Encounters With Rev. Heng Sure -- In Costa Rica!
ServiceSpace
--Arathi Ravichandran
3 minute read
Jan 4, 2016

 

Last month, Joel and I were in the Southern Eastern tip of Costa Rica, in the Caribbean jungle, very close to the border with Panama. There were torrential downpours all night long, leaving the ocean incredibly choppy and the jungle very very muddy. That morning, we woke early to trek out to the permaculture farm where we were going to volunteer. Almost three hours of walking later (with two very cute wild dogs who I was convinced would show us the way), we were terribly lost in the jungle, with mud up to our shins and no farm in site. We happen to run into a farmer who chuckled and told us we were very lost, and lead us back to the small town where we started.

A bit defeated, we headed back up to the closest town where we could spend the night and decided to wait out the rain, in hopes that we could hike out to the farm the following day.

That evening, we went out for dinner at a small local restaurant which happened to be totally packed with people. They were the only spot in town with some decent vegetarian food, so we decided to stick around and wait out the crowd, and ended up sitting in their upstairs loft overlooking the street, in a small side corner of the restaurant.

I was sort of aimlessly taking in the surroundings and looked to my left, and lo and behold, there is one solitary book leaning on the cross beam, with two monks bowing on the cover. I picked it up immediately and saw that it was one of Rev Heng Sure's journals from his pilgrimage.

Dumbfounded, I looked at Joel and was like, "You will never believe this!" And we both just sat there, wondering how on earth in this tiny town in the middle of no where in the Caribbean jungle, we came across this book.

Both of us held the book in our hands, closed our eyes, and prayed, asking a silent question in our hearts. I opened to a random page (my question, as it always is these days, how to serve through being a parent) opens right to a paragraph on the wisdom of children, on children's ability to see the world without any blinders on, on their raw perception of life as it is. The paragraph hit us both like a ton of bricks.

Later on, we asked the waiter if he knew who the book belonged to, and he said that it was his! He loved the title, and went on to describe how he was moved by the book and felt called to living a life of love and peace, in this tiny little town. I was so touched by his effort to read the book, given his poor English, and even more that despite note really being able to understand it in a literal sense, his feeling of connection to it.

Such a beautiful and random encounter!

 

Posted by Arathi Ravichandran on Jan 4, 2016


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