Serving Side by Side

As the first MBU trip to Bulgaria, it was slow-going recruiting students to participate. Perhaps it was the cost, perhaps it was the unknown (why Bulgaria? where even is it?), perhaps it was too short of a time frame for students to plan. Whatever the reason, what seemed a decent level of interest in the trip eventually waned to 3 students, and within 2 weeks of departure (after plane tickets were purchased) was down to just one brave soul. In a conversation with our “host” missionary, Shawn, his words resonated very loudly, “God is not surprised…We will still have a great time and God will use it for awesome things.” Ouch, OK. Thanks for the reminder! So, we decided to turn it into a scouting mission, where we would experience a week in the life of missionaries and come home with a deeper appreciation of their calling, their mission field, and the beauty of the city of Sofia. In doing so, we would be able to plan for an amazing return trip!

I met my student, Emily, about a week prior to departure. We had emailed but hadn’t met in person, so I wanted to at least have the opportunity to put faces to names as we’d be spending a lot of time together over the next two weeks. On the day of departure, as we got situated at our gate awaiting our first flight, we just started chatting and within about 30 minutes had figured out several personal connections and mutual acquaintances. Neither of us were global travelers, so we figured out how to navigate international travel together and bonded over the extreme fatigue of essentially a 24-hour travel experience…and the “cruelty” of Shawn and Natalie in keeping us awake after we arrived on Bulgarian soil.

Over the week there, what started as as perhaps an awkward student-teacher dynamic morphed through shared experiences and LOTS of laughter into friendship. We braved solo outings for ice cream and coffee, timidly tried new foods, compared daily step counts (we walked a LOT), tried out our meager language skills (though she was a rockstar, putting to use some of her familiarity with Cyrillic alphabet acquired through Russian friends), and soaking in all there was to learn about the history and culture of both the city of Sofia and the country itself.

There is such beauty in seeing how the body of Christ operates. As we served alongside Shawn and Natalie, loving on the kids at the orphanage they partner with and feeding the homeless, we went from the awkward (I don’t really know you) pose at the National Theatre to sharing hugs and laughter as we departed Saturday morning at the airport. While the trip was profound in many ways, which I share about in a later post, the relationships formed as friendship with the Keys and Emily deepened will last a lifetime.