Hello! Wow! There has been a lot happening here. I wish I could share every single moment! First off, thank you to all of you. The support…the prayers…the simple reading of my blogs. My heart is filled with joy hearing and seeing the way God is moving in everyone back home. I miss everyone a lot. 

Costa Rica. With a couple days left I feel the Lord wants me to tell all of you what Costa Rica meant to me. 

Looking back to where the Lord spoke to me at the start, I realize that His purpose for me was straight on. Surprise surprise, right! Ha! I definitely fell away from it at times, and forgot what was important, but the Lord has taught me a lot through it all. 

Here was the goal: A season of enjoying God’s presence. Not fixating on performance, but living in the freedom of Christ. To continue to grasp God’s great love more and more with the wonderful people here. A time of cultivating relationships and empowering others in their inheritance of Christ.

God has been walking me through this so much in my time here. There have been times I have fell into performance. I fell into doing things to do them, but not doing them out of love. I found times where I forgot my freedom in Christ and lived like I was still in bondage.

Galatians 5:1  “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.”

There was times I got stuck up in performance. Times at evangelism where I felt like I should have talked to someone, but I didn’t. It discouraged me. I beat myself up for it. Something I had to really take to heart was that God’s love has no conditions.

The beauty of the cross is not that we can work to be perfect, but that we were made perfect in the blood of Jesus already. 1 Corinthians 13 states that love keeps no record of wrongs. God is love. He IS love. True love expects nothing in return. Asks for nothing in return. Keeps no record of wrongs. Does not tally the good and bad. It was realizing that the Lord didn’t need me, but as His son, He wants to use me for His kingdom. It reminded me of projects as home with my dad. Like changing tire brakes or building a treehouse. He can well off do it himself, but He invites me in anyway to come alongside him.

Now where am I going with this. Am I saying we are free to do what we want because we have been cleansed through the cross. No! the Bible makes it clear that it does not mean we go on continuing to sin. Here is where it has brought me.

James 2:17 says faith without deeds is dead. Usually these two things are separated. Put in separate categories. Looked at as two different things. If you look at the original Jewish text, the word was not separated. Hearing and obeying was connected. And it is connected in the English text too! It doesn’t say that if you have faith, but don’t do anything about it, you need to get a stronger faith, or start taking action on what you believe in. It doesn’t say faith without deeds is weak, it says it is dead! If your deeds are dead, your faith is dead. You can’t have one and not have the other. If you have faith, you have works. This is where performance comes into play.

The performance mindset is easy to creep in. It can come in like a snake to still your joy and freedom in Christ. This is the common culture America portrays. The American Dream. Pursuing your success. You can have all you want if you work for it. It is very task-oriented in mindset. Costa Rica has been such a blessing for me because it is so much more relationship oriented rather than tasks. God revealed the great importance of fellowship with others, and brought my focus more on the relationships I build with others. Even in relationships a performance mindset can come in, but the Lord has shown me what it looks like to get out of that mindset. 

The more you get into love, the more you get out of performance. Love doesn’t perform, it just is. I realized that my relationship with God was the foundation for how I shared light and love as I served. If I was trying to perform in my relationship with God, I would with others in the world. The Lord revealed to me that the fruit we bear comes out of the intimacy we have in relationship with Him. The sweet relationship we can have with the Lord, and from that, it never feels like performance, but it is simply love manifesting in our actions. 

In almost all of Paul’s letters in the Bible, he writes at the end may the grace of Christ be with you. If you fall away from the grace of Christ, that is when faith becomes more of a business than a relationship. You can have the deeds part, but you can lack the true faith. Having a constant feeling of expectations to meet, rather than a beautiful, free-flowing love. Like in sports. I loved sports, but expectations were hard on me. Or school. Expectations. Expectations would hold a burden on me in different things. The beauty of the Lord though is that there is no expectations. The beauty of love. That love just is, and we become love as we walk in true love with the Father. We are free from expectations, which makes the pursuit of God’s desires here on earth so much sweeter. 

With all that being said, leaving Costa Rica is going to be hard. It won’t be hard for me to leave because of the dance classes. The English club. Evangelizing around the city. Cleaning the facility. The tasks we do are not what makes it hard. It is the name of each person that I built a relationship with why I was here.

Leaving is gonna be hard. It is gonna hurt. But one of my good mentors told me, “if it hurts, what you had there was beautiful. It is good that it is hard to leave. It means the time was sweet.”