here starts the adventure

What day is it? This has been a whirlwind week of packing, airline travel, moving into temporary digs, moving into semi-permanent digs, then switching countries and traveling to a camp in the Netherlands, changing time zones, meeting people at the office where I’ll be working, then meeting tons of other people from literally all over the world, sleeping in, getting up early, eating strange camp food, trying to drink unchilled milk, trying chocolate sprinkles on bread, and worshiping with people from many nations and tongues (at least these that I know of: Taiwan, Holland, Korea, Germany, France, England, Scotland, Ireland [Northern and Southern—and yes, they’re almost 2 different countries], Trinidad, United States, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Japan, Switzerland, Russia, Kazachstan, Kosovo, Chile, Mexico, Spain, Egypt, Belgium, Finland, Denmark, Faroeur Islands, Morocco, Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Singapore, Israel, Argentina, Arabian Peninsula, Philippines, Laos, whew!).

I had a really interesting conversation with my Dutch roommate about worship last night. We’ve been singing popular worship songs in English, and it’s fascinating to see how many people in the room know the tunes. She asked me what writers we use at my church and she knew everyone I mentioned. I asked if they translate the songs into Dutch and she said unfortunately, yes: some translate well, but most don’t. She would prefer to sing them in English, and most younger people do. I asked her if she liked singing in English and she said yes. On the other hand, most of this conference is being translated on the stage into German. It seems that most of them speak English, but not all. We also have translators (into headphones) in Korean and French. How do these people join in? The worship leader at the conference is from New Zealand, and I asked her if it’s a challenge to pick song sets for a gathering of this type. She said yes, but that’s why her band is multi-national and she has all of the vocalists choose sets. Yesterday we sang a few songs in Dutch, and later in English.

I had the privilege of worshiping by watching others worship as we sang a tune (in English) the Europeans obviously knew, but I did not. I swelled with emotion as different parts of the room lit up, and praised God for His people.