First Leg of the Journey

We left for Charlotte, NC yesterday at about noon, and the weather in Madison was pretty rotten. It was snowing and the temperature was right around 30 F. It was very odd to think that in 3 days, we'd be experiencing weather more than 90 F. As we sat on the Dane County Regional Airport runway, the de-icing crew was hard at work spraying us down to prepare us for the flight to Detroit, where we would stop over on the way down to Charlotte. Sitting in the plane, we'd already avoided our first minor difficulty that we expected to encounter. Two of our bags were over the 50 lb limit that the airlines impose on domestic travel, but with the reconstruction efforts at the airport, the ticket agents didn't have any scales with which to weigh our bags. We could tell that the attendant at the counter, although easily strong enough to lift all of our bags, knew we were carrying the extra weight, but he couldn't charge us for it considering there were no scales. While we were prepared to pay if needed, it sure was nice to know that it was one minor thing we didn't have to deal with. With all the snow and ice, we left an hour late, but didn't have any trouble catching our connection in Detroit for the trip down to SIM headquarters.

After spending today in Charlotte, learning about Nigeria and some of the experiences we might face during our two months there, it's awfully good to know that therre are so many people praying over our trip. We spoke about it this evening before dinner, and though we know our experiences in other countries to this point are useful in shaping how we'll respond to our new surroundings, things will still be very different in Africa. Our experience in Honduras two years ago with Blackhawk Church has prepared us somewhat for serving in a community with drastically lower standards of living, but we also recognize that the rural setting we were in there will be different than the more urban setting of Jos. Neither of us have ever travelled to any part of Africa, either, and the cultural mindset is quite different than in South America. One of the SIM staff here challenged us to think about our world view. He argued that the easiest way to learn to deal with a culture from a dramatically different world view would be to first understand ours. He also warned us to be cognizant of when our cultural American world view influenced how we developed our biblical world view and vice versa. While the bible was written to specific groups of people, it was written for all people of all times. That means that a biblical world view should be extensible to all cultures, although an American world view wouldn't necessarily be the same. Often, it's hard to differentiate between the two. Some areas overlap, but others are in direct conflict. We pray that we'll be given the wisdom to discern when our American world view is being challenged but our biblical one is not. Those are the situations where we need to show grace and learn to love Nigerian culture.

We are a little nervous about what will happen once we get to the airport in Abuja. We leave Charlotte tomorrow at 1:45, and after stops in Newark and Amsterdam, will arrive in Abuja at 8:55PM their time on Wednesday. We have been warned that we might find the airport a bit of an experience and pray that we will collect all our baggage, get through customs, and meet up with our driver safely and swiftly. We will stay in Abuja overnight as it is not wise to drive at night, and on Thursday we will drive out to our final destination, Jos. We'll breathe a big sigh of relief once we are there! We'll be in touch again once we're settled in.