If you are a regular reader, you may have been wondering where I was yesterday and why there was no Monday blog… or maybe you didn’t even notice. But we have been out of town all weekend and I didn’t realize that I forgot to plan blogs for this week until Monday afternoon. Oops. My mind has been on other things.
“What kind of other things?” you may wonder. We just completed our first real Leadership Retreat for our university ministry here in Costa Rica. We have been working at establishing this ministry for the last 3 years and here’s where we are at this point.
our leadership team
These are most of our leaders, and as you can see, they represent student lead small groups on 9 campuses around the country. And we are still growing. We are leading leaders.
This weekend we rented a house on the beach, tucked into the rain forest and we poured into their lives. The students, some of whom only knew each other via Facebook previously because they live in other cities, came away feeling like they were a family. I read their comments on Facebook as they complimented and teased each other and encouraged and quoted each other. It was a great weekend.
Once the students left for home, my family and I stayed another two days for a little R&R after the intense preparation leading up to the retreat. We were awoken each morning by the loud pitter patter of monkeys jumping and running across the tin roof of the house. This morning we all got up to enjoy the show. We threw slices of mangos out the window and onto the roof for the little monkeys to eat. We’ve seen monkeys many times here, but I can’t remember ever having so much fun with them.
throwing mangos out the window for the monkeys
They were so cute and mischievous.
We had quite the entertainment right on our patio.
my kids wanted to catch one and take it home with us. Um, no.
Honestly living in Costa Rica has in some ways ruined us forever. We will never again think a zoo is a great place to spend an afternoon. After you see the animals in the wild, anything else is just sad and disappointing. On this trip we had two sloths just hanging out in the tree right off our patio. We saw 3 different types of monkeys all in one day, and monkeys in general every morning. And we lived among the geckos and gigantic insects and iguanas and jungle birds for a few days- some of that was not wonderful, but it is very different from life in Minnesota. I don’t know if I can ever go back to “regular” life after living in Costa Rica. This is my home and I love it here!
Monkeys in My Bag 