Well, we are finally back in Prague! After 30 hours of traveling and more than 3 months of waiting we are back. I can only begin to explain what it felt like coming back… I was nervous and a bit scared after being gone so long that things would just be totally different and we would feel unattached from people here, but it really wasn’t like that at all. I really felt like we were coming home and picking up right where we left off. But, I also felt like we weren’t really the same people who had left and we came back to Prague much more committed to Prague and the people here then when we left.So far our first 24 hours back in Prague have been really wonderful. Our friends Carrie and Mathias picked us up from the airport (along with Carrie’s parents, who we got to meet for the first time which was really fun) and then we went and had dinner with our friends Sarah and Craig. It was so great to see them all and catch up a little with them that even though we jet lagged and hadn’t really slept in 30 hours I didn’t feel tired at all just excited to be there. After that Bryan and I came back to our place and both just wandered around looking at everything and enjoying being back in our own place (it’s hard to be living with other people in other people’s homes for 3 months). Then today we unpacked everything and spent the day just settling back in. Tonight we went to the Nova Sin art gallery for a common gathering. It was so great to see so many familiar faces and reconnect with people and just great to be in that kind of casual participatory church environment again (3 months of really large churches where we didn’t really know any one was frustrating for me). It was really wonderful to be back. Maybe this is silly but I think one of my favorite things about the last 24 hours was the rain. It started to rain when we were at Craig and Sarah’s for dinner and it really poured after we got back to our place and then it rained again on the way to church. You’d think that after being in Seattle (where it always rains) and the rain we had in Phoenix over Memorial Day I would be sick of rain but for some reason this rain felt different. It felt incredibly refreshing to be walking the streets of Prague in the rain and watching it out the window of our own home. It felt like God was saying, “the long trip, the long wait, is over and now I’m going to rain down on you and REFRESH your soul and body and very life.” It felt like God was raining down His approval of us being back in Prague – it was beautiful and I smile even now thinking about it.

Rejoicing in the journey - Beth Stedman

Photograph by Beth Stedman