So here I sit with a cup of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee overlooking the Caribbean Sea at sunset.  After 12 hours of continuous travel, a bit of relaxation seems in order.  I’d tell you that it’s 81 degrees and I’ve already taken a dip in the ocean, but that might be unfair.

I am happy to report that we have safely arrived in Jamaica, all twenty of us AND our stuff. Twenty ministry bags filled with much needed supplies. For the past two years getting through customs has been brutal- a half dozen bags pulled over and an hour of explaining and re-explaining.  Do I look like a black market smuggler of crayons, Bibles and glue sticks?  Really?  But this year smooth sailing.  More on that in a minute.

Some of you have probably already done the math and are asking… “12 hours of travel to get to Jamaica?  What, were you swimming? Using a row boat?”

Well, back in December when we were booking tickets, both a direct flight from Dulles to Jamaica and tickets routing through Miami were extremely expensive.  In an effort to keep the overall cost of the trip low, I reluctantly agreed to route through Dallas.  DALLAS!?  Yeah, I wasn’t happy about it either.  Who ever heard of going west in order to go east? That’s just stupid.  If you do that, you turn a 3 ½ hour plane trip into a 9 hour cross country zigzag.

God is teaching me that sometimes you have to go west to get east.  God has his reasons and purposes.  Often I’ve found that I want to go from point A to point B directly but God’s path is much more circuitous.  He has unplanned stops in mind that we can’t understand, we just have to trust Him.

For example, who would have thought four months ago when we were booking tickets that a fire would close down the Miami airport on the very weekend that we were traveling?  At Dulles this morning there were dozens of people desperately scrambling to reschedule flights to Montego Bay that had been routed through Miami.  But our tickets to MoBay through Dallas were confirmed and safe.  God had a better thing planned for 20 travelers on mission for Him.

When we landed in MoBay we arrived at the same time as 4 other flights.  Immigration and customs were completely overwhelmed.  Almost a thousand people were crowded into a massive line winding through barely air conditioned halls waiting to get their passport stamped and collect their luggage.  Among those thousands of bags were 20 bags of precious kingdom cargo- Bibles, school supplies, crafts, a sound system, video components- thousand of dollars in donated supplies.

It took us 2 hours to get through customs.  You should have heard the American tourists whine.  “This is outrageous, criminal, a fiasco!”  We were exhausted and in poor humor too, but after we worked our way painstakingly through immigration, collected our luggage and got to customs, we were in for God’s gracious surprise.  The custom officials were shuttling people through with only a perfunctory glance at the bags.  “How many bags, sir? Two?  Have a nice day.”  Again God was teaching us the benefit of traveling west to go east.  Inconvenient? Yes.  Burdensome?  You bet.  But traveling through Dallas and standing in line for two hours were the very providential mechanisms God used to further his work.  So don’t be discouraged if you have to zigzag every now and then. God may be using that very process to complete his work through you.

Sometimes you have to go west to go east.