the moment we've all been waiting for

So, Tuesday was pretty normal (especially compared to the appendicitis-scare fiasco), and we were just learning from our speaker, Josh Menning, about the character and nature of God. Which has been really cool – he is so knowledgeable and passionate and we’ve all really enjoyed it a lot.

Tuesday afternoons are our “outreach prep” time, and at the beginning of it, Josie told us that the staff just hadn’t reached a decision about who was on what team, and they weren’t ready to release any information to us. So, we just talked for a while about general things that would be helpful on any outreach. So eventually we started talking about perspective and how important it was for us to have perspective, and Josie said we were going to play a game to get us in the right mindset. So, she said they were going to hand out a piece of paper to each of us and we had to find other people whose cards related to ours, and the pictures on each card would correspond and make a story that we had to figure out. So they hand out the cards, and tell us to open them. And what does mine have on it? A picture of an airplane with the South African flag on it. And truth be told - I really wanted to be on the South Africa team. So I’m sitting there, a little upset, because I’m thinking “why did they give me this picture? Now, if I got put on a different team, I would admittedly be pretty upset, As other people started coming to me with other South Africa-related pictures, we started trying to put the story together. As we are trying to do this, Josie says, “Okay, so let’s really try to work together to finish the stories, because… these are your outreach teams!”

Immediately we all kind of freaked out, did a big group hug, and were just so excited. And something else that’s great - - Erin is coming too! It’s me & Erin, Rachel (London), Minsoo (Maryland), Rebekka (Norway), Elise (Texas), Mikkel (Norway) and our staff leader is Andy (England). It’s a GREAT team – we all get along super well and just have really complimentary personality types. A guy who is in one of the other outreach teams made the comment that if we all were in outreach team Olympics, our team would win. I think that sums it up. :)

Anyway we are all VERY excited and have tons to do now… even though we won’t leave until the end of December, I know it will be here before we know it!