One flew away.....

Ten days ago I returned from a week in Costa Rica, having flown down to accompany our youngest daughter Rachel in her move to that country. Rachel will be serving there with one or more local missions in outreach to the poorer people in the slums around San Jose. She doesn’t plan to return in the foreseeable future.

This move has been a long time coming. When she was a child, Rachel gravitated to the missionary stories in the church library; she had no notion of becoming one herself, but such books drew her in a way she couldn’t explain. It was not until she went with her church youth group to inner-city L.A. on a short term mission trip that Rachel began to get the idea that such service might be for her.

In her high school junior year Rachel asked us for permission to go to Latin America on a student exchange. We put her off until graduation, but when she finished school she hadn’t forgotten. Rachel worked a year, and then with her savings and a newly arranged line of credit she launched out and went to Costa Rica to study Spanish in a home stay program for nine months.

Upon her return from Costa Rica, Rachel worked for another year and then enrolled in the Calvary Chapel Bible College in Lima, Peru. During this time Rachel felt a growing, newly definite sense that God was calling her into missions. It was not so much an aspiration or an ambition so much as an imperative, an undeniable sense that this is something that she must do in obedience to God’s Spirit.

In reponse to this, Rachel began working singlemindedly to pay off her debts upon her return from Peru last April. Her goal was to become free to go back to serve in Costa Rica on a full time, permanent basis. She largely succeeded in reaching her goal and now she has followed through.

In doing so she is going against the grain of conventional thinking. Rachel has no training other than the year in bible school, no sending mission (she is being supported directly by family and friends) and no firm arrangements at the other end. She also has had to come to terms with the knowledge that any marriage hopes she might have (and she is a normal young woman in this respect) must take second place to God’s call for her.

Rachel also has been discouraged at times by the voices of our comfortable Christian culture: “What are your qualifications?”; “Why do you need to go away? There is so much to do here”; “What about a career? You need to think about your future” and perhaps most insidiously, “The era of Western missions is over; don't go, just send money”. (Rachel says that when she first encountered this thesis in K.P. Yohannan’s Revolution in World Missions she became so angry that she threw the book across the room.)

But what Rachel does have is our wholehearted support. We are very proud of her decision to put God first in her life, we trust her ability to discern His call and we know that whether or not she is specifically supposed to serve in San Jose, she is walking God’s way and He will steer her right.

Still, it’s not easy to see Rachel go. As our youngest she is the one we feel most protective toward even at the age of 23. And she is a young 23, dewy-eyed and innocent looking. No one would know to look at her that at 19 she traveled alone in a dodgy part of Nicaragua, or that she made her way at age 21 through bandit-infested jungle to visit the Peruvian headwaters of the Amazon.

As the time approached for her departure, I became more and more aware that in the busyness of our arrangements we would have very little quality time together. I therefore asked Rachel if she would mind if I flew down with her. “Since this is to be your future”, I said, “I want to be the one who walks you down the aisle into your new life.” And she agreed.

We flew out on a red-eye flight March 30, arriving in San Jose about noon. We rented a small third world style SUV called a Terios and spent the next four days at Manuel Antonio beach on the Pacific coast and driving around the interior before ending up in the Orosí valley near Cartago Thursday. During these days Rachel and I walked and explored and prayed together. We talked perhaps more than we ever had- about her dreams and her feelings and how God had brought her to this point. It was a precious time and passed all too quickly.

On Friday we spent an hour wandering around Desamparados looking for the place where Rachel would be staying. Our job was made especially difficult by the fact that Costa Rica has very few street signs or numeric addresses. All we had to go on was the vague description “700 metres south of the playing field close to Dos Cercas.” We spent all of our time looking without success for these two landmarks, until in our random driving we stumbled on the condo complex itself. Only then could we backtrack on the directions to find the playing field and fix its location so that we could find the home again the next day.

That night I treated Rachel to a fairly sumptuous meal at the Outback steak house in Escazú. We were both aware of the irony that the price of this feast was a quarter of what would be her monthly budget for living expenses (Rachel is adamant that she will live according to local standards). Say farewell to North American affluence!

The next morning I brought Rachel back to her new home at which we met the woman whose apartment she would be sharing. Yahaira (sounds like Elvira) is quite friendly and invited us in to chat for a little while. When she asked Rachel in Spanish if our family was Christian I found myself giving her an impromptu testimony of faith.

Our introduction stretched to include the serving of a crepa and coffee and the review of Yahaira’s family pictures (one can’t decently rush these things in Latin America, even with a plane to catch), but the moment came when I could delay no longer. I gave Rachel a hug and a kiss and that was that. Our little girl was on her own.