Our travel to India was much more eventful than we could have ever imagined. The journey was supposed to begin with all 8 of our team on our first flight to London at 7:35pm Thursday evening out of LAX. Unbeknownst to us, this was not God’s actual plan for us. The flight was delayed due to a mechanical problem with the plane. Then, once that was “fixed” we were boarded onto the plane at about 11pm. Well, the adventure was just beginning. Shortly thereafter we were “de-planed”, a word that I really do not like (read more here), and found ourselves back at the airport.
Everyone from that flight then ran to every available service counter in the terminal and began the process of re-routing. We thought we were in good shape being the 3rd group in line at our service counter until we discovered that each group was taking an hour plus to re-route. When it was our turn, at about 2am or so, we found that we couldn’t be re-routed together and would have to be split into our 2 4-person ticketing groups. By a little after 3am, the first group had tickets to go through Tokyo Narita Airport in Japan and then on to Delhi. However, the flight was not until noon on Friday! And things were still not looking good for the 2nd group.
By 4:15am, group 2 was ticketed through Shanghai, China and then on to Delhi to meet group one 2 hours later and then fly together to Bagdogra. The Shanghai flight was to take off at 3pm on Friday. In the meantime, both groups were put up by American Airlines in the Doubletree hotel in Carson for the rest of the night. We thought that our travel woes were all behind us, but God still had some lessons in store for us – particularly for group 1.
Group 1 took off at noon for Tokyo as planned and all was well – until there was a medical emergency onboard the flight that forced the plane to land in Anchorage, Alaska. After sitting in the plane in Alaska for about 2 hours, they finally decided that the only option was to fly back to LAX and re-route everyone again. Apparently, the pilot had already logged too many hours at that point. Now group one was back at LAX at 3am on Saturday morning.
All of the passengers had to be re-ticketed and issued new boarding passes which took several hours. The new flight to Tokyo took off at 9:45am Saturday morning. Instead of meeting up with group 2 in Delhi to fly on to Bagdogra together, group 1 did not arrive until the next day.
When all of the dust settled, Group 2 missed the first scheduled day of ministry on Sunday, June 30th, and Group 1 missed two days of ministry – both Sunday and Monday.
The team was reunited on Monday afternoon in one of Dipesh’s villages as group 2 was finishing the first day of door-to-door evangelism. It was very emotional for everyone when the bus rolled up while the children’s program was finishing up and we got to be together for the first time since early Friday morning!
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