Faster! Faster! Chinatown! Faster! Faster!
The bus pulls over to the side of the road quickly and these words are thrown at us in rapid succession from our bus driver. Our team is so confused because this is not the plan. We are not supposed to get dropped off here, but trying to communicate with an angry bus driver with limited English is not working so well, so off the bus we go. We stuff our iPods into our backpacks and scramble to get our big packs from underneath the bus before he pulls away with everything we own. It’s dark and a little after nine and we are in panic mode.
“Does everyone have their stuff?”
“Yes, yes, yes, we’re good.”
“Ok.”
We swing our belongings onto the sidewalk and try to breathe for a minute.
Rewind a few hours back.
It’s 4pm and we had just landed in Malaysia (beautiful airport by the way) and we find out that our contact is about to have a baby and that we should stay in the capital for the night. Ladies and gentlemen, the Race just got real for us. After our cush living situation in the Philippines, we were jolted into the reality of the Race. Find shelter. Find transportation. Go! So the guys went online and found us a hostel an hour away; shelter-check! Next, we needed to figure out how to get to the hostel.
Thankfully, we were able to talk to the lady at the bus station and thought that we had worked out a plan with the bus driver to drop us off at the train station to buy train tickets and afterwards bring us to our hostel, but no, no, no, that was not the case. Instead, we were evicted from the bus after a peaceful hour-long bus ride and became overwhelmingly aware that this was not a game, this was not a dream, we are really out here in the middle of southeast Asia.
Fast forward back to the present.
We are safe at our new ministry site with an awesome contact who really loves God and loves this community and I just look back and am so grateful. I am so grateful that we all got off that bus. I am so grateful that we all got our belongings. I am so grateful that no one was hurt, even though there were some near misses. I am so grateful that we made it to the hostel easy. I am so grateful for so many things.
Of course, it did not go as planned, but hey we signed up for the Race. You are to expect the unexpected and become accustomed to surrendering expectations and plans. This is our lives now.
To end on a fun note, because our plans were changed, we were able to spend some time in the capital exploring and it was so fun! I am really loving Malaysia and I really love you!
What do you do when your life doesn’t go as planned?
Are holding on to the truth in Romans 8:28 that all things work together for the good?
