Loaves and Fishes

I’m happy to say that our Costa Rica team had a relatively smooth travel day. We did have to wake up insanely early on Monday morning (1 am!) to hit the road for O'Hare. While most of our team slept on the way, Tobey helped keep me awake during the three-hour drive (I was going on 1.5 hrs of sleep, so this was much needed). It was a nice opportunity to get to know one of my students better!

We got checked in and through security pretty quickly and arrived at our gate with plenty of time to spare. After a couple of hours in the air (and most of our team members enjoying in-flight movies after 9+ days without screens), we arrived in Houston. We had a healthy five-hour layover, and the team got to walk around the airport, grab some lunch, play cards, read their Bibles (quiet time for the day was James 3 and Proverbs 29), and make last calls home before departing for San Jose.

We got into Costa Rica around 7.30 pm, and our friends Grace, Alfonso, and Milton were waiting outside to pick us up and take us to our new home for the next few weeks in Cachi. The team was quite exhausted, arriving at the church around 10 pm, and we were able to get them to bed by 11 pm. But not before our nightly prayer and reciting our team verse: Isaiah 43.2.

The next day, we were up at 6 am (we’ll be spending most of our week working in schools each morning). Unfortunately, we found that we were locked out of the church's kitchen, which meant cooking our oatmeal was not an option. However, some quick thinking from Kelsie, Ava, and Quaid kept us from going hungry! While we had distributed a handful of snacks and sustenance for our previous day’s travel, many of our team hadn't eaten their hard-boiled eggs or apples. So we re-collected the remaining food, sliced it up, bought a couple of baguettes from the bakery across the street, and enjoyed a morning of egg sandwiches with apples dipped in peanut butter.

What a reminder of how well God takes care of us! Just as Jesus multiplied the fishes and loaves, our Father is ready to take what little we have to offer and make it more than enough to sustain us each day. None of our team went hungry, and actually, after many days of oatmeal at camp, this was a refreshing change of pace for breakfast.

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