Jul
12
Wow, over a week has passed since I’ve updated. So sorry! So much goodness is going on over here in Belgium it’s ridiculous! God’s fingerprints are all over this trip and it’s amazing to see God provide over and over again.
We have some open beds at the hostel, which has allowed us to invite other people in and hang with us. We’ve “adopted” two guys into our family. Alex from Flotrack and Charlie, a distance runner (shocker, God keeps placing distance runners in my life!)
It has been fun to do life with them. Experiencing Belgium for the second time has been so much better. I feel like I have an idea of what I’m doing and my team is so wonderful. They’re all about ministry and are so flexible. They’re willing to serve wherever is needed and honestly, this isn’t a team…it’s a family. We bonded so well right from the beginning and the bond continues to grow stronger as we serve and live together…as we experience Belgium together.
There was one bad day. Honestly, it wasn’t that awful, but for me, it was horrible. One of our guys went off shopping and lost track of time. We thought he’d be back for lunch, but lunch came and went. Team time came and he still hadn’t shown up. Obviously, I was completely catapulted back to Florida. He finally came back and I didn’t know whether to hug him or slug him. Eventually I told him he was grounded.
But I just couldn’t shake the Florida feeling. It still hurts and the wounds are so fresh. I think with our summer projects, it has been easy to suppress the feelings to deal with at a later date. Unfortunately, they just happened to pop up at an inconvenient time.
The ministry here continues to flourish. We keep meeting more and more people. We went to a local church – ICEL. They had a missionary lady speak and she talked about prayer…one thing she said that was really good was that the loss of control leads people to pray. But sometimes we view prayer as a way to regain that control, not necessarily to surrender that control to God. She also said that when we are in the presence of God, our perspective changes – our perspective on ourselves, our perspective on our enemy, and our perspective on God.
Yesterday, we took a trip up to Holland. I was hoping to bring the team to the Corrie ten Boom house, but apparently they’re closed on Mondays…woops! But we did stop by the house and walked around Haarlem. We went to Amsterdam and got to tour the place where Anne Frank and her family hid during WWII. Amsterdam is an interesting place. My friend loves that city – maybe because it’s a good place for busking, but I’m not a huge fan. I loved Haarlem, though!
Tonight will be fun. Dinner party planned for 15-20 people. The 10 originals, my two adopted boys, our hostel owner, our Belgian pole vaulter friends and possibly some other American athletes.
My prayer is that through us, they see the love of Christ.