I am now over 25% of the way through my time on the field with B Squad. It’s flying by, much faster than I imagined it would.
A lot has happened in the first quarter of the journey, and I realized most of you don’t know about those things. My bad.
So allow me to tell you a few of the stories from the first part of this Race.
I started with Team Anchors, serving in Sombor, Serbia for about 10 days. During our time there, we met a young man who loved spending time with us. He was not a believer, but was willing to engage in conversation about God with us. We spent one evening with him, after he came to church with us, hearing about his life and all the things that were not satisfying him. We were able to share how Jesus has satisfied that desire within each of us and invite him to pray to God to fill that for him. He was open to try, but not to commit because, in his words, he hasn’t had an experience with it. For it to be real, he needs to experience something. For a better written and more detailed account of this night, check out Lindsey’s blog here. http://lindseykappler.theworldrace.org/post/i-prayed-but-it-didnt-work
Lindsey (the other Squad Leader, not the Lindsey whose blog I just linked to) and I met up after the first part of the month to travel together to our 3rd team who was serving in Kosovo, Team Undivided. The trip started with us buying tickets from Novi Sad, where Lindsey was with Team United, to Belgrade so we could catch a bus in Belgrade down to Pristina, Kosovo. We bought our tickets and waited outside of the bus terminal until about 10 minutes before the bus was going to leave. When we tried to go through the gate, the woman working there told us, “No. This is bus. You have train tickets.” What?! So we high-tailed it to the other part of the station (thankfully it was the same place) to where the train was and made it on with a few minutes to spare. When we got to Belgrade, it took us about 15 minutes to find where to buy our bus tickets down to Kosovo. We found the window finally around 4:05 and asked when the next bus was leaving. We came to find out they had stopped selling tickets for the bus leaving at 4:20 just 5 minutes ago and we would have to wait until 9:30, 5 hours later. So we did, which put us into Pristina, Kosovo around 4:00 am. Yay travel days..
At the end of our first month, B Squad came together in Belgrade, Serbia for Month 1 Debrief. Debrief, in short, is a time for the squad to rest and reflect on what the Lord did in the past month. A chance for leadership to check in with individuals and with teams, and to encourage and challenge as we all move forward together. A few things we talked a lot about at this debrief were hearing from God, rest, vulnerability, and having intentional norms, things to fight for, in your life. Zach wrote about (and posted a video) his experience with stepping into vulnerability and you can check it out here. http://zachlambert.theworldrace.org/index.asp?filename=vulnerability-hangover-part-i
After debrief, we traveled to Romania as a squad where we are now for All Squad Month. We spent a couple of days having orientation for the month before starting ministry. On our first day of ministry I woke up not feeling so good. My body was achy all over and it wasn’t long before I developed a pretty good sized headache. I took the afternoon off to try and sleep it away, but without any success. I got out of bed late at night to go to the bathroom one last time when things took a turn for the worse. I made it down the stairs (praise the Lord) before getting really light-headed. I was able to get myself to a sitting position on the floor before I lost consciousness. The next thing I remember was waking up on the floor with blood all over the back of my hand from a cut I had got above my eye as I fell. Thankfully Mack was in the bathroom when this happened and he did a wonderful job of taking care of me. The call was made for me to go to the hospital so about midnight we loaded up the car and headed on over. It was about a 20 minute ride and I passed out one more time in the car before we got there. We got to the hospital and they got an IV in me and ran a few tests, including some blood work. What we ultimately came to find out was it was a combination of a viral infection (with a fever), low blood pressure, stress or tiredness, and a slightly low iron count. There was thankfully no head trauma from the fall, but I do have a brain scan hanging on the wall of our kitchen now. And a chest x-ray. (Picture below) I ended up checking in to the hospital on Saturday night and not leaving until Tuesday afternoon. It was awful because I felt good enough to leave, if not fully recovered, on Sunday afternoon. But because I was an American they wanted to make sure they did everything they could before they released me so nothing would come back to bite them. I felt very trapped and went a little stir crazy. But it’s fine, the Lord is teaching me a few things through it all. I’ll probably end up with a blog about it at some point.
There are many more things to tell about but now you have at least a small snapshot into the last 6 weeks. We have a couple more weeks here in Romania, before we head to Malawi and some warmer weather. We are looking forward to celebrating Thanksgiving together this week and will be trying to make all our favorite foods. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Let me end this post with a few pictures from the month, several of which are from my time in the hospital. Thanks for reading!
My CT scan and chest X-ray really tie the room together.
The cut on my eye needed one stitch, but thankfully it is now out! I also cut my nose a bit.
I had a needle in my arm from Saturday night until Tuesday afternoon. I was glad to get it out.
They don’t believe in hospital gowns, but they do believe in old man pajamas. Also, that’s not my blood on the leg…
You could tell they were really high quality from the giant hole in the crotch.
It hasn’t been all sunshine this month (literally actually) so we’ve really celebrated the moments when it has been.
And I will leave you with this. We stopped at a monastery on our way through Romania and came across this view.
