed business, and she asked:
Should we pray for sunny days? Praise God IN the storm? Praise God DESPITE the storm? Praise God FOR the storm?
This isn?t just a word game. These are drastically different ways of looking at and dealing with life.
It struck me as an interesting question, and many of us, out of our experiences or studies would be able to respond stating the method we feel that is correct or that more suits our personal style. However, I felt compelled to respond in a different way:
My opinion is that, for questions like these, it is best to turn to the prayer book of the Bible, Psalms. In it we see all kinds of prayers that may not fit with our personal style. There are prayers of questioning, prayers of frustration, and prayers asking for God to bring judgment. Also, there are prayers of praise and prayers that ask for God?s blessing.
What does this teach us? That there are some prayers that are better and some that are worse? I think no. (Perhaps there are some that come from a more mature understanding of God?s ways.) But I think that the important point that Psalms makes is that we should pray. Praise in the good and bad. Pray for God?s peace and blessing, and sometimes just pray in such a way that we spill out everything that is in us before Him.
Sometimes what comes out won?t be pretty, but in all of our laughing and crying, praising and (perhaps) cursing, words of faith and frustration, I believe that God is working something out in us through His Spirit, and we are telling Him that He is more than a heavenly vending machine. He is our perfect, heavenly Father. And, who knows, when we are done, maybe He?ll have time to say something to us.
You see, I feel that we as Christians spend so much time on how we should pray that we fail to actually take time to pray. This is evident even in some of the new, and might I say, well though out missionary blogs that have popped up on missionary-blogs.com. Both The M Blog in this post on Trinitarian Theology and RTBM in “Returning to Biblical Missions” question our methodologies and challenge us to take a new look at our dependence on the Spirit. How better to do this but to bend our knees in prayer?
Who knows, maybe this post was something I needed to write simply to air out some thoughts, but perhaps this question of this mother of 2 in Springfield and the thoughts of two veteran missionaries will do what it did to me: reignite a desire to pray!
The missionaries of today are quite different from those of the past. Single-minded laborers for the Lord, they loaded their belongings in caskets, headed for far off regions that they were sure that they would never return from. Today, we are usually only a plane flight or two away from our home country, and the technology that we enjoy has us linked through the telephone and the internet in such a way that many of us can enjoy a connectedness with our families that few ever even imagined in the past. Some of us are even blessed to receive visits from family as we are enjoying now: Kelly’s parents David and Kim Yaple, along with her brother Micah have been here since last Thursday night, enjoying the Holy Week school break along with us.
Still there are events that remind us of the miles. We had a few that have happened just this weekend. The first was the birth of our latest nephew Levi Christopher this weekend. He’s a 9lb 1oz cutie that is currently 2,050 miles away as the bird flies. The second was the death of my uncle David Regan. Suffering from cancer, my uncle succumbed the day before Levi was welcomed into the world. With the desire to be there strong, but the realities and expenses of travel being as they are, suddenly the world has gotten much bigger. And when we hear of loved ones being sick or churches struggling, we long to be near, to be able to comfort with a touch or simply our presence but we are unable.
These are the times when the calling has to be sure. The times when we reflect on the reason that we have left the United States in order to work on the mission field, and the answer is not because there is a need, but because we are called. So we offer up our prayers for those who are far from us. Prayers of thanksgiving for those events in which the Lord has blessed, and prayers of peace and comfort for those who have suffered loss, and we take confidence that the Lord who has taken us away is big enough fill the space that we leave behind, be it in the celebrations or the sadness.
