Guangzhou

We are here, safe and sound!  Praise God!

Thank you for praying.  The 16 hour flight was not bad at all.  We actually enjoyed being forced to sit still after all the preparation and running around. The girls were amazing travelers (Kent posting here).  Not much sleep on the plane; some of us were awake for over 27 hours straight.  But we are in our hotel room in Guangzhou and Amy and the girls are sleeping peacefully.

After our long flight we had a wild three-hour van ride with a Chinese man who spoke no English--and took no driver's training, apparently.  From his right-side seat in the van he drove on the left side of the road through Hong Kong, one hand on the horn and the other flipping through one of three cell phones, a beeper (?) and a GPS (we thought the Chinese voice option on GPS was just for giggles in Grand Rapids).  He led us on a mad dash to the serious-looking border checkpoint between Hong Kong and mainland China, where we played charades with him for a while, finally determining that he wanted us to hand over our passports to the border agent and fill out this paperwork for each traveler...no, wait, now that you've scrambled to fill it all out with passport and visa numbers and airline information and destination address, etc, that was the wrong form.  We need to fill out this other form...NOW because we're apparently in an enormous hurry and it would be bad to keep these uniformed dust-mask wearers waiting.  After getting the OK to pass through the checkpoint with tailgate raised to show our embarrassing amount of luggage, our nameless driver joined the throng of vehicles and switched to driving on the RIGHT side of the road in Shenzhen. His constantly blaring horn presumably indicating that clueless Americans are coming through and we are not going to make any pretense of slowing down for you crammed double-decker buses, you texting bicyclists, you spastic taxis, nor especially for you, random person sitting in the dark on your bottom in the right lane with your back to five disorganized lanes of on-coming traffic!  I tried to remember not to be anxious about anything--even when the driver turned to me an hour into the ride and said with surprise, "Guangzhou?"  As if to say, THAT'S where you wanted to go?!--but by prayer and petition in thanksgiving to present my requests to God.  It helped when sleepy Hannah kept joyfully chirping from the back of the van, "This is such an adventure!" But needless to say, we were relieved to pull up to a beautiful and calm hotel at 10:15 PM local time.

There we learned the Chinese word for 'angel' is pronounced "Dan Wynalda"!  Dan was the very first person we saw when we pulled the bags out of the back of the van!  He had been stalking the front of the hotel for a couple hours, ready to welcome us to China.  You might recall that the farthest we had been away from home prior to this trip was a family mission trip to Ukraine five years ago.  We went with three families, including Dan and Katie Wynalda and their kids.  So now here we are in another foreign land and God's gift to our family today is the reassurance that Mr. What-can-I-do-for-you? has a hotel room four floors up from ours.  Amazing.

The internet has been tricky here, so if this posts to the blog at all it is thanks to the hour Dan spent safe-cracking on this Google-based computer last night, in a land that limits Google.

Today the plan is to rest--fitting, on this Lord's day.  We are looking forward to exploring the area with Dan.  Hopefully this will be our last day as a family of five.  That's strange to think about.  We are praying for you back home.  Especially for Joel Shank as he prepares to preach at Calvary for the first time at the morning services.
May God bless you, keep you, make his face to shine upon you, and give you His peace.