Prep Day

Saturday, May 21st was our do or die day for packing. Bryan had gone out of town on Wednesday, so it was up to me. Thankfully he had already set aside the clothes he wanted to take with us, so I just had to do *sigh* the rest of the packing and house preparations. This doesn't really sound like that big of a deal, until you see what my living room looked like. It was FILLED with donations.

When we first started collecting donations to take with us, I was scared that we wouldn't have anything. Boy was I wrong!! We are still in awe of how much God moved in people's hearts to provide. My work friends donated and got their friends to donate; our church accepted donations for us two Sundays in a row; my home church collected donations; my family collected donations and got their friends to donate, and my Aunt's church in Mississippi collected donations for us. They even managed to get a state department head to drive them to us (well, that's a bit of an exaggeration, it was a stop on her way, but that's what it felt like). I hope I didn't leave anyone out in my list there. Needless to say, it was really cool! A HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who contributed something. If you had any doubts about whether God cares about the "little things" in people's lives, let me assure you that we have seen proof that God provides for even the seemingly smallest needs.

The only problem with ALL of the donations is....they had to be packed up and I am only one person, so reinforcements were called in. Cousin J came with her babies (love those kids) to help pack and cousin B answered the call too along with cousin S who went to Ethiopia with us. The packing was nothing short of a miracle. We all thought that we would be up ALL night trying to get everything packed, weighed and repacked (everything had to be under 50 pounds). S and B went to town on the those donations and within 2 hours everything that would fit was packed away. I think they had some Alice in Wonderland cakes involved because magically nearly everything fit into 4 duffles and 2 suitcases. So nearly all of that pictured above, turned into this below. By the end of the night we had also enlisted K and J, our friends from Oklahoma, and M, one of Bryan's friends who also had to get up early the next morning to drive us to the airport (THANKS M!!).

Somehow S and I still managed to stay up until 3 am. I am still not quite sure how that happened. It's all a blur. Oh, and I forgot to mention that S had flown in that afternoon from Arizona to help pack and fly out with us Sunday, and Bryan didn't get home until Saturday afternoon too. It was a crazy week for everyone.

A few short hours later we were up and ready to load M's car with all of our luggage. Again, miraculously, it all fit. And off we went to the airport to start our journey to meet A!!