It’s 1:37 am and the only thing I can do right now is write out my thoughts. I can’t sleep because I don’t know a lot of things right now but I know that when my team and I started this journey we prayed. Prayed that God would show us people to interact with and people that would be honest and helpful to us.
At this point and time I don’t know where we’re going and what to expect. Will our host family know that our bus ride turned out to be 7 hours long and that we are not going to be entering their area until 4:30 am? Even though I told them that we were coming at 4:35 pm the day before?
I wish I could have made things work. I wish I knew the perfect shuttle to pick, the perfect spot to eat and the perfectly working ATM to exchange currency. I wish I knew the way to make our SIM card to work in our prepaid phone in this country and the perfect bus that told us before we got on that it had no working bathroom, but I don’t know. I also didn’t know that the road our bus is driving on right now is so tiny that a truck that passed us was a few inches in length away, until one of my teammates told me. Thing is, I don’t even know what that looks like because it is so dark outside. The beauty of it all is in the midst of these “I don’t know, and I wish it was” God says “it is.”
God says, it is the way I planned it to be to grow your faith. To put you in a path where you learn to fully trust me without a scripted and controlled life. It is this way because I made a way where there seemed to be none. Along this way, things may not have gone 100% as you maybe want or imagine, instead things are going the way I knew they would go long before you were born.
So if I had the perfect plan to travel directly to Kosovo in a quick and easy way, I never would have met these people. These people described below are people that I look back now and see that the prayer my team prayed before we embarked on this journey, are those exact people who were honest and helpful to us.
MoMo- a man who spoke Serbian (which thankfully one of my team members could communicate with him). He warmly greeted us Americans, into the shuttle and took us to the bus station.
The elderly lady- I could see her peering over at us Americans as we spoke on the shuttle. I could tell she heard the struggle of “What do we do?” in our voices of how to get to our host home in Kosovo. When coming off the shuttle and into the bus station, she asked if we knew French. Unfortunately, none of us did. However she still wanted to help us. So she went up to the bus station window and spoke in Serbian to a lady to buy our tickets for our next stop to get closer to our host family.
The waitresses- We stopped at a restaurant for food. Even greater than desiring food, water was a MUST. I was definitely parched and dehydrated. As we finished our meal, and were about to leave the restaurant the waitresses asked us where we were going/what we were doing (because of all of our huge backpacking bags that we were carrying around). My team and I described that we were traveling the world doing ministry, IMMEDIATELY without hesitation one of the waitresses says “water” and holds out her hand to fill our water bottles. Shocked in disbelief, I thought how did she know?! How did she know that moments ago I was pleading for water and without hesitation she freely gave it to us.
My team and I proceeded to look for an ATM and after much searching we found one that worked. From then we looked for a SIM card to put in our prepaid phone just to call our team mentor who was in Serbia. Thankfully, I got a call with her to explain that we would arrive to Kosovo from a bus around 4:30am. As soon as I spoke this, she was put at ease, but then the phone cut off. In that moment, I couldn’t read the Serbian phone instructions and therefore couldn’t even call our host to tell them we were coming. Okay, I thought I have to trust God.
The man on the bus- As the team and I got into the bus, we thought we were going to have to split up which was nerve-racking considering we all were still unsure about everything. Luckily a man who again didn’t speak English said to me in hand gestures “you can sit anywhere.” “Really?!” I thought wow thank you God we don’t have to split up and thank you for this man. My team and I got the top back of the double-decker bus, said our prayers and left. 7 more hours.
In the middle of our ride, the bus stopped and police officer came up the bus. He takes our passports and walks away. All of us had a lump in our throats like what was going to happen, as if we did something wrong. After a few minutes of wondering where is he taking our passports?!! He returned and said the most refreshing words we all were waiting to hear. “Welcome, you have crossed the border into Kosovo.” Praise Jesus we are here.
Shortly after that, we arrived in Pristina bus station which is in Kosovo. Praying and hoping we could contact our host family somehow. We went up to a man working in the bus station and asked for a working phone, he showed us where one was but not only was it all in Albanian but we could only work it with Euro’s (which we didn’t have). Therefore, I went up to the man at the station and he let us use a phone in their office to call our host. After finally communicating with them they assured us they will be there soon. By the time we got to our apartment we were staying at, it was 5:00 am.
There were many times throughout this travel day that I thought LORD, you have GOT to intervene. The funny thing was, God intervened the ENTIRE TRIP! The Lord taught me that I just needed to take off the blindfold of things being perfect or working a certain way. He is working in the chaos of life. Crazy part is, this is DAY ONE and I know the Lord has a lot more to come.
