When I last left you, we had just found out that Adventures in Missions wanted to take us off the mission field and send us to a marriage conference in America. If you didn’t catch the first part of the story, click the picture to get yourself caught up on the unforgettable journey, that is #LietteLife.
10 hours after we received the message we were to head home, I got woken up with yet another urgent message from our mission’s base. Someone needed to talk to me, ASAP.
“Wait, our flight leaves in 6 hours? We were supposed to leave next Friday.”
“That’s what I thought too, but I just checked my e-mail and saw that it’s booked for today.”
“Well I guess that means we aren’t going with our team into the mountains.”
“Nope, catch a cab to the airport, we’ll see you this evening.”
So, we wished our team off and began to pack our stuff to head back home. Oh, the emotions!
We weren't sure if we were excited or nervous.
I was about to shut down the computer when we got an instant message, “Do not get on that flight. There has been a mistake. Your flight is supposed to be next Friday. You need to meet up with your team.”
This created a slight problem. Number 1 was the fact that we had no idea where our team was. Could we catch them at the train station? Did the train already leave?
What we knew was that it was a 5-hour train ride, followed by a 40-minute gondola ride to the top of a mountain. That was just about the extent of our knowledge of the situation.
We could stay in Sofia, or we could adventure out into the countryside and see if we could figure out where our team was.
So, 24 hours later Kimberly and I hopped on a train only knowing that our stop was somewhere between four to five hours away. The train station would have gypsies at it and there was Wi-Fi in a little café across the street. Easy enough, right?
Oh, we also had this peace of paper with an address on it. Terrific. So helpful.
On the train we met two Greek women who wanted more than anything to learn English. We chatted with them, took pictures and even shared snacks. Eventually we got around to telling them why we were in Bulgaria and where we were trying to go. They promised to help us get off at the right stop… at least we thought they did because they only spoke Greek.
5-hours and several dozen stops later, we jumped off the train, hugging our new Greek friends goodbye we were now officially alone.
The train stop reeked of urine and there were several gypsies peddling for money or trying to sell knick-knacks from inside their jackets.
“Well, we’re here.” Kimberly stated bluntly. “Now what?”
“Um, maybe there will be someone out front we recognize?”
“Yeah, good plan. We have lots of friends in the mountains of Bulgaria. We should probably just hop in the car with that guy over there. He looks nice enough.”
“Okay, fine,” I relented. “Do you have the phone number of our contact, maybe we can find a pay phone.”
After about an hour of sitting around we eventually found a young man who spoke good enough English to make a phone call for us. 30 minutes after that our contact picked us up to bring us to the top of this beautiful mountain.
It was there that over 1,000 Bulgarian Christians from all denominations were gathered for a conference. We spent the week listening to speakers from organizations such as A21 to local pastors from around Bulgaria.
We slept in tents and helped to disciple new believers until the day came where we had to say goodbye. We were heading back to America and planned to be returning to Bulgaria within a week.
And so we left, leaving a lot of our belongings with our team so we didn’t have to carry them on an international flight. 28 hours later we arrived in America and were off to our conference.
The marriage conference actually ended up being a marriage intensive at the Winshape Retreat Center in Rome, Georgia. The National Institute for Marriage was in charge of taking us through the intensive and both Kimberly and myself would highly recommend any retreat, conference or intensive that NIM offers.
Through the week we learned lots of very helpful things. The most helpful and life changing of which was the reminder that if God isn’t the center of your marriage, nothing you do to try to make it better will work.
The marriage counselors spent time walking us through past issues, some of which were from before Kimberly and I even met each other. In all, the conference showed us that no matter how healthy your marriage is, there are multitudes of ways to make it better.
Through the week we learned to trust, we learned to communicate and we learned to love all over again. Since then we have been able to love one another on a much deeper and unconditional level than before.
After the marriage intensive was over, we were primed and ready to get back to Bulgaria. But that was our plans. God had something completely different in mind.
So we waited.
One day passed. Two days passed. Three days passed. No word on when we were heading back on the field. By this point we were starting to really wrestle with God.
Why are we in Georgia?
What is the point of all of this?
Who is keeping us here?
What did we do to deserve this?
None of it made sense. We had worked on raising money for this trip for over a year. We had been on the field for nearly two months and now were sitting in a hotel room wondering what in the world God was up to. Was there a lesson in all this waiting? Didn’t our plans line up with what God wants for our life and marriage? Did we really trust God?
That brought us to Lesson #2.
We can make our plans, but the Lord determines ours steps. (Prov 16:9)
It doesn’t matter how elaborate your plans are or how much time you spend in the details, because it is the Lord who ultimately directs our steps. And if we truly trusted him, we would learn to surrender our own desires and let the will of God reign in every single detail of our lives.
I wish that I could say that we eventually received a phone call telling us that we were heading back to Bulgaria in the morning, but that just couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, we received a message stating that we weren’t going back to Bulgaria at all.
And this is when we decided we would put it all in God’s hands, right? Well, yes. Sort of. It just took a few days for us to relent and finally surrender our own desires to the will of God.
We were done fighting. We were done making our own plans. They never worked out anyway. Why fight the creator of the universe?
So, we gave it all to him and about 4 hours later a miracle happened.
We received an email stating that someone thought that we would be a good fit at the AIM base in Guatemala, but before we could go a few things had to happen. Some things that we would have never planned for ourselves.
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