Tues. Jan. 20th

Today is Sunday and the service group meets at 9am so we slept in a little longer than normal. Right after the field service meeting, Brandon noticed a monster grasshopper on the bars of the Kingdom Hall. It was huge!!!! Probably 6 to 7 inches long! Brandon decided that these must be the “locusts” that John the Baptizer survived on in the wilderness. The 6 of us checked out a territory about 45 minutes up the coast just before the town of Jaco. We found a few Gringos and most all of them were very friendly. Part of the territory was a road that ran right along the beach, which had some amazing sized waves and no crowd. As we were driving Amanda yelled to stop! She had spotted macaws up in the trees above us! We all jumped out and started shooting…..calm down, not with guns…with our cameras. They were unbelievably beautiful….and LOUD!
We came home at around 1pm and worked on the phone territories that we started on Sunday. Later we went down to the beach for a nice late afternoon cool down…..it’s a great way to end the day. Got our meeting tonight at 7pm.

Oh yeah, I meant to tell you all a pretty neat experience for Sunday. A brother here, Ken Nelson and his wife Kim found an older gentleman in the door to door work a few weeks ago in Jaco, about an hour away. As they talked, the man told them that he was from Florida and had been married to a wonderful woman who was one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. He had been greatly opposed to her being a Witness. Then she died and he went into a depression, started back smoking again after having quit for many years and decided he wasn’t happy. So what did he do, he sold his house and business and moved to Costa Rica, confident that he would find happiness here in “paradise”. As you can imagine, he wasn’t any happier, even though he was living the “good life” here. So when Ken and Kim knocked on his door that day, he accepted a Bible study. He said after just a few studies that he had found the truth and wanted to make whatever changes he needed to worship Jehovah. He decided to move to Quepos, because there is no English congregation in Jaco and he doesn’t want to miss any meetings or studies. Sunday was his first time to attend the meeting and he loved it! He is spent the weekend with Ken and Kim and found a place to rent here and will be moving at the end of April. He also stopped smoking cold turkey. I thought that was really encouraging and a nice example of the progress here in Quepos.