The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Chicken Little made it to Costa Rica... but here he's actually right! Yesterday Samuel said the sky fell and I of course, had no idea what he was talking about. Josué told me to come and see how the sky falls... The foto explains it all. That's what happens during rainy season! It happened on Sunday too. Kind of reminds me of the way the fog would roll right into the laundry room when I worked at the Pisgah Inn the summer of 2005. Take a trip down memory lane with me on my BLOG.
Thanks be to God the sun actually came out today! I hadn't seen a large chunk of blue sky in at least a week!
Thanks for your continued prayers for me here. We leave for México de Upala a week from tomorrow!
Carrie
Wow, my summer at the Pisgah Inn feels like a several lifetimes ago! It was the summer after my freshman year of college. I was serving with A Christian Ministry in the National Parks, a sweet organization that places believers in National Parks. The concessionaire (private company) hires the believers and gives them Sundays off. This allows the believers to lead worship services in the campgrounds and/or conference rooms in the Park. Pretty sweet deal, getting paid to live in a national park and participate in a neat ministry! I'll say this though, it is NOT for the faint of heart!! Some locations are more removed from civilization than others, but even when you're only an hour away, lack of transportation can make getting there quite difficult. That summer there were only 3 of us on our team: a guy my age and another girl who was 2 years older than us. For some reason they made me the “team leader.” That worked out ok, but work schedules always made it really hard for the three of us to have time to hang out together. Plus, we were the only Christians there. That made it really hard. There was technically a support committee and one guy faithfully came almost every week and played his French horn for us (including the same prelude every week). Dear man. He took us to his house sometimes on Sunday afternoons. That was always such a huge blessing! His wife was really sweet. But, for the most part we were on our own. Made for a rather spiritually dry and challenging summer. Did I mention we had to go for a hike or tree-climbing to get cell phone reception? I didn't even have a phone back in those days, but my teammates did, and kindly shared with me on occasion.
Steph, the other girl on our team was my roomie and a hostess at the restaurant. Joe worked in housekeeping. I started as a housekeeper. I thought I would be really fast since I'm related to my Mommy and we say she only has to speeds, fast and faster. But, due to the meticulousness that my brother Daniel also has, I was not so fast. So, once the laundress quit I got to be the Laundry Queen. It was pretty sweet. I got to listen to the radio all day and fold sheets and towels. Pretty brainless, but I was ok with that after finishing my first year at strenuous Grove City College. I'll confess though, it made me an addict to the amazing smell of Bounce dryer sheets. One of our neighbors here in Costa Rica uses their dryer pretty often and I have to stop and take a few deep breaths before moving on...it smells SO GOOD!! Anyway, there were many cloudy afternoons in which the clouds rolled in...even into my warm, cozy laundry room! (PS working housekeeping is really cool because you find all sorts of cool stuff people leave in the rooms. Housekeeping is hard though, because the faster you work, the better, but obviously the less you get paid when the scale is by the hour...)
By the end of the summer Joe and I were the 4th and 5th most longstanding members of the housekeeping department. Can anybody say turnover? Pretty much anybody could get hired. There was even a guy who was wanted in 7 states that got hired for an afternoon before the cops found him! Almost all the 60 or so other employees smoked marijuana and/or cigarettes and drank a lot. God protected me there incredibly. And oh man... I was so young... so clueless. But I believe God used me in spite of, or perhaps even because of that.
I was recién llegada (recently arrived) from the first mission trip ever- a life changing experience in Guatemala and it was pretty much all I could talk about. People saw that I was passionate about Spanish and told me that Wolf, one of the cooks spoke Spanish. Wolf and I tried to speak Spanish, but mine was much better than his, so I ended up tutoring him. I think he wasn't too sober sometimes, but I didn't know how to tell that at the time. Thankfully God protected me. Oh was it a crazy adventure of a summer!
But God really used it to draw me closer to Him. On my days off, I was too scared to go hiking by myself because of rattlesnakes (my boss got bit by one-granted, he tried to pick it up and some other brilliant co-worker of mine had already picked it up, so it was already pretty...rattled). So, I spent most of the day on a blanket on a mountainside with God. I'd bring my discman and listen to worship music, examine the amazing creation that surrounded me, pray and read the Word. They were beautiful times with the Lord! I wish I had/made more time to do that more regularly!! Retreat times with God are so important! And those times were so good in such a difficult environment.
The other huge blessing of that summer was a family named the Johnsons. They went camping in Pisgah every summer. They were only around a weekend but they were the highlight of the summer. Joe had already left because he couldn't take it, but Steph and I really were blessed by them. They invited us to eat at their campsite with us, talked with us, and gave us money and told us to treat ourselves to something. I've even stayed in touch with them some. So, there’s a taste of life from Mt. Pisgah. Check it out at mile 408 on the Blue Ridge Parkway sometime! (sorry for the lack of pictures... those days at Pisgah were before I had a digital camera)
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