This weekend we went to Maidstone to visit a church, Jubilee Church. This was no small jaunt. Maidstone is about 2.5 hours away by car when you are in good traffic. It is on the other side of London and you have to go all the way around London. The lead pastor there, Michael Puffett, was a speaker in our training last year and he provided us a place to stay for the weekend at their training center. It was a fantastic weekend as we experienced love from the Body of Christ through fantastic hospitality and care.
We really only knew Michael and were being housed at their training center with about twenty people we had never met before. Nevertheless, they immediately took us in, provided us food and lodging, shared their testimonies and treated us to a fantastic evening at their annual fashion show, an amazing event that is used tremendously for evangelism locally. We also had the joy of meeting a young lady from Atlanta, Georgia, there who reminded us a bit of home. Finally, we greatly enjoyed worshipping with the church at Jubilee and a brief comment during the worship from one of the elders is brewing into what I hope to be another post soon – a post on unity in Jesus.
I am so grateful for the way were were blessed because the stress test part of this post was the travel to and from. I realized that 22 years of driving in the U.S. has programmed my brain. When I drive in the US I need not think much or really make many decisions, at least not with active thought. But, when you suddenly put yourself behind a steering wheel on the right side of the car, drive on the left side of the road, and shift with your left hand after 22 years of doing that differently, driving suddenly becomes a series of conscious decisions and is more work than leisure. At one point when we were going in circles through the center of Maidstone trying to find a place to get some dinner and our way to the fashion show I couldn’t take it any longer and I was not a pleasant husband or father, to put it mildly. That is when i realized that the stress of driving “differently” for so many hours had begun to take its toll on me. I just had to breathe, pray, and seek forgiveness from my family, admitting that I was wrong and asking for their encouragement and God’s strength. Sigh.
We did eventually make it, and even on time. Not only that, but we also were awarded one of the door prizes in a drawing, which was a seven-day stay at a beach resort in The Gambia. For those who do not know where that is, it is a small country on the Western Coast of Africa. It’s not every day in the US you hear people talk of taking a holiday in The Gambia. We shall see how we can fit that in some day.
Here are a few other sights we found along our way.
