Women’s Soccer Jamaica Blog VII

This week's journey to Jamaica was such a wonderful and humbling experience. Today was filled with more traveling than any of us would have liked but it was well worth the exhaustion. This morning was extremely comical. At around 6:30 a.m., I awoke to the kitchen of the hotel blaring Celine Dion.

Senior Salem Woody wrote this blog...

I rolled over and asked my roommates if I was dreaming or if this was actually happening. They reassured me that I was, in fact, not crazy. After we all fell back asleep we were woken up again around 7:30 a.m. to the sounds of a car alarm going nuts. After that we had trouble falling back asleep and just laid in bed until our 9:30 a.m. breakfast. After our last breakfast in Jamaica, we were able to attend the local church service hosted in the upstairs conference room of the hotel.

Check out the photo gallery from Jamaica...

Some of the kids from Maxfield's were there so we got to see some of them beforehand and give our final hugs. Their typical church service lasts around 2-3 hours, but we had to leave early due to our flights. At the beginning of the service we all had to introduce ourselves and then the church sang us a "welcome" song. We only had time to stay for the worship portion of the service, but almost all of the songs they sang were ones we knew from back in the States. It was awesome to all be able to fellowship together. We were able to hear a personal testimony from one of the women church members as God faithfully provided her blessings all week with getting out of a ticket and nice new tires. She graciously reminded us to trust God always, and that when He blesses us, He does so greatly.

We sneaked out of the service around 11:30 a.m. so that we could load up the buses and head to the airport. Once we arrived to the airport we had a quick and easy check in and sailed through security. We all decided to eat lunch at Burger King (because we are all sick of eating chicken). We boarded the plane at 2:45 p.m. and set off for Miami. That's when things got crazy. We arrived in Miami at 5:45 p.m., and had to go through the biggest line I have ever seen to get our passports stamped, re-check our bags, go through security again and much more. We arrived at our gate just as they were boarding our zones and had no time to relax. We arrived in Atlanta at 9:40 p.m. Due to a bad storm we had to stall in the air for about 20 minutes but things finally cleared up and we made it safely onto the ground. Once we got all of our bags we loaded up on the bus to take us back to school. We made what we thought would be a quick stop at Subway (they were closed, but kindly re-opened for us when they saw our bus but I think secretly they may have been a little angry since they were all cleaned up, but hey we brought them a bunch of business), but we ended up being there for over an hour. At 12 a.m. we finally departed Atlanta to head back to Mars Hill, close to a four our trip. So it was quite the late night for us!

We all want to thank you for helping us make this trip possible. We couldn't have done it without your support, encouragement, and prayers. This was a great way to begin both our school year as well as our season. God has been good to us this week, showering us with His grace and giving us hearts of compassion and love. Our horizons have been stretched, our hearts, eyes and ears have been opened, and we have started to unite as a team and as friends. We are excited to be able to say that we are the first team at Mars Hill College to be able to participate in such a memorable trip as this. We can come back to school knowing we made a difference in a place not as fortunate as what we are used to. I want to end our blog and conclude our trip with a feeling of accomplishment and knowing that we gave everything we could to make a lasting impression on the lives that we touched, because we all have been touched by those we met along the way during our stay in Jamaica. My dad has a saying that I think fits perfectly for all of us who have been on this journey, whether it was us physically on the trip or those of us who followed it via the blog. "Reach high and grow deep." Let that be how we live our lives and invest our hearts. Don't be afraid to challenge yourself and go where God calls you. His plans for our lives are better and more perfect than anything we can imagine ourselves.