PRAYER WORKS | T-FAMILY UPDATE

Dear Praying Friends,

By God's grace, and with your prayers, we have reached Elina's family home! It was a very long 2 days, but we have so much to be thankful for. Here's how things went:

Monday, 2:45 AM: Elina and I get up, eat a little food, and start loading the 15-passenger van we hired, with help from the driver and some Chrstian friends.

3:50 AM - On the road 10 minutes ahead of schedule! Hoping to reach the national border by 2-3 PM, for a smooth cross-over.

11 AM - We learn that foreigners with our type of visas are no longer allowed to enter Elina's home country by land - we are required to fly. The rule changed the night before, and we found out about 6 hours into our road trip. We decide to pray and forge ahead.

1-2:30 PM - the van's tire blows out - completely shredded. We wait by the road while our driver goes to buy a new tire, etc.

2:30 - 5:45 PM - We reach the international border, 15 minutes before it closes. 

5:45 - 7:45 PM - We frantically work to see if Elina's home country will let us enter or not, if they will let us bring the van across to transfer our luggage to another van, while our poor kids are stuck waiting around. With lots of help from new friends and accommodating border officials, we enter the country legally - my first time in almost 10 years!

After that, we still had about 16 hours of road travel. It was tiring but uneventful. Some motion sickness, some traffic jams, but we finally arrived at Elina's sister's home at about 4:30 PM on Tuesday.

We knew before we started the journey that things might not go as we planned, and they certainly didn't. We're so thankful you prayed! There was a very good possibility that we would have been sent back "home", having wasted 2 days of wearying, mountain travel, and having to book a flight, re-figuring out how to store or move our things. 

This was the most challenging part of our life-transition. In about a month, we fly to the USA. We'll invite you to pray for that too, though we're not too worried about that one!

Thank you so much for praying us through!

Blessings,
Scott, Elina, Linus, Jane and Livy

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