Family Time

Our family’s trip to visit various places in Scandinavia is drawing to a close for me. We have spent the last two and a half weeks in Iceland, Norway, and Denmark visiting our former AFS Exchange students. It has been magical spending time with these five young people who lived in our home for ten months over a span of ten years.

Since we have last seen them, they have become part of the workforce, attended, and some completed university, and created families of their own. We could not have anticipated when we began hosting students in 2008 how much our lives would remain connected to theirs sixteen years later.

One of the highlights of the trip was having three of them spend time together for a weekend. Last Friday our first student from Austria and our last student from Germany arrived in Copenhagen to spend the weekend with us at the home of our Danish student. We all met at the airport, and on the ride home, three distinct conversations were happening at the same time in each row of the car. It was as if they had known each other for as long as they had known us, as many of their experiences in our home were shared.

I carry the memories of them from their time with us in Plymouth and now there are new memories to carry in my heart.

See you in church!