Missed Flights and Seeing the Lord’s Hand in Every Step of Our Journey by Selah Balli

Welcome to a story of missed flights, blessed strangers, rude workers, and seeing the Lord’s hand in every step of our journey thus far.

The day started off fairly typical for a travel day: get up early, get to the airport, wait with luggage, etc. And then our flight was delayed- but that’s still pretty typical and it didn’t mess anything up with our second and third flights and so we weren’t too worried. And then our flight was changed. Twice. But everything was still working out fine! We just had to adjust our plans a bit. Further, the Lord actually brought us a huge blessing in the midst of figuring out our “all over the place” flights named Olinka. Olinka is a beautiful, kind, God loving Ugandan woman who is a three time cancer survivor and became our friend in the couple of moments that we spent with her today. Not only was it a delight to meet her, hear about her breast cancer awareness organization, and to rejoice in the Lord with her, but she also gifted us with more free checked bags than we should have had. A kindness from the Lord.

After saying goodbye to Olinka and running to our new flight to Seattle (it was originally meant to be Portland) we had a quick and easy flight, where we waited excited for what is to come. During the flight one of our team members, Savannah Johnson, actually got to share the gospel story and pray over a woman who had never heard the gospel before. It is beautiful to see the Lord work in the middle of “messed up” plans. Additionally, during this flight we found out that thousands of more dollars had been given to us to print discipleship workbooks for the highschools we will be visiting. Thank you Lord!

When we arrived in Seattle we had to get our boarding passes for our following flights because we were never given them in LAX (a nuance in our minds). The Lord in His kindness revealed more of His plan to us through this “inconvenience” though. For those of you who do not know, my grandmother, Sandi, was in Burundi for the first time in her life doing a women’s conference two weeks ago. Why does this matter? Well, lo and behold the man who was helping us to get our boarding passes was a Burundian, God loving, worship leading man named Joel. What a delight to befriend yet another person from God’s family, and another African from a country near and dear to our hearts! In our excitement to meet Joel, we were 7 minutes late to our flight to Amsterdam, despite running through the airport like a professional track team. Unfortunately, a man who was rather unkind would not let us on even as his coworkers were asking him to do the opposite. This ended up being frustrating, disheartening, and stressful, since it meant we would not catch our flight from Amsterdam to Entebbe. The Lord continued to be kind and mighty in how He showed us His plan though.

I am honored to say that I am a part of a team of young adult women who decided to go around and state things they are thankful for, and pray blessings upon the man who unnecessarily turned us away from the flight. They could have become grumpy, sad, and panicked but the joy and light of the Lord was physically visible in them. It was even commented on by airport workers.

While these young women were doing an amazing job at trusting God and loving each other well, my grandmother was deep in work discussing how we could still get to Uganda in a timely manner with multiple airport workers. One of these workers is a kind, generous, curious woman named Jade. She worked past her work hours helping us, gave us snacks from the worker lounge, and was genuinely smiling the whole way through. She even asked to give me a hug when she was done helping us. It didn’t seem like Jade knew the Lord, as she switched the subject whenever we brought God up, but we could tell her heart wanted to be open and she was fearful of what it would mean to allow herself to be loved by God. Thank you Lord for the gift of meeting Jade. Long story short for our new flight schedule: we flew to Amsterdam on a later flight, stopped in Kenya, and got to Uganda Thursday morning rather than our original plan of Wednesday night.

Due to our multitude of changed flights we had no idea what our seating arrangements were going to look like, which wasn’t a huge deal but we thought it would be a bit of a bummer. Looking back it is so silly how worried or disgruntled we were at times in this regard. All three of our final flights proved to have amazing seats and incredible company. We made friends with a flight attendant named Ricky who is kind, inquisitive, and peaceful. He made us laugh and provided great conversation. And on our Kenya to Uganda flight we made friends with a Ugandan woman named Pamala who is gentle, deeply caring, and a foster mom. Thank you Lord for how intentionally you placed us.

We have been continually overwhelmed by how much better God’s plan is than our own. We thank Him for the humility and trust in Him that He is helping us to learn right off the bat. Continue your good work Lord!

Three days of travel down, and the adventure of a lifetime to go!