Vosses move to Costa Rica

We first heard the word, "Honduras" 9 months ago. Since then God put into action a whirlwind of circumstances which led to our decision to follow God to Tegucigalpa, Honduras to work as church-planters. Mark will be a pastoral intern at Impact Church. He will also be simultaneously completing and teaching their church planting seminary. In other words, he will take a courses one semester, then teach those courses the following semester while taking new courses. The church was started 8 years ago by 3 missionary families, and is now a church of 1000, 500 of which are new believers. Four other daughter churches have also been planted in the past 8 years. Impact Church would like us to be part of a team planting a 5th church within our first 2 years in Tegucigalpa.

All of this background is to explain that 3 weeks ago we moved to Costa Rica for language school. We spent the 3 months prior to our move selling our belongings, filling out endless international paperwork, traveling to say goodbye to friends and family, sharing the vision that God has for Latin America, preparing our house for the market, and selling our automobiles.

The day of our move to Central America was amazing. Mark’s brother, Tom, flew with us and was immensely helpful with our luggage and with setting up technical equipment at our rental house in San Jose. We anticipated huge luggage fees for the 16 bags that we checked, but somehow American Airlines only charged us $400. At immigration in Costa Rica, we arrived to find more than 200 people waiting in line to be processed, but as we walked up to join the queue, an attendant noticed our two year old and waived us into a line with only two people waiting. We didn’t know if we had all our international paperwork correct, but immigration barely glanced at our passports and granted us entrance. We also expected intense scrutiny from the customs official because of some electronic equipment we were bringing to Costa Rica, but the gentleman didn’t open a single bag and charged us no customs fees. We know that these conveniences are insignificant on the scale of God’s great acts of love toward mankind, but we want to acknowledge them as blessings from Him. We know that many of you were praying for us on that day, and want you to know that God used your words on our behalf.

We are attending school four hours a day at el Instituto de Lengua Espanola. It is a school specifically for evangelical missionaries who are preparing to serve in Spanish speaking countries. They have been successfully equipping missionaries with language and culture skills for more than 65 years. The campus is about a mile from our rental house, so we walk a lot each day. There are more than 100 students studying here. Mark is starting as an intermediate student since he began studying Spanish at age five. He is thankful that his Spanish instruction has flooded back into his mind after 20 years of storage. Monica is starting as a novice and is enjoying classes in phonetics, grammar and conversation. Reagan loves his pre-school. His teacher, Hulda, speaks only Spanish, so he is hearing a new language and responding well.