My family was recently able to spend a week in Manuel Antonio Costa Rica.  It was an amazing trip with family time and snorkeling and beaches and zip lining, and rest.

And it was a gift.

The weather was perfect.  It was hot and humid but not rainy-even though it was rainy season.  The heat and the humidity required a lot of time by the pool or the beach.

We went on adventures.  We saw monkeys and sloths and dolphins.  And tarantulas.

And that is where the frog comes in.

One of our “fun” excursions was a night tour of the rain forest.  My husband wanted to go. My kids all wanted to go.  I did not really want to go-but my whole family was going so I went.

First-in Manual Antionio it gets dark at 6pm.  Really dark.

Second-night tours in the rainforest require participants to wear long pants-not because it’s cold, it’s not cold.  You must wear long pants to avoid being poisoned by the very species you’re attempting to see.  Sounds fun right?

So we all donned our long pants, and long sleeve shirts and hopped in the jeep for our trek into the rainforest. After a 30 minute drive through city streets and then dirt paved roads into a rainforest, we were out into the hot and humid pitch black night.

First it was cool-not temperature cool, but seeing a tour guide make a frog scream, (yep it really did scream) cool.

And then I was miserable.  Hot and sticky, with sweat dripping in places it shouldn’t but always does.   But my kiddos thought it was fun so I shut my mouth.

Our guides would stop us to show us random two inch spiders.  “Oh look,” they’d say, “a wolf spider.” and we’d all stop and gaze at the spider in its web a foot off the trail (and quite honestly to me it just looked like every other spider out there but bigger).  And then my husband asked “Is it poisonous?”

“OH YES!” the guide replied.  Right.

So now my mama bear instinct kicks in and I’m desperately trying to keep my kids away from the edge of the trail so as to not need to run back out of the trail and drive the 30 minutes to a hospital in Costa Rica.

For the next 45 minutes we saw various spiders in their webs, strange bugs on leaves and frogs-hopping into streams, sitting quietly on the side of the path and resting on tree stumps.  I didn’t happen to find any of the animals particularly cool.  I KNOW that some people do.  I was with them.  I just don’t happen to be one of them.

After the tour mercilessly ended, and we drove the 30 minutes back to our villa and I was once again cooled off in shorts and a t-shirt, my husband showed me some of the pictures he took.

I saw the picture of the red-eyed tree frog sitting on a tree stump.  And it was beautiful.  More beautiful than I remember it being when I was standing in front of that stump dripping sweat in uncomfortable places. The picture is possibly one of my favorite pictures of the entire trip to Costa Rica.

And I can’t help but think that our life is like that some times.

There are some pretty amazing moments in our life and then there are those moments that we really wish we didn’t have to experience.  They are the dark, uncomfortable, terror inducing moments.  They can seem to last forever when we are in them.

Once we are out of them, we look back and we see some of the beauty in those moments that we may not have recognized.   The beauty was too hard to see because the pain was too great (or possibly because we were distracted by the dripping sweat).

I want to learn to recognize some of the beauty in the hard places.  To see how God has redeemed my hard moments and created unbelievable beauty.    I want to learn how to lean on God’s promises in the every day so that I might catch some of the moments as they’re happening and recognize God’s presence.

The church that I attend recently stated that FAITH is : Living my life on the confidence that Jesus is who he says he is and that he’s going to keep every promise he ever made to me.

31 Days to Consider what it is that Jesus has promised me-and to live like I believe Him.