So from London we went to Dublin, we were staying 3 days there, and we were pretty excited, I had been to Belfast before, but had never spent any time in Dublin. We got there at like 6 am after a crazy overnight bus/ferry ride where we were woken up every couple of hours, and had to find out hostel in the dark and rain in a city we had never been to before. It turned out to be not too bad, and when we got to our hostel the guy at the desk actually showed us so much favour, we were literally allowed to check in right away! Which is crazy because it was 7 in the morning, AND he let us have the free breakfast too! So we were able to eat and crash immediately. When we got up we met up with the free walking tour, it was pretty cool to get to join in and see the city right away. One of the things that we learned about Dublin is that it’s a pretty small city with not a lot going on, the pub life is huge however and so it has become somewhat of a party city where there are tons of pub crawls and bar hopping, and quite an alive night life but not much else. We were in Dublin for Ash Wednesday and the biggest church (it was Anglican) had an Ash Wednesday service that Joey and I went to. It was incredible, the choir sang what was probably the most beautifully harmonized worship that I have every heard. The sermon was on the season if lent (obviously) and struck a chord in my heart as the pastor talked about giving up things not just for the sake of tradition or law, but in order to fill those spaces with more of the Lord and draw closer to Him. (More on what He’s doing in me regarding that later on in the trip).
For some comic relief. As Joe and I stood in line to receive the ashes we noticed that of the two lines that they had for the ashes all of the people that were walking back to their seats from our line looked like the priest had just taken a paintbrush, dipped it into the thickest black tar he could find and then swiped it across their foreheads with long sweeping strokes, so every ones foreheads were literally covered in thick black ash. I wanted to switch lines so bad! I was so nervous that I was going to have to walk out of that church with my forehead covered in dense black cross, but also didn’t want to wipe the ash off after I received it. I was filled with visible relief when the other line finished first and the priestess beckoned us over to hers, where we received a barely visible little greyish splotch in the middle of the foreheads.
I think my favourite part about Dublin was that we got to meet up with our own alumni squad leader from our race and sit for 3 hours drinking tea and coffee and talking Kingdom, life, love, and dreams with her. It was so random for us to be in the same countries at the same time, and she had called bets on Joe and I getting together after the race so we got to talk about that and laugh at how correct she was. Dublin was amazing and and I love that we got to share our trip with Tiff and got to thank her for the influence that she had had on our race and in our stories. So much love for her.
More about the rest of the U.K. coming soon!
