Salem Chapel Missions Blog

If you’ve been following along with the mini-updates, you’ve seen that we have had quite the start to our trip already. We left from the church office yesterday at 10:00 AM. At this point we are still in Chicago. There was a mechanical failure on our first flight out of GSO, delaying us 2 and a half hours. Once we landed in OHare we had 20 minutes to make our connection. It seemed unlikely but we had to try. After the sprint across the airport we arrived at our gate to watch our plane pulling out from the gate. It was now 4:30 PM.

Quick is not a word I would use to describe the process that it took to reroute us. It took around 4 1/2 hours to get us rebooked, get us a hotel, and get us food vouchers for dinner. We got to our hotel around 9 o’clock. After grabbing a nice dinner (by nice, I mean we dropped $200 on dinner of airline voucher money) we crashed into bed. The hotel was a definite bright spot in our travel fun. It was a sweet Crowne Plaza that the students would describe as “legit.”

That brings us to today. We are checked in and waiting to head out to Newark. As I type this post , however, the flight was delayed for 30 minutes due to weather. We are praying that the weather doesn’t get worse and more importantly that it does not delay our departing flight out of Newark. I will say this, the team is doing great! We are having a blast and taking each new twist in stride.

Continue to pray. It is so comforting to know that God is in control and that He is bigger than any airline issues.

On the side bar to the right, you can find Mini Updates. Throughout the trip, we are hoping to use Twitter to post small updates during the day. Granted we will be 7 hours ahead but the updates will be happening in real time here. We are hoping to post specific prayer requests so that you can be joining us through prayer.

The team is taking off in just two short days. There are still all of the last minute details to put in place before we leave. As we are gearing up to go we would love for you to join us in prayer. Here are some things that you can be praying:

Last Sunday at our team training we were talking about the need to understand differences in our culture from others. Everybody is ethnocentric. What I mean by that is everybody has some level of ethnocentricity in which they feel most comfortable in their own culture. On some levels this can lead to feeling that the way you grew up doing things and the social norms that you are used to are the best. Contrary to our feelings, different isn’t always wrong, most times it is just different. And that is okay.

Recognizing this, we as a team are doing everything we can to learn about the people and culture of Estonia. Paul wrote to the Corinthian church, “I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings.” We are reading some articles about the country’s history as well as current social trends. Additionally we watched the moving “The Singing Revolution.” This movie is a well done documentary that tells of the dramatic and peaceful revolution of 1988 which eventually led to the nations independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

We have begun our training process of the Estonia 09 trip. While the trip is still a couple of months away the team has been meeting together in preparation for the trip for the last several weeks. Here’s a look at the team this year: