As I sit here in my beautiful little apartment up on the 26th floor in the middle of Harbin China, I am blown away by the providence and grace of God. I was not expecting this nice of accommodations coming into my first month of the race or on the race in general.
We left the US on September 10 to fly to China. After a weekend full of team bonding, safety scenarios and numerous meeting, our squad was ready to leave. We shuttle all 46 of us to the airport and left on a 14 ½ hour plane ride to Seoul which was filled with movies, a little sleeping and interesting Korean food. Once we landed in Korea, we had an hour and a half layover and then we flew 2 ½ to China. We made it through customs, got all our bags and after numerous stares and pictures taken by our Chinese counterparts, we all piled in a bus and made it to our hostel in Beijing for the night.
The next morning we woke up bright and early and set out to find breakfast for our team, as well as food we could eat for the rest of the day. At 930 our squad got together and headed towards the Beijing Subway station to travel to the train stations. We then embarked on a 19 hour train ride from Beijing to Harbin at 1:30 pm which was crazy. Our stuff was everywhere, we had day packs and gear hanging from the luggage rack, we got very little sleep from the rigged seats and ended up playing a lot of games, bonding as a squad and just trying to entertain ourselves. We arrived in Harbin at 9:30 am on Sept 13, four days after we started our original travel. Though this travel day was long and tiring, our squad had such a good attitude! We were always looking for ways to entertain and serve one another throughout this journey.
When we arrived in Harbin, we met up with our contact, Jake, and headed to our new home which are these awesome apartments in the middle of the city. We spent the weekend relaxing, catching up on sleep, exploring the city, finding good and cheap places to eat and learning simple things like how to cross a five way cross walk without signs. We also found out what our ministry is going to be this month. Our squad is broken up into four teams and each team is assigned to a different neighbor hoods to scout out the area, try to get a rough estimate of the population of the neighborhood, find day cares to minister to and just pray over the area. We are also each assigned a university which will be ministering too. Our goal is to connect with students, meet with them, telling them why we are hear and hopefully making disciples. A lot of the ministry we are doing is based on the relationships and connections that we make with the people we meet in the university. My team and I are very excited to see how the Lord is going to work in and through the people we meet. We have already made some connections with people and we are so excited to see what the Lord is going to do with these connections and how is going to work through in and through their lives.
Please pray that we can reach the heart of the university students and the people in the area we are ministering too. Pray that our team continues to come closer and closer together. I am still about 3000 away from being fully funded. Please pray that the Lord continues to provide the funds we need. Thank you all for your love and support!
