training // another busy weekend wrap-up

Our weekend started like this:

Rain, rain, and lots of it. And LOTS of football too! The Hokies played Marshall and came out with a win after 3 overtimes. We were so excited and completely soaked and left re-energized in our Hokie Spirit!

We then went to church on Sunday and spent the rest of the day hurrying around to finish everything that had to be done that day. The hours went by so quickly and suddenly it was past time to go to bed so that we could catch a few hours of sleep before we had to wake up at 4AM to head to the airport. (And thanks to Jamey's dad for waking up that early with us to take us.)

That Monday morning we flew from Roanoke Airport to O'Hare in Chicago to Colorado Springs. Everything went off without a hitch while flying, thankfully, and Jamey got the experience of his first domestic flight. All of his many other flights he had taken were international!

Jamey very excited to be flying, apparently! 

We finally arrived through a shuttle van to the training center here at about 2:30PM, Colorado time. We unpacked, went through orientation, received our HUGE training manuals, and ate our first dinner with the 39 other adults and 16 kids that are here at training with us.

So far, we've already been able to completely understand the sense of community that forms here. For once, we are not the minority by being missionaries, but the norm. People here are going out all over the world, but we all have this common ground on which to form relationships because we are all moving to a new country & culture, all learning a new language (or more than one), our lives are all changing, and much is still to be determined for us, or revealed to us. We've already in just 2.5 days have had incredibly awesome and interesting conversations, and even have had the opportunity to share about our common feelings... and we haven't even met everyone yet! Not even close. :)

Our beautiful views at the MTI training center. 

It is incredibly beautiful here, both the people and the views. We began a bit overwhelmed, just because we had been working on getting everything in order right up to the last day before we came to training, but we are definitely already able to see God's blessings in us being here.

We'll have more of an update toward the end of the week, but we wanted to be sure to let everyone know that we made it safely and happily! We would also definitely appreciate your prayers that we would just be like sponges, able to absorb everything possible from everyone & everything (from the program to the staff's experiences to the fellow missionaries in training) that we can.

For now, we're spending the reminder of our evening hanging out with our dear friend Kenny, who was previously in Honduras at the same church we're heading to, since he is ALSO in Colorado currently attending the other program that MTI offers, which is a reentering the U.S. debriefing time. We were so blessed that this one week lined up that we would all be here together, and that he had the opportunity to come join us at our training center!