The Sunset Service

A Story about the Shared Community Experience of Sunset at Playa Carmen in Costa Rica

Every Friday and Saturday evening at Playa Carmen in Costa Rica, something amazing happens. What’s even more amazing is that nobody organized it.

Around 5:00pm, the town starts to empty out. Restaurants go quiet. Streets thin out. And thousands of people walk toward the water.

By the time the sun gets low, the beach is packed. Families. Couples. Dogs. Kids chasing each other through the shallows. And out past the break, 50 to 100 surfers are lined up on the horizon, bobbing in the swell, waiting for one more ride before the light goes.

Nobody sends a calendar invite. There’s no announcement. It just happens. The whole community stops what it’s doing and faces the same direction, toward the horizon.

It’s one of the most natural senses of church/congregation that I’ve ever experienced.

One one Saturday evening, my wife Becca reminded me that I’d been wanting to capture this. Not just the sunset itself, but how crowded everything gets. The beach. The ocean. The whole scene.

After snapping a few pictures, I told Becca about a guy named Tony who I met while surfing in the mornings. He lives in Santa Teresa and is originally from Arizona. We met last year and remembered each. He’s the kind of guy who always comes over to say good morning. We’ve surfed together a few times. He catches waves like it’s nothing. Easy. Natural. The kind of surfer who could clean house and catch every wave if he wanted to.

But he doesn’t.

One morning, I asked Tony if he’d gone out for a sunset surf. He said no. He’d been at El Carmen, the restaurant right on the beach. He told me he usually likes to leave the sunset to the Ticos (i.e., the locals).

That thought sat with me.

Here’s a guy who could paddle out and ride every wave in sight. The surf was firing. And the sunset was amazing. But he chose to sit it out. Not because he didn’t want to surf. Because he’d been here long enough to understand something about the place.

Becca added a layer I hadn’t thought of. A lot of the locals can’t surf in the morning. If you’re doing construction, or working a shop, or teaching surf lessons, you’re starting early. Your window is sunset. That’s your time on the water.

Tony sees that. And he leaves room.

I’ve come to believe there’s a difference between visiting a place and being in relationship with it. I’m starting to think that tourists extract. They take the photo, ride the wave, check the box. There’s nothing wrong with that exactly. But it feels surface level. It feels like consumption.

Tony’s doing something different. He’s developed a relationship with Playa Carmen. He knows its rhythms. He knows who needs what and when. And he adjusts. Not because someone told him to. Because that’s what care looks like when you’ve been paying attention.

I think about that a lot in the context of this adventure. The difference between showing up somewhere and actually being present. Between taking from a community and contributing to one. Between fear, which grabs, and love, which makes room.

Tony could grab. He’s good enough. Instead, he watches from a restaurant with a drink in his hand and lets the locals catch their waves.

That feels like a love-based way to be somewhere.

I haven’t done a sunset surf yet. And I am not sure if I ever will. If I do, it’ll be on a quiet night when the crowd is thin and there’s room.

Because I think that’s what happens when you start to build a relationship with a place. You stop thinking about what you can get from it. And you start thinking about what you can give to it.

Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org