Latest / Missions & Miles | Mission Trips, Group Travel, Missionary Stories, Travel Tips / About Missions and Miles
Transcript
- Joy Owens: welcome to Missions and Miles. This is our first episode of Missions and Miles, and I just wanted to lay out kind of what we're going to be talking about on this podcast. As the name suggests, we will be talking to people who are doing humanitarian work all around the world, whether it be short-term mission trips, like taking a church or a school to Dominican Republic to do a VBS over spring break, or long-term missionaries, those who might have been living overseas in places like Kenya, Tanzania, and even Lebanon. and hearing their experiences of getting to the to their destinations, what tips they might have for you as someone who might want to join the mission field. And as the second part of the title suggests, we'll also be talking about travel. We'll be giving you tips on how to organize your travel, how to find deals, what to pack, and everything that goes along with travel when it relates to being a missionary, or when it relates to doing humanitarian work. So we hope that you enjoy, listen, and subscribe to our new podcasts. To start our first episode, I just wanted to share a little story about my background. When I was thirteen, my parents decided that we should leave our wonderful home in Connecticut and move to Zambia. We were going to work at this place called Riverside Farm Institute. Now as a thirteen year old, I really did not want to leave my home. I was pretty annoyed with that. However, my parents wouldn't let me stay behind and so Christmas Eve we headed to the airport with thirty six bags. Now normally back in these days this was quite a number of years ago. you were allowed to have two bags. And actually I think we were allowed to have three bags. We were allowed to have three bags and so there was five of us. We had fifteen bags were included in in our fair. And we had, by the way, got our tickets from Butler Travel, who is the sponsor of this show. And we arrived at the front desk to check in for our flight with our 38 bags, our 36 or 38, can't quite remember, bags in tow, and we're expecting to pay a hefty bag fee, because that's normally what happens when you have extra bags. Flying domestically, normally you have to pay for all your bags unless you have a airline sponsored credit card, if you have status, or if you buy a ticket that includes the bag. And going abroad usually have one, or depending on the destination, you might have two. If you have a humanitarian rate, you probably will have three. So we obviously had we had a humanitarian rate, Since we were traveling with missionaries. So again, we arrived at the airport planning to pay these bag peas where my parents were, because again, I was only 13. And it was Christmas Eve. And the ticketing agent of the who checked us in at the airport listened to our story and then was like, wow, you guys are going to be missionaries. You know what? It's Christmas Eve. I'm going to let you check all these bags in for free. It was a miracle. It was a sign we thought, you know, from God about that we were on the right path. Now this doesn't normally happen. Normally they don't allow you to just check in bags for for free. however, occasionally God works miracles, he opens up doors, he helps travel plans to go smoothly when it doesn't seem like it it should, like we were expecting to pave these fees, but we did not have to. And over my years of Living abroad in both Zambia, Kenya, Honduras, and Taiwan, and also in Germany and Portugal. I have seen how travel that was supposed to go smoothly did not. But then also how God opened doors, maybe one plane is delayed, but the other one is also delayed and miracles happen and you are able to make your flight. Again, it doesn't always happen that way, but these are the stories we will focus on this podcast. So we're really excited to see how this podcast goes and to listen to all these stories from around the world and get inspired to also go out and surf. We hope that you join in listen and subscribe.