Recent Travels

Over the Christmas holidays, Julie and I had the wonderful opportunity of being with family. This is often not the case with missionaries, but we were very blessed to see God working out detail after detail to allow us to go. For financial reasons, we decided to fly into Atlanta, Georgia and then rent a car at the airport and drive to Mississippi the first day of travel. The afternoon flights were delayed from the beginning due to weather which made a long day even longer. The drive from Atlanta to Clinton, MS is between six and seven hours and we were just getting started at around 7:30pm local time. It certainly didn’t help that I managed to miss the I-20 exit from the airport which added almost another hour to our drive. The first day was long with all of the traveling, but it was certainly enjoyable and we love watching God meet our needs as we go. We arrived in Clinton at around 5am local time (6am Atlanta time) and were greeted by Julie’s parents who so graciously got up when we arrived. It was so great to see them, even at that hour, which made the long day very worth it.

We spent a week with Julie’s family which included several birthday parties and a few (somewhat overwhelming, at times) Christmas celebrations. It was an extremely busy week with supporters to visit at Julie’s church in Hattiesburg, appointments to keep, friends and family to see, and last minute Christmas shopping to do. As busy as we were, we were so happy to be there with people that we love but don’t see often.

Two days before New Years, we left Clinton to make the drive back to Atlanta where we were met by Peter and Kristen Carroll, with whom we ate dinner at The Cheesecake Factory (amazing food!), and then rode with them to Augusta, GA. We stayed with my family for about a week and celebrated New Years with them. It was a wonderful, somewhat more relaxing time with family and friends. We were so blessed to be able to spend so much time with loved ones.

The day that we were to return, we woke up early to leave my parent’s house by 6am to make our morning flight out of Atlanta. As we were loading the car with our baggage, I decided to check my things to make sure I had everything I needed. I checked the pocket in my backpack for my passport and my heart sank when it wasn’t in there. We pulled the bags back out and began a frantic search. This was not the time to be looking for a passport! I was sweating from the stress and running around even though it was quite cold, and praying that we find it. We searched everywhere we could think of in the house but to no avail. Julie and my sister both searched my backpack pockets to double and triple check. We needed to go ahead and leave so I grabbed my birth certificate (this no longer works for travel, by the way) from my Dad’s office and we headed out to Atlanta. We ran into few problems at the airport and were very happy to be back in Merida when we arrived. I was still frustrated with myself for losing my passport again (this is the third or fourth time for me) and couldn’t figure out for the life of me where it could have been. I searched all of our baggage several times, including the backpack again. We asked our families to search the houses but they reported back that they had found nothing. Julie and I were a bit worried about the expense of buying yet another passport (about $100 US) but knew that it needed to be done since we had a trip planned to Belize in about a month (more on that in the next blog). I prayed about it a lot and asked God to either let me find the passport (which seemed quite hopeless at the time) or to allow us to have the money to buy another one, and to teach me how to keep track of things! Two days before I needed to go to the American consulate to order a new passport was a Sunday morning. I had time that morning to sit and read and pray for a while. I went to my trusty backpack to find a pen and thought I should take a moment to look one last time and then I would finally admit defeat in my search. I checked the same pockets that had been checked many times by several people and decided to pull out the user’s manual for my laptop to reach under it. There was nothing there. In the same moment, something wasn’t quite right about the manual so I opened it to find it…my passport!!! I was so thankful to God for showing me His greatness, even in little things. He is so good to us.

“This is my comfort in my affliction, that your promise gives me life.”
~Psalm 119:50