The Hollow Tree / El Árbol Hueco

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I've probably been more tired than I am right now, but I don't remember it. Today, we went into the mountains with a youth group at a local church. This might sound like a walk in the park, but it wasn't. Imagine a three hour hike, up hill at about a 30 degree angle most of the way, going at a pretty steady pace. There was a mud road for most of the way up, but then it was narrow mountain mud path for the next stretch. But then, we stopped for lunch at one of the most amazing things I've ever seen!

This picture doesn't do this tree justice. If you see the little blue spot up there, that's my wife. This tree is huge beyond huge. She's probably about 30 feet up in the air in this picture. The epic part about it is, however, that it is hollow. But very stable. A long time ago, this was two trees. The one tree, the hollow one, died, and the other tree grew around it, forming a very hard and stable shell around a hollow tree. Roots and branches inside the tree make it so people can crawl up from the inside and come out there where Liz is.

Sorry that this picture has a couple people's behinds in it, but I wanted to show you the scale of this thing. This is the inside of the huge hollow tree. It is Epic.

After almost everyone climbed in the tree, we had lunch and Liz and I got to share our testimonies, in Spanish, with the youth group. We sang a few songs up there, rested up a bit, (because at this point, we were all already very tired), and went back down the mountain.

Going down the mountain was much easier than going up, obviously, but just as we started on our downward path, it started to rain. Pretty hard. Then very hard. Then just pretty hard. And the path is made of mud, so it was pretty slippery. It was around a two hour trek down the mountain, and I'm happy to report, no one was hurt. Maybe a little embarrassed to be riding the city bus covered in mud and really stinky, but not hurt.

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When we finally got back to the apartment, I had a wonderful little email from a new prayer supporter, Laura. She asked for some specific prayer needs that she could take to her church, so I thought I would include my response in the blog, so other people would be able to get the information as well.

Aw, thank you so very much for continuing to pray for us. It means the world to us to know that there are people back in the States keeping us in prayer. I've been keeping a blog giving lots of details at http://lucasyliz.blogspot.com/ if you wanted to check that out.

I would say that our first prayer need would be Spiritual. We've been in this country for about 10 days now, and we have been attending church, but since everything is in Spanish, and we're still working on learning the language, it means that we get most of our spiritual "meat" from our personal devotions, and very little of it from church. God has been answering already in this way, as at least I personally have been really getting a lot out of my recent studies in Job.

The 2nd prayer need is language-related. We've been taking Spanish classes and we continue to do so, but we've still got a long way to go to fluency. We've hit a good milestone today, though. We just got back from a hiking trip with a local youth group. There were no English speakers in the group, (the youth leader knew some English, but she's been given a directive to speak only Spanish with us except for emergencies) and we were able make the trip to meet them -- this takes taking the city bus into San José, meeting the youth leader there, taking two more city bus trips to meet up with the youth, then we went on a six hour hike into the mountains, where we were able to give our testimonies in Spanish and tell how God has changed our lives. Afterwords, leaving the group and finding another city bus to get us back where we're staying. The whole trip we only used Spanish. So it's a great milestone, but our Spanish is still only good enough to speak to people with some patience. So prayer in that department would be awesome.

And the 3rd prayer request is for ministry. We're going to be starting an English and a second language class in about 2 weeks, and we've got a lot of preparing to do. So prayer for the preparation, prayer for the classes we'll be teaching, and prayer for the other people in the seminary where we are volunteering. The more Spanish we learn, the more ministry we'll get to be a part of.

So! As you can tell, I'll thrilled to be asked this, but if you wanted a summary version to give to your church, here it is: 

1) Spiritual Encouragement

2) Spanish Language development

3) Ministry Opportunities as our Spanish progresses.

Thank you so much again for your support!