Day 1 - Dominican Republic

    It's funny how when you a couple hours more or less than 8 hours of sleep in a night you feel dead tired.  However if you get less than 5 hours of sleep, you wake up feeling awake.  Almost as if your sleep cycle is a sphere separated into 2 halves: a good sleep half and a sleep deprivation half, and that if you get too far into the sleep deprivation half you can actually just pop up on the other side of the good sleep half and wake up feeling as though you had double the amount of sleep.  Maybe that doesn't happen to you, but that's how I felt when I left for the Denver International Airport at 4:30am to leave for a one week mission trip to the Dominican Republic with an organization called VisionTrust.  I had heard about this trip through a campus ministry at my school, Cru.  Most everyone on the trip was involved with their Cru ministry on their campus, but seeing as though there are at least 500 different Cru campuses in the US, with anywhere from 20-300 students attending a weekly Cru meeting or Bible Study, the chances of me knowing one of the 24 people accompanying me on this trip were slim, and I wasn't expecting to know anyone.
     When I arrived at the airport at 6am, I ran into a girl that was flying to Miami with me for the trip.  Turns out I actually knew her!  She was the random roommate of a friend of mine at a Cru conference I went to last year.  Nicely surprised we hopped on the plane for Miami where we met up with the rest of our half of the team (the other half had earlier flights out of Miami).  As we were awkwardly bonding, as is per ushe, a girl brought up the topic of poop (mind you as of this point it's me and about 8 females).  "I think we should all tell poop stories, because I think they're hysterical!"  Yes, that is what she said.  We all laughed as she told us a story about when she pooped herself.  She was the only one to tell a poop story and at first I thought that this was a foreshadow into what the rest of the week would be like.
     After that explosive ice breaker, everyone started asking each other about their lives.  Everyone seemed genuinely interested in each others lives which was cool to see.  For example they would ask me about my school, major, etc, but then expanded by asking me about my family and asked me to share my testimony with them.  Not something that typically comes out after knowing someone for an hour, but hey, what else would we do during our ridiculously long layover?
     When we finally arrived it was late and we were ready to go to bed.  But then life happened.  Ben, (the only other male on the trip) lost his luggage, and we lost Kathryn.  After a long time of waiting and staring blankly at the luggage-go-round, we found Kathryn.  Apparently she was being held captive by the DR because she didn't bring her green card from Colombia, where she has dual-citizenship.  I'm not sure of the details but after a long time of negotiation between her, the DR officials, and our trip leader, they had to submit to the law and send her back to the US.  Apparently the US shouldn't of allowed her to leave the country in the first place.  The US got fined, and we prayed.  I'm not sure what God's plan for her is and why she wasn't able to come, but there's a time and place for everything.  As Jesus said in John13:7, "You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand."
     On that note, at the time I wasn't sure what God had in store for the trip; the trip seemed semi-disorganized, the team had a    22 : 2, girl to guy ratio, and breakfast the next morning was surprisingly good.  I was very curious to see what God was wanting to show us.  But until then I needed to sleep.


    P.S. just so you know, I originally wrote this the morning after I arrived to the DR where I had fallen asleep at 4am and woke up at 8am.  Four hours of sleep, and I was pretty tired.  So I guess my sleep theory isn't that simple.  In scientific terms, you could say that I failed to reject the null hypothesis.