Jakarta

After leaving PNG we had a strong sense lingering with us of caution. Thinking 'what else will go wrong?'. For example when we sitting on the plane to leave Jayapura, still we questioned if we were truly able to leave, or if at any moment the flight attendant may come and ask us to get off for some kind of delay. However, I had a strong hope and belief that God will not delay our plans any further as we left PNG. On Wednesday we caught a flight across Indonesia Landing in Jakarta in the evening. When we got off the plane to collect our bags we could not find them, any of them. I remembered our ticket stubs for our bags were on my ticket, which I had left in the pocket in front of my seat on the plane. We had no bags, and no proof that we had bags. It happened to be a flight where we left more things in our undercarriage than ever before. Panic struck the three of us, and perhaps anger towards me for the loss of the stubs. We stood there in the empty airport in a foreign country with no bags, no plan, and no one we knew. Hard to imagine that God was working out a pretty sweet deal for us. An airport worker named Lukeman walked up to us with his airport uniform, he asked us what our situation was, and began working to solve our problem. He sent people to retrieve the ticket from the plane, called all the airports of our transfers, and began doing everything possible to track our lost luggage. Lukeman assured us that perhaps the flights tomorrow would bring our bags if we came back the next day. But he was unable to get us a hotel because he could not contact anyone to authorize that payment. He began to look for anyway to help us, and found that all he could offer was him home. We were shocked, he was willing take us three foreigners into him home until he found our luggage. A few minutes later he received a call from his people that were searching. They informed Lukeman that our bags were found in a warehouse and would be 10 minutes for them to get them to us. We when we finally had our bags in our hands, and our stress lifted from us. Lukeman said to us, we would still be able to stay with him in his home if we liked his offer. We did like it and took his offer and went home from work with him, and met his entire Muslim family that soon became our huge blessing. We spent the next three days with the family, eating with them in their beautiful home and going with them to the Fantastic World Theme Park with the family. In our 3-day stay with the family, we learnt so much about the Indonesian Culture, the Muslim traditions and met new people who we hope to someday visit again. We found that having our luggage misplaced was the way God lead us to meet a different culture in a foreign place through a very great family. Kenton