A very long, very good story

(I started this post Thursday night and finished it on the flight home from Jo'burg to Atlanta)



Ha! I know you thought this would be a blog about Jennifer's trip to Africa.

A place where you could follow along with my adventures in this beautiful land. But our days have been so full. I could tell a story, but so many of them demand some processing time for me. And so.....there's a bit of storytelling delay.



In the spirit of delay--I'll copy/paste this story from my journal....

I wrote it on the flight from Atlanta to Johannesburg. The background is this: I hate flying. I don't trust or like my panic brain in that context. As I began this trip, my flight from PDX to Atlanta was delayed. We sat on the plane for 2 hours while they figured out if we were going to go or not. About an hour and a half into the wait I called home and Ethan wanted to know if I was in Africa yet. In fact, I was discovering that my 5 hour delay in Atlanta was no longer enough and I would not make my connecting flights with the new scheduled departure. After I stood in long rescheduling lines, my Dad and the boys picked me up. Ryan and Ethan were completely unaffected by the fact that Mommy's 12 day trip was actually only about 7 hours. But I was rattled.

And my panic brain grabbed ahold of the opportunity. I no longer had the confidence that I'd been feeling the 2 weeks prior to the trip. I wanted to stay home where I belonged

Thankfully, people had been and were praying for me.



I took a short nap, and went outside to pull weeds with the boys playing around me. That is my world. The place where I find peace. And in the process I found courage.....I knew I had to go. About 4:30 the next morning David and I set off to try again. Having learned from the previous day's dress rehearsal, this morning went very smoothly. Confidence was restored.



As I sat on the PDX to Atlanta flight waiting for passengers to board and settle, I noticed a lady standing in the aisle with a Zambian flag pin on her jacket. The only reason I recognized the Zambian flag was because I had just redone the WaterAfrica website and had studied the Zambian flag for a color scheme. I looked again and this time I noticed that she was also wearing a World Vision pin. So I asked her about her pins and she had just enough time to tell me that her organization partnered with World Vision in Zambia and they were traveling there now. Seriously.



When we got off the plane in Atlanta I asked them if I could tag along to find the next plane. They graciously took me under their wings and I didn't have to do a thing, but follow. We ate lunch together and kept an eye on each other's stuff as we waited during our 5 hour layover. It turns out their daughter was in the Peace Corps in northern Zambia when she had a bike accident 8 years ago and died from head injuries. Unbelievable. Their response has been to form http://www.bethsgirls.org



I had had an aisle seat in the exit row on my way to Atlanta and I kept nervously eyeing the window seat of non-exit rows because that's where I was going to be stuck on this 16 hour flight. I worried about my panic brain.

As soon as I crawled into my spot here I started a conversation with the lady sitting next to me. Turns out she and her husband are from South Africa and she's done this flight many times. She immediately put me at ease--remarkably so. Her husband George is a regional manager for Gideons International and travels a lot for them. I told her what I was doing and she knew World Vision because she has a friend who works for World Vision. So we talked about all that and other odds and ends.



But here's the amazing part...we were eating dinner later, talking a bit and I found myself telling about my panic brain. When I looked up at her she had tears in her eyes. She said she had just told George that the Lord told her to take care of me for a little while. Seriously. I'm sitting by angels. I can hardly believe it. God is obviously paying attention to my journey. I'm grateful for the prayers.