You may have picked up from yesterday’s Share Your World that I spent last week in Puerto Rico and man, do I have some stories to tell you.  Unfortunately, I’ve had a bug for the last 36 hours and can only just now look at my computer screen without wanting to vomit.  (Travel related?  Unrelated?  I don’t know and I don’t care as long as it’s gone.)

So I need some time to gather my thoughts a bit, but until I’ve got my feet under me here’s the bare bones of the matter.

As mission trips go this was a pretty last minute one.  They spend months planning the annual trip to Haiti, so the idea of heading to Puerto Rico seemed pretty abstract when our associate pastor dropped notice early October.  It hardly even sounded like notice, really, more like, “Hey, we’re thinking about putting a team together to go to Puerto Rico toward the end of November.”  To which my brain naturally went, “Huh.”  (In a “good, they really need help” sort of way, not in a “huh, whatever” way.)

Then comes mid-October and another mention.  “Hey, we’re putting a team together that will be heading to Puerto Rico after Thanksgiving.  We’ll be meeting up with a couple of other church teams there.  We’re working out the details now.”  My brain, ever quick on its feet, responded with a “Hmm.”  Not a contact-someone-and-ask-some-questions hmm; more like the idea lodged itself in my subconscious and camped out.

Fast forward to the Sunday before Halloween when P² (what? doesn’t everyone have a cool nickname for their pastor?) announces we have to let him know by the end of the day if we want to go with the team to Puerto Rico because plane reservations are being finalized.  Mic drop.

And the brain that so far had only fed me “huh” and “hmm” decided to go rogue, joggling around inside my skull.  Suddenly I was struck with one all consuming idea: I think I’m going to Puerto Rico.

Anyone who’s known me for any length of time at all knows this is insane.  I’m not the drop everything and disappear for a week type.  I’m not the one who flies off into disaster relief areas.  I’m not even the kind of mom who typically rolls with last minute sleepover plans.  So surely, surely, I wasn’t the one who’d leave my family to fend for themselves the week after Thanksgiving while I dropped off the radar.

Except it turned out I was.