God to Me: "Surprise! It's time to travel again!"

This past week brought a very happy surprise to me--dropped right into my lap by God Himself.

On January 30th of this month, I will be leaving for a 10 day mission trip to Trinidad and Tobago! Our family friends, the Jones family, are going on this trip and knew of a last-minute opening. This opening is unfortunate...due to illness, but the person who cannot go has already paid for the trip and wanted someone to go in her place. The Jones' asked a few other people before me, but due to schedule conflicts, no one was able to go. Then they thought of me, and--YES! It works perfectly!

It's unfortunate that there isn't room for Matt to go as well, but he is so excited for me!

Our group of 21 people will be going to Arima on the island of Trinidad for the work-part of our trip. We will spend the week doing various work projects with a church as well as helping to run a Bible school for children. I am so, so excited for this! I have always wanted to go on another out-of-country mission trip since I went with my high school youth group to Mexico. That was such an amazing experience, but the interaction with the families we were building homes for was difficult since most of us didn't speak Spanish and they spoke no English. The official language of Trinidad and Tobago is English, although all sorts of dialects exist. But communication should be much better, and I'm so excited to work with the kids!

After our work-week, we'll go over to the island of Tobago to stay at a resort for two days! It will definitely be a nice way to end the trip.

I feel so blessed to be given this opportunity! The already-paid cost of the trip includes all expenses from departure to arrival at the Detroit Metro Airport. Wow!!

I will be excited to share all the photos of the trip after I get back on February 9th!