Driving Fast Through a Strange Country

Our team arrived in this amazing city a couple of hours ago.  There’s an energy here that lets you know right away this is a place on the move. People everywhere and all of them rushing to get somewhere. New buildings going up as far as you can see. Two-thousand-year-old ruins resting next to modern apartments. Mosques with their distinctive minarets dot the skyline and calls to prayer echo through the streets throughout the day. And perhaps most critically, expressways crammed from curb to curb with traffic with our host careening through it like Danica Patrick at the Daytona 500 as he took us from the airport to our home for the next few days. I thought I was gonna die.

All our material arrived safely. Our friends are super excited.

We met up with our good friends when we arrived at our destination. Here’s David with Jake. David’s the one with the dark glasses on.  Jake’s the one with a dazed expression after undergoing 18 hours of travel followed by 1 hour of race car driving.

Karla and Pam were glad to see each other, too. Many of you will remember that David and Karla spent a while with us last summer.

We’re staying in a guest house here, a center for training and hospitality that David uses to reach out to people throughout the region. A real blessing. People are housed here (in fact, one young man, a believer, from a closed country is living here right now while his family is actually living in our country), taught here and find a place of peace and encouragement here. A pretty cool place.

We’re waiting now for dinner, which will include some national dishes—and a lot of them, I hope. Meetings begin tomorrow with our partners in country as well as back home.