A Mexican Thanksgiving in Costa Rica!

Twenty-two people crowded into our home for a Thanksgiving “lupper”, at 3:00 p.m. Almost nothing was familiar…almost.

Turkeys are rare and expensive here, so right off the bat we decided not to have turkey. We just asked each family or person coming to simply bring their favorite dish. We figured it would be a mismatched dinner but our focus wasn’t really on the food. I stayed up late Wednesday night putting together a few of my family’s favorite dishes and planned to do the rest on Thursday. My plan was to cook everything after school. (Yes we had school! Thanksgiving is not a holiday here.) Approximately 2 ½ hours before our house was bustling with 22 people, I put my cake in the oven. I wanted to get that done first and still have time to cook my other dishes. When I checked on my cake I realized it hadn’t cooked all the way through. As I was checking my oven setting, I realized the flame had gone out on my large pot of beans on the stove. As it turned out, we were out of gas! Nothing I had prepared was finished and I was concerned about having enough food for everyone. After all, I had only requested that our friends just bring one dish per family. This was not good! Chris hiked down to the market to by a new canister, found one, carried it back home on his shoulders, attempted to hook it up and realized it had a different sized connector. By this time, we only had about an hour before people arrived. Frantically I begin calling a few other students to see if their ovens were available. I did find a couple of available ovens, but could only cook about half of what I prepared. I began scrounging around my kitchen for things that I could cook without the oven or stovetop. I only had rice for the rice cooker and a few avocados. I made some rice and some guacamole, both of which were strange offerings, in my mind, for a Thanksgiving feast. I was fairly upset but kept repeating to myself that “it pleases the Lord for this to have happened”, and “the Lord is sovereign over ALL things”. I shed a few quick tears of frustration, put on a smile and asked the Lord to increase the food so that we’d have enough for everyone.

As our friends started to arrive the smile quickly changed from one of those “things are going horrible but I need to put on a fake smile for my guests and be hospitable” kind of smile, to a REAL smile! Everyone brought three times as much food as I had planned for and to top it off, a lot of the favorite dishes they chose to bring were Mexican!! The fellowship that night was so sweet. We decided to take turns thanking God for the “quirky” things that mean so much to us. I was able to share about how thankful I am for a God who is sovereign over ALL things! Even gas stoves!

I mentioned that “almost” nothing was familiar about our Thanksgiving, but some things never change when you are a child of God... His loving care over you and the sweet fellowship available to us with our brothers and sisters in Christ! Happy Thanksgiving to all!