Sitting in the plane ride from Atlanta heading towards Boston I sat there trying to figure out what I wanted to say in this blog. I had the ideas of what happened at launch, saying goodbye to the people and the comforts of home, how excited I was for what God has in store for me and my squad in these nine months. And honestly God put something a lot heavier on my heart.
Since we have a 14 hour layover in Boston before we leave for Qatar we got to go out and explore some of the city. So me and a few my squadmates went on a freedom trail through downtown Boston, where it showed different historical sites like where the Boston Massacre was. And of course being the “lazy and entitled” generation that we are we definitely didn’t want to walk there when we already had to walk down this trail. So we got an Uber to take us from the airport to where this trail started. Now this driver was very quiet and didn’t really want to talk no matter how hard I tried and trust me I tried.
Once he dropped us off we went to find a place to eat because most of us hadn’t really slept since two nights before, because of a early morning flight, and we were all very hungry. I had some very amazing clam chowder. But anyway we start walking down this trail looking at all these beautiful historic buildings, statues and the occasional cool trinkets in gift shops. But we also had to be back at the airport by 1:30 because we split in half, half stayed at the airport to watch our belongings while the other half went to explore and 1:30 was our time to switch.
At this point my group was pretty ready to come back so we called another Uber to take us to the airport. And we come to find out that this guy drives a super nice looking Mercedes Benz. So we got super excited about that. And we are even more blown away by what he has to say. His name was Gil and he was originally from Portugal and was a immigrant to the United States. His passion for God and to just speak truth, life, and wisdom into was purely astonishing. The entire way to the airport he was talking about how to love one another. He talked about how equality is so important. He talked about how one persons culture, language, or even food is different from ours but still needs to respected.
The wisdom that he poured into us was so perfect for this time in our lives as we are about to head into a completely different part of life that people are living in. He really made a impact on how I was looking at the race in the 15 minutes that he driving us to the airport. And before we got out of the car we got the opportunity to pray over him and he prayed over us and our trip. It was a crazy God moment about how it all played out.
So I would like to end this post on a spiritual note. I feel like this verse really captures the way that Gil wanted to impact our work that we are about to set out and do. “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.”
??Colossians? ?3:12? ?NIV??
