London Calling

Our first free weekend to travel was in the beginning of February. A group of my friends decided to go to London, since the flights were cheap and it was somewhere we had always wanted to go. I wasn't planning on it being a religious experience, since it was a secular place we were going. Yet, God always works in funny ways.

Since it was our first time traveling on our own without the help of the school, we were all a little nervous. We had to take the bus from our school to the train station, then 3 different trains to get to Salzburg, then a bus from the train station to the airport, and then fly to London. Although we had a lot of quick connections, we were able to make it to Salzburg no problem. Phew. We decided we were going to sleep in the airport, since our flight was really early the next morning and we didn't want to pay for a hostel. We found the bus no problem to get to the airport, and by the time it dropped us off it was around 11:30pm. We were surprised at how small the airport was, and how deserted it seemed. Don't airports usually stay open all night? We walked up to one of the sliding doors and it didn't move. Ut-oh. We tried another one and it didn't move either. There was no one inside and all of the lights seemed dimmed. The airport must have been closed! Here we were, in the middle of the night, in the outskirts of the city with nowhere to sleep.

We saw a sign for a hotel next to the airport, so we walked over thinking we had found our solution. But the door was locked and there was no one at the reception desk. As some of us started to freak out, we said a prayer of protection and guidance. We knew there were benches outside of the airport doors, and although it was a cold night in the middle of winter we began to accept the fact that we would be sleeping outside. We made each other feel better by saying that it would only be for a few hours, that we could huddle together, and that it would be a good way to really experience how homeless people live in order to get a greater appreciation for those things we take for granted every day. We trusted in God and gave the night to Him and His will. If it was His will for us to sleep outside, then so be it.

We walked over to the benches which were outside of the main doors of the airport. To our surprise, we checked the doors one more time and they opened!!! We all stood there stunned for a moment. We hurried inside praising God with smiles of disbelief on our faces. We realized that the doors we had been trying earlier were off to the side, that they must close those and only keep the main doors in the middle open. But God wanted it to be that way. He wanted to break us down, to have to give everything to Him and trust completely in Him, before He could bring us into the airport. It was an important lesson we needed to learn at the start of our semester before we started traveling the globe. I'm so glad it happened that way, because I gave every trip after that completely into God's hands. He wanted us to give Him that yes, to follow His will even if it meant sleeping outside in the cold. To accept anything and everything put in our path. I smiled as I curled up on the hard airport bench I would call my bed for that night, thinking of all of this and praising God for all He had done for us. Who knew I could ever be so thankful for an airport bench?

The rest of our trip was pretty uneventful compared to this- a time of growth in friendship and a realization of the joys and challenges of traveling abroad. London is such a historically rich city, and it was a childhood dream come true to be able to go there! Big Ben, Parliament, Buckingham Palace, the double decker buses, red telephone booths.. we saw it all :)