I, Carrie, headed to our new city for 2 days to get some apartment stuff ready. It was a wonderfully crazy 2 days of shopping and planning. Brad and I then met in Beijing on July 4th. Our sweet friend, DY was armed and ready to watch our kids for the week.
When Brad and I travel, we have a game day drink that helps get us through the day. Here we are just a couple of hours before boarding.
And here I am just after landing. It was wild to travel with just the two of us. I actually watched a movie, read a book, slept and ate an entire meal all by myself. I had read to expect our luggage to be lost, but we had no problems with anything. After exchanging money, we went out to meet our agency guy. He didn't get the notice that we were traveling from Beijing and not the States, so we had a little mix-up on the pick-up. But we eventually got to where we were supposed to be.
Once we got to our guest house, our agency guy asked us if "we were going to see our little girl today?" We said "no, we will see her tomorrow." This was what the schedule had said, but we found out later on that his question meant that we could see her today. We discovered the miscommunication and were set to see her later on in the afternoon.
In the meantime, we invited ourselves with another family to go to a church service.
Here's Brad with the girl of the family that we went with. It was interesting because she was raised Orthodox and so was really upset at being in a Protestant service. She speaks a minority dialect, so it was tough to get out the whole story. She went running out of the service. So I went outside with her and several other kids and we made up games with rocks, grass and dirt.
It was awesome to get to worship in another language. Something about that dynamic is really powerful to me. It's such a reminder of the church as a whole and how we will one day worship in full community. The music was amazing and it was not at all a quiet, somber service. I loved it.
The church was centered in the middle of a Somalian pocket of town. We were told that they are very conservative and strict in their religious life. But the church works a lot with that community and has seen some amazing fruit.
Ok, so I realize that we haven't even picked her up, but I'm going to leave the rest for the next post because this one is getting lengthy. So the next installment will include the dramatic pick up.
