Sitting at the train station in Bucharesti, Romania and heading towards Uzice, Serbia (our first month of ministry)! This past week has been a week of teaching…
Teaching me how to lead my team
The importance of feedback
How to conduct feedback
To do feedback every night
About the gift of prophesy
How to be confident in the position I’m in as leader
…
With that said, while sitting in the train station at Bucharesti, our train (which takes 13 hours of riding it to get to Belgrade, Serbia) arrives and my teammates and I load our tremendously heavy packs that average 42 pounds each. Exiting the train, I grab Ben to go on a snack run before the train leaves. As we are meandering around the mini mart for something under 3 lei (about 1 dollar) I yet again display my indecisiveness and take way too long to pick up two packs of cookies for a midnight snack.
As Ben and I are walking toward our train we have a discussion about the “what ifs” of missing our train. I quickly reassure him that we have 10 min while he thought we had 1 min until departure…I mean I bought the tickets a couple of days ago, which was a story in and of itself, so I should know right. As we get closer to our train Ben thinks he hears people yelling his name. Even closer to our train we realize that our train is not where it was when we walked away from it.
The man standing where the head of the train came in, wildly pointed to our train that had picked up some speed down the tracks. At that instant Ben and I began sprinting toward our train. As the moment seemed so surreal to me, Ben yells out, “I love my life right now…this is definitely going on a blog!” Getting closer to the train, we began to see the small image of Erin, another teammate, who so selflessly has been yelling our names and hanging from out the door of the train for the last 5 minutes. As Ben and I arrived even closer to the train, we realized it was stopped and we jumped on quickly getting into our seats.
Deep laughter filled the room where the 6 of us are riding, while Jenny and Erin are franticly trying to calm their hearts and stomachs, and Michael is urgently searching for my phone number on his computer. Later we heard the other side of the story (http://erinolson.theworldrace.org), in which Erin convinced the train conductor, who so thankfully spoke English, to wait for Ben and I after he already started leaving and picking up speed.
Along with such an amazing intro into our first ministry site, the week itself has been challenging and rewarding. My team is compiled of such amazing leadership qualities that have the capability to compliment each other, as well as, bring challenge. I have gotten to know my team a bit deeper this week, through strive, through feedback, through a day of just team time and running for trains. Being in the leadership position and leading this team of people has broken me this week. It has caused me to doubt my unmistakable placement in this journey.
After prayer on Friday, I was told of an image my squad leader had, in representing my team he saw a rock hit a cement slab and crack it, allowing water to flow out of it. This was such a light spoken into me…allowing me to know that the challenges of this week have opened a bigger picture allowing fruit to flow out of our circumstances.
