I always felt that I was doing well with not having expectations on this trip. But I soon realized that anger comes up when expectations are not met. I also didn’t know these expectations were there until they were not met. One expectation is that when a time is set to do something it happens at that time. . Another expectation I had was that I would be busy doing work like everyone else on all workdays. Some days they ask for volunteers to do certain things or they put you into teams if you are not already responsible for something. One day my team all had previous responsibilities. I was supposed to meet with a contact at 10am. Well 10:45 came around and I was still at the house waiting. I was able to attend one of our intercession groups in the mean time. Finally after lunch at 1 pm I was able to help my contact. The task was to replace a mirror on the ministry van. We had to travel to a nearby village to it. On our way back we picked up another team and brought them back for they were done with their ministry.
It was hard for me that day. I felt like I wasted an entire day when everyone else was hard at work doing ministry and I felt like I did very little with a lot of down time. I now realize that sometimes we do have down time, and we should take that time to rest and draw closer to God. Our main focus this month is to minister to our contacts and to support them in their ministry and not completely about us ministering to the people.
Planning on the world race is a day-to-day thing. We never really know what we will be doing until the night before at the earliest. My team was sent on a 2 day 1 night trip to the village of Lisa, which is about 40 minutes away from our ministry base. So we planned on that with our clothing and food supply. After we got there we found out there was a translation issue and we were actually going to be gone 3 days and 2 nights. We didn’t have enough food and we didn’t have church clothes packed. Several other incidents changed our plans for the weekend also.
We were surprised to have an evening off during our 3 day trip with a night out in Slatina. We met an American team doing ministry in the park and enjoyed the sunset.
Oh yeah forgot to mention, I think my laptop got a fried power supply or something, so “planning” on using that is gone for writing blogs and messing with photos. So until I can get it fixed, I am to rely on other racer's laptops to write my blogs. Shout out to http://laceyodonnell.theworldrace.org/ for letting me use her laptop to write this blog!
God provided as He always does, and He got us more food and clothing for those that needed it for church. What I have learned in all of this is to take the down time to relax and be prepared for whatever comes up next. Embrace the constant change of plans knowing that whatever happens it is going to work out fine. The end is still the same, “I’m on the World Race!”
