Our Trip to Rota, Spain

April 1, 2009
As I sit here in O’Hare airport in Chicago waiting for our departure flight to Madrid, Spain, I cannot help but think about how small our world really is. Flying here just a short while ago from OKC and looking down over the city of Chicago, I was just thinking about all of the people in all of those houses, in all of those skyscraper offices and hotels along Lake Michigan, all of the cars, trucks, vans, buses going to and fro across the city………….and how HUGE God is!! I began to multiply the facts of the lives of the people in this one city by the six billion people around the world. And He knows the number of hairs on every head!!! For God SO loved the world that He gave…………….!!

Monty and I watched a fantastic video recently called The Privileged Planet that was done by scientists who had discovered, through a solar eclipse in India, that we are the only planet that could possibly have life. I am not a scientist (not by any stretch of the imagination) but I was able to track with them how this is so. And it was fascinating. Check it out. But, that piece of information, along with another movie clip I mentioned several posts back, that was referenced in Francis Chan's book Crazy Love on how small we are compared to the other galaxies of the heavens, have all been stirring in my mind about how significant the resurrection really is.

Paul stated it well in I Cor 15 when he said that if there were no resurrection of Jesus, then we are, or all people, most miserable (my loose paraphrase)and to be most pitied. But, instead, because I believe completely in the reality of the resurrection, I am to be envied, not pitied, because I have the amazing assurance of what will happen to me when I die. Such great peace floods my heart because it is all by His grace that I am His and He is mine. It puts all of this smallness of the world into perspective. I am significant to God because His Son died for me and His Spirit dwells within this temporary body that will one day be resurrected because 2,000 years ago the stone was rolled away and the tomb was found by many witnesses to be empty. He is risen!! The LORD is risen indeed!

11 hours later…2:00.a.m. Oklahoma time and 9:00 a.m. here, in the Madrid Airport waiting for our next flight to Jerez, which I have learned to pronounce correctly after several corrections when I asked about check-in and gate information. I will try to spell the pronunciation phonetically…………gggghhhhareth……that is a guttural gggghhhh, by the way!

Anyway, what a beautiful airport ~state of the art!!! Very classy looking people, shops, and clothing!! Not exactly like Will Rogers WORLD Airport in OKC!! We have about three hours to kill, so wwe can do a lot of people watching!!

On our flight from O’Hare to here we were accompanied by six blind people with their seeing eye dogs, which were the most amazing animals!! Very impressive.....I am thinking that is the best kind of dog to have!!! It was a Spaniard airline, Iberia, and the majority of announcements, given in both Spanish and English, were not understandable to either of us. It made me think of how God forced the people to populate the earth as He had said for them to do after the flood. Remember how they disobeyed that command and huddled together to build their own tower to heaven (Gen 10&11)!! So God confounded their languages. And now the world is populated, with lots of different languages. And the interesting thing about that is that we (believers) are now trying to conquer those languages in order to get the gospel to the uttermost parts of the world .... to every tongue, tribe and nation!!!

April 3
Rota, Spain at Victory Villa
We finally arrived here yesterday afternoon at 2:15, which would have been 7:15 A.M. in OKC.........about 21 hours after getting to Will Rogers World Airport!! It was a sleepless night of travel, but well worth it to be here with Lanny and Stacey Groves, and their five children: Caleb, Katie Jo, Seth, Bethany, and Joshua, ages 8,7,5,4,15 months at their beautiful beach front home that overlooks the natural harbor, just around a small peninsula in the Atlantic Ocean. I have mentioned Stacey before and her blog. You can read more about their ministry here (http://www.victoryvilla-spain.blogspot.com/) with Cadence Int, which offers this Hospitality House to US military overseas, which happens to be to those stationed at Rota Naval Station, right next door. We are looking foreard to meeting some of them when they come tonight for dinner and Bible study time when Monty will get to share with them how helpful the Hospitality House was to him when he was flying rescue helicopters in Thailand during the Viet Nam War in 1968-69!

This is so beautiful we may never go home!!