It’s 1am in Nairobi, and I just laid down in bed. We have a meeting at 8:30 in the morning so I’ll make this short. Let’s face it, 17 hours of flight time doesn’t have a lot of highlights.

Nashville to Atlanta is a really quick flight. 38 minutes from take off to landing.

Atlanta to Amsterdam not as quick, luckily I got a window seat beside a talker.

Yes, that is a person under that complimentary Delta blanket. No, she is not dead, this is just the natural reaction to flying for 8 hours in a 3×3 foot box. A box that the guy in front of me decided wasn’t enough and kept trying to lean back as far as possible as if there wasn’t another person with no leg room right behind him. It was so bad I had to keep grabbing my drink cup because his chair kept ramming into it.

Luckily dinner was on the way.

I was given the choice between chicken and pasta. I went with chicken, the safe choice. Little did I know it would be served in a cat puke puree. Thank goodness for the sea salt brownie, not pictured because I devoured it. The guy a row over devoured his meal like it was his last, I was tempted to ask him if he wanted the rest of mine.

I feel like I’m being too negative. Did I mention I paid $16 for wifi service that didn’t happen to include streaming services like Netflix? I learned that when they sent me the confirmation, which also informed me wifi only worked within the continental United States.

But all in all, it really wasn’t that bad. I did have a good book to read.

Donald says we all should learn to live a better story, but there’s a problem.

“Here’s the truth about telling stories with your life. It’s going to sound like a great idea, and you are going to get excited about it, and then when it comes time to do the work, you’re not going to want to do it. People love to have a lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen. But joy costs pain.” 

It’s been a great book, I encourage anyone who’s wanting to live a better story to pick it up. You can find it here.

Hopefully I’ll have a better story for you tomorrow, but for now I hope you find joy in my pain.

Hey, if you just stumbled upon this post, I want you to know I’m in Kenya with Compassion International for a week. I wanted to document my experience to share with my family and friends and anyone else who may be interested. I will be back sharing my thoughts on leadership, church growth, and more next week. If you want to follow along with the blog, make sure to subscribe to get email updates delivered to your inbox each week.