900 Hours

This afternoon we officially graduated from our year of language school.  That means we have spend 900 classroom hours studying grammar, phonetics, culture, practicing using all this in conversations.  That's crazy!!

Our graduation was suppose to be tomorrow.  Until yesterday, when the city notified ILE that they will be shutting off the electricity tomorrow.  So (entonces), graduation got moved up to this afternoon.  You know, it's just something that comes with living in Latin America.

It was a neat measure for me to sit through graduation after those 900 hours.  We went to the graduation after our first tri and I understood almost none of it.  Today, I understood almost all of it, could laugh at the jokes and follow what some of the finer points.

The families (some have been here a year, some just 4 months) that graduated today are heading to 9 countries throughout Latin America.  It's crazy how God takes people from their own countries and plants them some where else, to love and connect with a people that isn't their own, in a language that isn't theirs. 

Sometimes I get really discouraged by the fact that I am not where I want to be language wise, but the pastor that spoke today talked about how Jesus choose men from Galilee, who had terrible language skills and used them to build the church.  While it's our job to study and work towards bettering our Spanish, it really isn't about us.  God does things differently than we think.  And I am grateful.  In fact, He often does this on purpose. 

And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God.  For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling.  My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words (yeah, maybe more like the vocab of a 4 year old!), but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power,  so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.  1 Corinthians 2:1-5

Our particular class (those of us who have been here a year) was small to begin with and several families have left early, but of our little group that's left, one family is headed to Mexico, another to El Salvador, a third to Peru.  Two families are staying here in Costa Rica and the two single girls are heading to the US for further study.  Most of us are from the United States, but there was a family from South Korea and one pseudo Canadian (Hi Suz!)

Hard to believe that we are done with this crazy year!  I won't lie and tell you we wish we could stay longer in school, but it is bittersweet to see these great people all move to other areas of the world.  And yet, it's exciting all at the same time, to think about what God is going to do through this group!