Dear blog:
A
long time ago in a place far, far away we had World Race training camp. (Speaking
of Star Wars: Two of my teammates have never seen a Star Wars movie. Please
pray for team unity and that we still love them like we did before, as this
discovery was quite hard to stomach for the rest of us.) Any who, at camp there
was a schedule, but it wasn’t revealed to us until right before hand, and this
was the source of many a camp joke. We were to trust that the staff knew what
they were doing. (I’m still pretty sure a few people got zapped with the memory
erasing Men In Black light for discovering the full schedule.) At the time, I
thought that keeping us in the dark was pretty silly (pretty silly being a
euphemism for it kinda made me angry) because I absolutely love routine and
schedule. Well, I’d like to take the time to apologize to Adventures in
Missions because that’s exactly the atmosphere we started our race in. Little
information and no choice but to have lots of faith. But you know what? It’s
worked. Every time I feel like I have no clue what’s going on God sends me
somebody who does.
After
being here one day with the team leaders (love you team leaders!) to accomplish
some logistical things, I met up with my team at the Kiev airport 6 days ago
and immediately we hopped on a bus to the train station for a 9-hour overnight
train ride to Odessa. I had our tickets, but I had no idea what they said. The
whole ticket was in Russian or Ukrainian, and I knew how to get to the train
station, but that was it. English miracle #1: the man behind me on the bus
spoke perfect English and told me exactly what my ticket said and how to get to
our train. Thanks God!
We
found our train and discovered we had sleeper cars, but had no clue which rooms
were ours. Don’t worry, English miracle #2: my teammate Jonathan met a guy from
Uzbekistan who spoke English and Russian and showed us our seats and upon
discovering our tickets had us all split up in different cars, made sure none of
our girls were left alone in a car by asking some people to trade cars. I had
the pleasure of sharing a car and the night with 3 Ukrainians who I’m pretty
sure were heavily amused by my friends and me. Also, I use the term sleeper car
loosely because with the mix of heat and snoring there wasn’t really much of
that going on for me, but regardless we still pulled up at Odessa right on time
at 6:12 A.M.
I
had spoken with my contact a couple of times, but I wasn’t positive our arrival
time had been successfully communicated and my further attempts to reach her
weren’t working, so I honestly didn’t know if we’d have someone waiting for us
at the train station. I had prayed for someone to be there while I wasn’t
sleeping the night before, but I was still doubtful. Well, I hadn’t been out of
the train for more than 20 seconds when a man in an Indiana University shirt
and a woman come up and say they are here to give us a ride. The woman speaks
no English and despite his shirt, I quickly discover the man, Maxime, speaks
only passable English. But I trust
them and we all follow them and pile in to their van. I mentally reviewed every
24 episode in my mind on the drive and thought of what Jack Bauer moves I would
use to save my team if they were in fact Soviet terrorist kidnappers, but as
you can probably guess they weren’t – I don’t think Soviet terrorist kidnappers
usually let you blog. How these people knew to be there is beyond me, but I’m
positive prayer brought them there.
We’re
taken to house we’re staying at- a house specifically for missionaries owned by
a family currently in the US, so that means we’re with several Ukrainians who
despite not always knowing what they’re saying are wonderful people. Despite
the confusion and lack of information, the people we’re working with are
incredible people and believers who have sacrificed much to give their life to
helping Ukrainian children. Maxime
is actually not a Soviet terrorist kidnapper, but in fact a preacher who helps
with gypsy churches, and He is also a constant source of comic relief. They’re
truly an inspiration, and I love them but the first several days were
definitely a little crazy.
Upon
our arrival at this house, we deciphered we would be working with gypsy
children sometime: maybe later that day, maybe the next. That’s basically how
it went for the first 3 days. We thought we had an idea of what was going on,
but were generally wrong. We’d be told at 1:45 dinner was at 4:00 and be eating
ten minutes later, or that we’d go to gypsy camp from 10:00 to 11:00 and not
leave our house until 10:50 and get back around 2:00. Normally this would drive
me insane, but somehow it didn’t. God has filled me with a supernatural peace throughout the
last couple of weeks that I know comes from Him and is there because of the
prayers being said for my team and I. I absolutely can feel your prayers, so
please continue.
It
helped that my team was awesome at handling this situation. It would be so easy
to get frustrated at the lack of information and even frustrated at me because
I’m team leader and surely I knew more than I really did, but they never did.
We just went with the flow whenever and wherever it took us knowing it was
where God wanted it to take us.
Day
2 of camp came with probably our biggest and definitely best surprise of the
trip when we discovered English miracle #3: Brittany, a seminary student
studying here who is from Wisconsin!! God bless America. There’s no way we
could have survived as well as we have without her and she is an absolute
blessing from the Lord. She’s shown us around town including the grocery store,
ATM and even the nearest Black Sea beach.
After
several days of unknown gypsy camp schedules and a couple of days of
frustratingly doing nothing, Wednesday night God finally decided to put an end
to this test he’s been putting me through and give me some information for more
than the next 12 hours. I wish I could say I constantly passed this test with
flying colors, but I know it was just a trial to refine me and grow me. I got a
call from my main contact asking me about all the details for the ministry
we’ve been doing and answered all the big questions I still had remaining. She explained
she had passed all the information along, but just now realized all the
information didn’t continue on as far as it should have. It was an incredible
conversation that concluded with her assuring me that she was praying for our
team. God has blessed us with little things like this constantly to assure us
He’s still got our back at all times.
We’ve
done some really great stuff with the gypsy children at their camp from Friday
to Sunday and got to begin working again with them Thursday, and I’ll make sure
to tell you all about it in my next blog that I hope will come much sooner than
this one did. So sorry I haven’t updated you yet especially since your support
really does mean so much to me. I’ll leave you with one fun Ukraine story until
next time.
Wednesday,
we trekked to McDonald’s for it’s free wi-fi to watch the USA World Cup game
online. We had hoped to find a restaurant around us to watch on a real TV, but
forgot England was playing at the same time and that was the game being shown
here. So I watched the game huddled around a McDonald’s table off a Web site
streaming a Spanish broadcast of the game. The game was tense and US had to win
to advance to the next round and with only 2 minutes left in the game we
finally scored a goal to win the game. I, along with a couple of teammates,
jump out of my seat and yell quite loudly…I’ve never stuck out so much in my
life as every head turned and stared. I tried to put myself in their shoes and
picture myself as the foreigner and had to laugh. How would you react if you
were in the McDonald’s and the same happened to you? Definitely a cool experience. I would have laughed at you if you told
me last year I would be watching the USA game in the Odessa, Ukraine McDonald’s
but I’m so glad I was.
Thanks
for your support and prayers and keep it up. I truly do feel them.
