I’ve been eagerly awaiting my first look at the computer this morning. The Tico Times has a whole new web site. They’ve been talking for months about the new web site that was coming. Like our church’s re-designed web site, launched last year, the Tico Times wanted their site to display well and be easy to read on smartphones as well as computers. The Tico Times is a name known to most gringos who visit Costa Rica. Since its founding in 1956, the Tico Times has been the best source for English language news of Costa Rica. Until just a few years ago, they were primarily a print newspaper. Then, in 2010, they re-designed and expanded their web site so that they became my go to place for Costa Rica News when I was out of the country. Not long afterward, the realities of the decline of print journalism and the costs of printing forced them to drop the print edition. I haven’t visited Costa Rica since the print edition disappeared, but I’m sure that it is different than the days when we would pick up a copy just for the opportunity to make connections in our own language in a place where you learn to dream in Spanish because that is the language the people use.

Costa Rica being Costa Rica, the old Tico Times web site was a bit clunky. The ads were awkward and pop-ups were annoying. Since the site is geared primarily to people from the United States who travel to Costa Rica for vacation, and a few who have second homes in Costa Rica or retire to the country, the ads were for products that don’t really interest me. I’m not planning to travel to Costa Rica for cosmetic dental surgery or luxury hotels or other products advertised on the site.

I do like to keep up with a bit of the news. The presidential election is heating up and it looks like it is possible that Jonny Araya might be able to win without a runoff. At least he has a healthy lead in the polls. The current president, Laura Chinchilla has not been the most popular president ever, but she has made a Costa Rica-sized splash on the international scene and been a strong promoter of Costa Rica in the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).

I guess that part of my heart is always in Costa Rica. Pastor Dorota Yucra is a colleague who serves the Community Christian Church of los Guido, our sister church. Our congregation has been involved with the Community Christian Church since 1988, but I didn’t meet Pastor Dorotea until 2001. I was able to visit her church in 01, 03, 05 and 07 and learned to respect her gentle but firm style of pastoral leadership in a situation that is very difficult.

Her ministry doesn’t work like mine. My salary is predictable, and sufficient to afford a home and reliable cars and regular trips to visit our children who live in different states. Dorotea discovered the depth of her call to the ministry after she was widowed and made the choice to travel with her family away from her native country to Costa Rica in search of ways to keep her family together and provide for them without the benefits of any savings or insurance or other support. If there is a glass ceiling in the United States, it must be a lot higher and be full of windows compared to the situation in Latin America where the macho culture devalues women and their contributions. It is a real struggle for a single mother simply to keep meals on the table all across Central America and Costa Rica seems to attract single mothers and their children as they seek an acceptable standard of living. There are plenty of forces in Costa Rica that threaten to drive families apart.

It hasn’t been an easy path for Dorotea. He children have struggled with marriage and divorce, employment and unemployment, and raising children in the country they have known as home with less than reliable resources. Dorotea has steadfastly worked to keep her family together. There have been more than a few tears over the events in her children’s lives. But there has never been any question that Dorotea was there for them all along.

Her congregation might be best described as quirky and unstable. People come and go. Sometimes you can’t tell if they are there for the worship or the free food. You become attached to individuals and invest in their future just to see them seduced away by predatory evangelical churches that report the number of baptisms to their USA-based funders without noting how many people are baptized over and over again. At least “until their souls become wrinkled” according to Pastor Dorotea.

In the midst of all of this Dorotea has sought to be attentive in her studies of the Bible, disciplined in her prayer, and faithful to bringing Christ to the people she serves in tangible ways.

Today’s coincidence is that the new web site for the Tico Times arrived on the day that our friends Chuck and Sybil Rounds are leaving for Costa Rica. They have faithfully traveled to Costa Rica for Vacation Bible School every year, strengthening the ties between the two congregations, getting to know the children and families of our sister church, and keeping open the lines of communication with Pastor Dorotea. I am really hoping that next year I’ll be going with them, but that remains to be seen. A year is too long to predict the future in Costa Rica, and I’ve never been good at predicting the future in the first place.

Of course part of my heart is with colleagues in England and Australia and South Africa and Canada and in other places around the world. Ours is a worldwide church and the people that we have grown to know and love serve God in many places.

So if you see me staring at pictures on my cell phone, it is likely that I’m scrolling through the stories about the new national police tourist security campaign; or the search for Costa Rica’s golden toad, once thought to be extinct, but which may have survived deep in the rainforest; or the horseback riders at the Palmares Festival; or the latest delay in getting the new bus routes up and running; or the rumors surrounding the giant shopping mall that may someday dominate the space between the airport and downtown.

My heart, however, isn’t in the Tico Times news from Costa Rica. It is in a tiny church with an attached parsonage where Dorotea is cooking rice and seasoning it with the stories of Jesus as she serves it to her hungry neighbors.

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