Off Again! But this time with newsletters, hopefully.

There’s this funny thing about making plans – they have a distressing tendency to blow up in my face. For the past two years, I’ve wandered from place to place, always planning to return to the Seattle area and settle down. Instead, I’ve bounced around from Seattle to Oregon to Montana to Seattle to Costa Rica and back again. After my latest adventure to Costa Rica, I swore up and down that it would be my last trip. I had begun to get a handle on what God wanted to do with my life, and therefore I would finally get myself a real job and a real apartment. You know, pay bills and so forth. Like a proper adult.

But I’m still not ready to settle. The Environment and Resource Stewardship (EARS) allowed me to begin seeing a larger world, introducing me to the power that God can have in others’ lives, but a simple introduction hasn’t been enough. My experience with Christianity and God has been very small, and frankly, rather damaging. Most of the time, I have seen Christians only talking about God changing their lives. However, at YWAM I have encountered people who want to be a part of the kingdom Jesus describes so vividly. Now, I’m heading back to Costa Rica in six weeks to do a Discipleship Training School (DTS) with Youth with a Mission (YWAM). It’s the same base that I worked with when I did EARS earlier this year.

As I head off to DTS, I’ve decided I want others to be more involved in my journey. In my past travels, I rarely made the attempt to share the knowledge I gained or the bits of God I’ve discovered. I do not want anyone to misunderstand my thoughts. Some of my most important friends are non-Christian and many have been seriously hurt by the church. I never want to contribute to that pain or align myself with the parts of the church that are so seriously broken. Following that line of thought, I have no desire to make my Christian friends feel criticized as I question my faith and the meaning of Christianity in my life. Therefore, I tried to keep much of my story to myself. After all, how can I possibly describe seemingly small experiences that had a large impact on my life? How could I get others to see how God works in little things when I just barely believe it myself?

I want to invite all of you to follow my wanderings as I prepare for DTS. Unlike EARS, DTS is designed to stretch the faith of students and help them discover where they fit in the world. The course is divided into three parts: knowing God, knowing yourself, and finding out how you fit into the world. This is all covered at base during the first three months, then we go on outreach for another two months. Outreach, in my single experience, is a combination of trying to serve others and learning from mistakes, all the while trying to figure out what God has to teach. In total, it’s about five months of travel and spending time with God.

During this trip, I’m going to try sending out a monthly newsletter. While I have my blog, it doesn’t have the accountability I apparently need to keep writing. If you want to receive updates from me, facebook me your email or simply shoot me a message at jessiekbyron@gmail.com.

Please keep me in your prayers. My story is only a small part of the world, but sometimes the little things can have an impact. My greatest hope is that DTS will teach me how to show God’s love to others. 

Costa Rica Reflections: RICE

Costa Ricans love rice. Or lots of them do, apparently. At base, most meals have rice included. Gallo Pinto, the national meal, is a lovely combination of rice and beans. Rice is just the food. Everywhere.

I love rice.

I came home and cooked rice.

Rice is the best thing ever. Especially rice with coconut oil.

Rice made a particular impression on me, particularly because most of my team seemed to find it impossible to be ambivalent about rice. They hated it or they loved it, no one seemed to just vaguely appreciate it.

So my impression of food in Costa Rica, fair or not, was "YUMMY RICE."

Costa Rica Reflections: A Word from God

Janurary 28, 2015

My friend said he had a word for me: God will build my faith. Not only that, he is not demanding my faith, but inviting me to learn more about him. It's gonna be an interesting 6 months.

I reacted as any well-bred lady would: punched the ground and wandered off in tears, without letting my friend finish his sentence, of course.

A little bit about my emotions when I got to Heredia. The Christianity I learned as a kid had transformed itself into some complicated guilt tripping thing with a God I didn't particularly want to know. Also, the church, while occasionally supportive and wonderful, had an irritating tendency to emotionally hurt my friends. Between my former youth pastor, my parents, and some of my friends, I could see that Christianity wasn't worth leaving, but something had to change. Going to YWAM was partially a search for a different Christianity and partially the hope that God would start talking to me.

To sum it up, me and Christianity were having a bit of a conflict. The very last thing I wanted to hear was to "have faith." No, I wanted Christianity to just make sense, like magic, without work. I'd made the first step, gone to a different country, and planted myself in a place for him to show up. Instead of seeing signs and miracles, I worked through a number of smaller experiences with God. From reconciling my views of the Bible to taking more of a leadership position on outreach, I began to learn how a strong faith could affect my life.

When I heard my friend's words back in January, I doubted they would ever mean anything. Now I think they sum up my experiences quite well. More on that later.

Costa Rice Reflections: Unofficial Team Rules

One of the running jokes (and challenges) for our team was the lack of structure. All of us were as stubborn as hell and didn't take well to any sort of authority. So at the end of outreach, some of my teammates and I created this list of unofficial rules that we had dedicatedly followed throughout the trip.

• Be on time for meals (and everything else)
• Make time to do your devos
• Don’t put boogers on people
• Be present for team activities
• Make everything difficult for everyone
• Have as few rules as possible
• Discuss poop and beards at least once a day
• Eat as little rice as possible
• 1. Hate on pancakes and hotdogs
• Talk about food for at least an hour per day
• Keep at least one person out of the loop
• Change the schedule at least once a day (preferably more)
• Have one or more deep conversations per day
• Always blame an imaginary person (preferably Ashley or Trevor)
• Don’t forget Dave
• ALWAYS carry extra toilet paper

Costa Rica Reflections: Introduction

After 6 months of traveling, I'm finally home again! Wifi was awful in most of the places I stayed, so I completely neglected my blog (and facebook and talking to people in general), but it's time to start up again.

For the next couple weeks I'm going to be posting a variety of stories from Costa Rica, though not very many pictures since I didn't take any and I haven't bugged my teammates into giving me theirs. Still, there are many thoughts and reflections that I would love to share with you. God has been doing a lot in my life and I've grown more than I thought possible back in January.

An overview:
I spend 3 months in Costa Rica learning about Environment and Resource Stewardship (EARS) before leaving on outreach. Outreach was a 3 month phase where we (theoretically) applied what we learned during our lectures. Our destinations were Panama and Columbia, and we spent time with a total of 5 indigenous communities working with local churches. We had 9 students, though sadly one of them couldn't make it to Columbia with us, so we ended the trip with 8 of us. A lot of our work was geared towards teaching environmental stewardship and Biblical worldview principles. As usual on a mission trip however, we spent a great deal of time playing with kids and just talking with the community.

My team! We ate lunch in Peru one day - it was just a boat ride away from the base in Leticia.

Chicken Death

Welp, I now know how to kill and pluck a chicken. Next week I'll figure out how to gut one. Dead chickens are actually more entertaining than you'd think. And they don't smell awful.

Life Skills

The past two months have been filled with so much learning. I can now use a drill, milk a goat, explain the process of a biodigester, complete a short conversation in Spanish, clean wood of bark, identify the basic differences between pvc pipe fittings, and build a composting system. For me, that's a lot more hands-on knowledge than I've ever had the opportunity to accumulate. Kinda, pathetic, but celebrate with me guys!

However, mostly I've been learning about community, especially how to actively participate rather than simply watching. My fellow students have supported me as I attempt to lead, allowing me opportunity and fixing my mistakes when I fail. Even as we are struggling with frustrations about our upcoming outreach mission to Panama and Columbia, we continue to laugh together. Every one of us comes from a different background, but that just means that we each have a lot to learn about each other. It feels as if every week someone is teasing me about reading so much, but at least once a day I'm snarking at my gun and beard obsessed friends. Seriously, beards. Who knew you could talk so much about them?

I definitely did not expect to learn so much about community while being in the EARS school, but I think that these experiences will shape more of my life than any practical knowledge I get here. Though, it is great to actually feel as if I could implement some of these sustainable development tools - either as teaching tools at home or in the mission field. I needed the practical knowledge before I can make a difference with my own gifts, so EARS has been perfect for me. Occasionally frustrating, yes, but that's part of any school.

Celebrating birthdays. Birthdays = cake, so they are kinda the best days. Except our teachers get annoyed because we all end up late for class or taking a very extended break.

Sleeping in class - all of us in solidarity

Somehow we always end up having massage trains in restaurants. I'm not sure how it started, but it's kinda hilarious.

Traveling to the beach. All the time. 

This is Fast Track, one of my new favourite games. It involves teams, lots of yelling, and a great deal of killing the other players.

The newest big thing on base is the ropes course. It's a bunch of different elements designed to encourage team building in a variety of ways. This particular one, the flying squirrel, had all of us on a rope hoisting the person on the other end into the air. It was definitely fun both running the other people up and being flown into the air.