They Made It! (Physically)

What a wonderful chaotic mess! It started with the Pack and Pray Party Wednesday night. Large duffels were drug in filled with donated baseball equipment. Then a hundred pairs of donated pants and bags of school supplies had to be delicately shoved in and around the bats, balls, and cleats. It was, once again, a "loaves and fish" moment except this time it was the duffel bags that seemed to keep multiplying.

(The size of said duffels is roughly two of what you see in the picture and although there were only 11 it seemed like there were dozens. And they were red and black and blue.)

Each bag had to weigh only 50 pounds. Mama J brought a couple of cool devices to ensure that was the case. They looked like this:

And, boy are they nifty! I think one bag was repacked 4 times just so that people could take turns using this little gem.

We also found out that there was a potential snag in the trip...the leaders of the group needed "religious visas" so the team could work with the church down there. Without those everyone would be simply a tourist and it would be illegal to have contact with any of the scheduled guides or contacts. That means taking a bunch of Junior High students into a communist country with no national language help or advocates. This would not be good and the trip would have to be postponed or canceled. Much of the prayer time done by several of us that night was for those visas to come in.

It was nearly 11 pm by the time we were done packing and praying and weighing and cleaning up after ourselves.

Not until Thursday afternoon did we find out that God graciously provided the religious visas and the trip was absolutely, positively a go!

So far, this is starting to sound like a typical Bryan vacation, isn't it?

~m