Wow, so it’s really starting. I’m sitting here in the Philly Airport waiting for Lindsay to arrive and things are finally beginning to hit me (and it’s an awesome feeling!) I’m about to circle the globe, that’s kind of cool I guess. This whole traveling thing has really got me thinking a lot about my role here, on this planet. Sometimes I forget that there are so many other people out there. I’m sitting right now in the terminal and doing one of my favorite pastimes: people-watching. And it’s amazing to see how many different people walk by (and I’m still in Philadelphia, I wonder what I’ll be thinking in a few weeks) But it just strikes me that there’s so many times when things in my life tell me that everything is about me. But how can that be true when there are so many other people out there. I guess its kind of a simple idea, obviously there’s different people out there, but for some reason that’s all that’s going through my head right now.

I’m about to start on this journey where I am going to meet people from every walk of life, and each one of them I feel is going to teach me something different. Hopefully I can keep it all straight. It’s so easy for me to think that my way of life is the answer to all problems, but that’s probably not true. Actually I’m pretty sure that’s not true. You know in 10 weeks I’ll be flying back to this exact same airport and watching a whole new fleet of people walk by me. I wonder what I’ll be thinking then…

Sometimes I just have to laugh at how God is working around me and through me. And the majority of the time I don’t even see it happening, it’s when I look back and see how all the puzzle pieces fell together that I’m blown away. I feel like that’s been the summary of my life, I’m just kind of flying through this thing called life hoping that I’m heading in the right direction. And then when I finally get somewhere, I look back and just have to smile. I never needed to worry about how I was going to get there, heck, I didn’t even know where I was going for most of the time, but regardless, God got me to this point, and it feels good.

That’s especially been the case with this entire summer. For those of you that had to put up with me over the past year (cough, Sauder) you know that I kind of just jumped into this whole Africa thing, and I’m really not even sure when Australia came into the picture. But when I look back on it I have to laugh, I went into this expecting that going the entire way across the globe would be nothing, I’m Spud, I can handle it. But I quickly realized that traveling is much more work than one would expect (or at least I would expect). But I made it, and now I’m sitting here in an airport waiting to catch a flight to London, Dar es Salaam, Kilimanjaro, Johannesburg, Sydney, Darwin, Alice Springs, Cairns, and Los Angelos. It really sounds impressive when you write a bunch of them out. So now what, where do I go from here? I guess my plan is to do what I’ve always done, go with the flow and figure things out as they come my way. I’m getting pretty good at it. So we’ll see how it goes, it should be an interesting trip and one that I will learn a lot from. Well I have to go take a malaria pill (yes mom, I didn’t forget to take it). Until next time, Humjambo!! (I’m close, I know I got the jambo part right)