Reflections on the Flight Home

About a year after we came home, my niece was playing with Emmaline and asking me questions about our time in Sofia. I was telling her all about street pizza and flower shops. The trolley and cobbled streets. Then she asked, “how long did it take you to get home?” 28 hours. She was silent for a moment, thoughtfully watching Emmaline. Then, “how did you do that? I can’t imagine doing that.” “I’ll tell you how. Jesus sat next to me.” She looked at me as if I was joking. But, that is pretty close to the truth. We rose at o’dark thirty to get to the Sofia airport for a 6:30 am departure to Vienna. We flew during the pandemic, requiring Covid testing to fly home. We had successful brain swabs (negative tests); however, the printed test results had our names misspelled and our birthdates wrong. An auspicious beginning. Our agency helped us get it sorted and by 3:00 a.m., when we headed to the airport, we had corrected results in hand. Emmaline was still only eating Bulgarian yogurt at the time. Occasionally I could sneak in mashed bananas or graham cracker crumbs. We bought baby food, emptied the jars, cleaned them, and then filled them with yogurt. An insulated Lidl bag kept them cool. Thankfully, security did not check to see if the jars will still sealed and we got through to the gates. The actual flights to Vienna and then across the Atlantic were uneventful. On time. Sparse airports (thanks to Covid.) The biggest issue was Emmaline did not sleep at all. Not a wink. As we boarded for the long flight from Vienna to Washington D.C., I was fatigued. The long two weeks of the pickup trip weighed on my shoulders. Emmaline’s obvious distress and trauma grieved my heart. I missed my children at home. Surely we would nap on this flight and the world would be brighter after some sleep. A few hours into the flight, exhaustion set in. The little airplane on the screen in front of me seemed to be barely crawling across the ocean. Immigration loomed ahead in D.C. Then another flight to Atlanta, a bus ride to our van, and a battle with traffic to get home. I needed help. I whispered an exhausted prayer. God is so faithful. Just when I am at the end of myself, He fills me, and He did not fail me during our trip home. His Spirit ministered to me during that long flight, through the line to immigration, through another security check, and onto our final flight. He didn’t give me sleep. But He gave me His presence, an almost palpable presence that not only got me through, but got us all through the trip with kindness, grace, and never-ending patience that was most definitely Him, not me. I am constantly thankful and humbled that the same God who put the planets and stars in their places, cares deeply enough about His children to meet them in their need and answer their cries for help. He asks us to follow Him into hard things, to be His hands and feet in this world, but He never leaves us to do it alone. He is with us, sitting next to us, walking beside us, lifting exhausted spirits. And, so, we made it home. 28 hours after we left Bulgaria, we drove into our driveway and saw the faces we had been missing so much. Our life as a family of 9 began.