a respite

This trimester I am doing the same FARO program that Brian is doing. So far, I absolutely love it. I have some very kind and very-willing-to-help people on my route that I talk with twice a week. All of them work in or own a store of some sort in our neighborhood (pharmacy, convenience store, bakery, etc.) This past Thursday I was out on my route, when I found myself needing to kill some time while the bookstore owner attended to an actual paying customer and the video store guy finished opening up shop (even though it was already 20 minutes later than their scheduled open time). So, rather than making the 10 minute walk back to our house, I decided to venture over to one of the local parks and rest a bit while these two finished preparing for an exhilarating conversation regarding Costa Rican food.

I would guess that I’ve already been to this park 20 times or more since we’ve lived here. They have a farmer’s market on Saturdays that we used to go to pretty regularly. And it has a running track, which is a nice alternative to trying to navigate (and survive) the local roads while maintaining a killer 12 minute mile pace. But honestly, apart from the farmer’s market and the track, I was never too terribly impressed with the place. It’s not that it isn’t a nice enough park, I guess. It’s just that it’s, well, not anything close to as nice as ANY park that I would ever go to regularly in the States.

But, without being too dramatic, I’d say that on Thursday God transformed this place into a much needed place of respite for me. I sat down for a minute on one of the cement benches with a bit of shade. And instead of thinking “why in the world can’t they have some halfway comfortable benches to sit on here”, I found myself genuinely thanking the Lord for the park because of the rest and relief it was offering me. It was the same park, the same graffitied walls, the same unemptied garbage, the same unkempt grass, the same broken playground equipment. But after 2 tiring hours of walking around the neighborhood in the heat, while being literally unable at times to hear the person talking to me (standing just 3 feet away) because of an engine-braking truck or a blaring horn, this park was amazingly refreshing. And in a very real way, a much appreciated gift from the Lord. I could still hear all of the same sounds, but here they were just distant enough to be ignored. And there’s something pretty cool about being able to thoroughly enjoy something that is just enough. Not perfect, not too much, but just enough.

A pic from the park