We made it!

Anyone following the travel drama on Facebook or Twitter last night knows that we had quite an adventure getting here.

Reminiscent of a recent trip I had from Seattle for work a week and a half before, the plane that was supposed to take us to Prague for our connecting flight to Tallinn did not show up to the gate, and our flight to Prague was delayed out multiple times for "maintenance" reasons.  This was causing us a little bit of concern because we only really had a 2 hour layover scheduled in Prague - good if your flights are on time, but in the situation we found ourselves in a little nerve racking.

Eventually, Delta pulls a "new" (one of us commented that it may have been the original Delta 767 plane purchased from Boeing) plane out to fly us to Prague and we eventually take off at 8:15pm (or 2 1/2 hours after we were scheduled to leave).  From that point, and my Facebook status of "pray for us!", we knew that our chances of catching our original connection were somewhere between "slim" and "none."  But we trusted that God would enable us to get there, and I knew from experience that what we think of as "Plan B" in many times is God's "Plan A" because he isn't so much concerned about our smooth travel as in our trusting completely in Him.

Anyways - short story.  I fall asleep and wake up about an hour before we land in Prague.  We land at the airport exactly 15 minutes before our Tallinn flight is scheduled to take off, and it takes us a long time to get off the plane.  With the walking through the airport and having to go through security, I'm looking forward to day full of airports and strange transfer flights.  And then we walk off the plane....

And greeting us is a cute little blonde Czech girl from the airline with a sign reading "Tallinn 9" with an escort from Czech Airways that tells us to follow him and he'll get us to our flight.  He gives us passes to rush us through security and Czech Airways holds the flight for us, and we board our scheduled flight to Tallinn.  The pilot did mention as they were taking off:  "Sorry about the delay, we held the flight because some Americans were late."  Ha Ha.  Good times.

An hour and a half later, we are meeting Innar in Tallinn.  Okay, we do not have our bags, but who cares about bags... we are in ESTONIA... ON TIME... AS SCHEDULED.  Based on Delta's delays and my recent history, this should not have happened.

Now you can't tell me that God doesn't have something awesome cooked up for us at this camp!

So, anyways we finish our day with a BBQ at Craig Hamner's house and right now I'm writing this blog from Daniel's house and am about to shower and get some much needed rest.  We are going through training for the camp tomorrow and on Sunday will be starting our adventure.  I'm excited!

Now, all that needs to happen is for our bags to arrive tomorrow :-).

We leave today :-)

Hey everyone... keep us in your prayers as we fly out today.

Instead of writing something with my prayer requests, I opted to do a video blog today.  This is my first attempt at iMovie and it was a little weird looking at myself record this, but I believe I got my thoughts out okay :-)




Thank you so much for your prayers and support.  I can't wait to tell you about what God's going to do through this trip!!!

Ciao!

Recycle

The trip is 8 days away, and I'm finally getting a new blog post in.

How to start it?

Maybe like Snoopy, I can start with:

"It was a dark and stormy night"

Actually, that part is true.  It IS a dark and stormy night tonight.  I'm not making that part up.

Perhaps a status report is in order, last weekend we met with some other folks that have been to Estonia before to pray for our journey.  Three weekends ago, we escaped Atlanta for a weekend to the beach at Hilton Head, thanks to Kevin's grandfather for donating his one bedroom, one bath condo for 6 singles for the two days.  6 people - one bathroom - that's a lesson in flexibility there.

We shared our stories with each other, and we Skyped with Daniel (the youth leader at Risttee) where we talked a little about the retreat details.  And you may have heard the retreat theme if you follow any of us on Facebook.  The theme is:

"Recycle your life"

Given what I wrote to my supporters when I started on this fourth journey to Estonia, this camp theme is definitely fitting.  And given the theme of our stories, this is what we experientially get to share with the students we are going to be hanging out with.  I like the theme, and here's why...

It's what they (and we) need.

Our lives are broken in some way, and we need to exchange it..

For something better.

Something useable.

Something valuable.

Something amazing.

And this is what God does with our lives, our mission, our relationships when we surrender up the broken things that are part of... wait.... are our lives.  Like an emptied, disgusting Coke bottle, he takes it...

And transforms it.

And fills it.

And returns something greater than what we gave up.

I'm excited to be talking about this over the course of the week.  Imagine not only what can be done with our lives when we surrender up what is ultimately useless, and we get back something infinitely valuable.  When we consider that these students are indeed the future leaders of Estonia, imagine what this could mean for a culture.

Exchanging the fear of Soviet past.  Exchanging mistrust.  Exchanging a life that depends on and ultimately ends with "me"

And getting hope.  Getting life.  Getting God's blessing.

That is awesome.  That is what I'm praying for.

Join me in this... will you be willing to pray bigger than you've ever prayed for Estonia before?  Are you willing to pray like you believe that God is as huge as He is.

I am.  So let's also recycle our prayer.

That nugget is free :-)