{"id":40,"date":"2008-08-06T19:19:42","date_gmt":"2008-08-07T01:19:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.randybaldwin.com\/costarica\/?p=36"},"modified":"2008-08-06T19:19:42","modified_gmt":"2008-08-07T01:19:42","slug":"at-the-bottom-of-the-hill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.randybaldwin.com\/costarica\/2008\/08\/06\/at-the-bottom-of-the-hill\/","title":{"rendered":"at the bottom of the hill!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Greetings friends, this is Pastor Adam posting.\u00a0 One of the great things about mission trips is the people that you get to meet.\u00a0 You have already heard about Charlie Strong, Pastor Edgar and others.\u00a0 Tonight I want to tell you about someone else that we met this week.\u00a0 Her name is Serena and she is a college student from California who came to spend the summer in Costa Rica to work for Charlie’s mission agency and to learn Spanish.\u00a0 When she arrived at\u00a0the beginning of the summer\u00a0she spoke no Spanish, however, at this point she has become quite proficient.<\/p>\n

What makes Serena so interesting is not that she is a student giving up a summer for mission work, or even that she has learned so much Spanish in such a short time.\u00a0 What makes her interesting is that she is the closest thing I have ever seen to a human Muppet.\u00a0 She goes at a constant frenetic pace.\u00a0 Every third word out of her mouth is “WOW!!” followed by an exclamation of how amazing something is or how hard something is.\u00a0 She is really very good at speaking Spanish but she lacks confidence in her ability.\u00a0 She is a joy to watch with the children from the church at Los Guidos and they absolutely love her as they hang off of her every appendage.<\/p>\n

After leaving the work site the other day we had to drop her off on our way home so that she could walk back to the house of her host family.\u00a0 She did not know how to describe where to be dropped off except to say “At the bottom of the hill”.\u00a0 Rebecca, our guide who is a Spanish teacher in the states during the year, kept telling her to think about it and tell the driver (Rebecca refused to give her the spanish words – just like a teacher).\u00a0 Serena just kept saying, “Wow!! You have no idea how hard this is for me.”\u00a0 and “JUST LET ME OUT AT THE BOTTOM OF THE HILL.”\u00a0 When we finally reached the bottom of said hill, we were all laughing so hard that we had a hard time saying goodbye to her.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>After talking about it, we decided that perhaps a better description for\u00a0Serena\u00a0than a real life Muppet would be “joy personified”.\u00a0 She exuded joy, she kept making the comment, “Is there anything more precious in the Kingdom of God than children.”\u00a0 She laughed with the children, she cried with the children, she made crazy comments to us, she was one of the most entertaining people any of us had ever met.\u00a0 It\u00a0seems to be her dream to someday move to Texas, so maybe y’all will get\u00a0to\u00a0experience the tornado that is Serena just as we have.<\/p>\n

-Adam<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Greetings friends, this is Pastor Adam posting.\u00a0 One of the great things about mission trips is the people that you get to meet.\u00a0 You have already heard about Charlie Strong, Pastor Edgar and others.\u00a0 Tonight I want to tell you about someone else that we met this week.\u00a0 Her name is Serena and she is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-costa-rica"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.randybaldwin.com\/costarica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.randybaldwin.com\/costarica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.randybaldwin.com\/costarica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.randybaldwin.com\/costarica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.randybaldwin.com\/costarica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.randybaldwin.com\/costarica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.randybaldwin.com\/costarica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.randybaldwin.com\/costarica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.randybaldwin.com\/costarica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}