ESPANA.

I never thought I'd be the weird girl who could relate driving on a bus for 20+ hours to a musical. Growing up I would blare our house with the sounds of Cats, Sound of Music, 7 Brides for 7 Brothers, or Oklahoma!. To this day I know too many words to the song "Memory" and have distant dreams of doing a hip hop dance dressed up like Macavity or Old Deuteronomy. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you're missing out. And I'm sorry you didn't have a childhood like mine that consisted of memorizing the VHS of River Dance instead of watching Nickelodeon. So why do my 6 days in Barcelona have anything to do with my musical library? 

Behold, My Fair Lady and the song that I sang to Bethany on the bus that nobody knew.

Oh Spain! We left Wednesday night around 8 and drove all night through Holland, Belgium and France to arrive in Spain around 4 on Thursday. Why Spain? Well the Kings Kids of Barcelona hosted the European conference, so 42 dutchies and I showed up to represent KK Netherlands :). Over 21 countries were represented at the conference, including someone from Congo! Crazy! I'm sad to say, that America was the minority country there but maybe in a few years that will change! So the purpose of the conference is to have a weekend of worship, workshops, and fellowship with all the different Kings Kids groups across Europe. Sadly, I slept through most of France so I didn't get to see much of it... except a gas station. Oops. Our group consisted of staff from the different KK teams within Holland and Belgium. I got to know a lot more people within KK Holland, which was super :)

This is the conference center/hotel we got to stay at in Barcelona.

I shared a room with 5 other girls from Holland, so niiiice.

these are the boys from our team...

and these are the girls!

Our schedule was pretty packed, worship in the morning, coffee and tea break, speakers, seminars, etc. But Friday we snuck away on bikes to go to the beach and on Saturday we had the afternoon to roam Barcelona in its entirety :) It kind of reminded me a little bit of NYC sometimes, but it was a-freakin-mazing. A couple times I would look to Beth and just say "oh my gosh we're in Barcelona right now!" and it still never quite sunk in. This trip doubled the amount of countries I've visited so far, coming in at a grand total of.....4! I'm working on it :) But even tonight in Amsterdam after teaching class we were talking and I just said "wow this is something I'm going to get to tell my kids about, I taught hip hop in a basement in Amsterdam!" This has been such an amazing oppurtunity and I'm so happy that I am constantly reminded to stop and think, "I. AM.SO.BLESSED." It's been so amazing, and Spain was the perfect ending of a super busy month.

Besides enjoying Barcelona and loving every minute of it, you could say going there we (me,beth, and tam) were feeling a little dry. Teaching 3x a week on top of KK weekends every week has been a bit exhausting, but luckily for each of us Spain really was a time of renewal and rest. Of course for me it wasn't immediate, ha what else is new? I realized I was going home soon on the bus ride there so I started just "getting busy in my head" and had kind of mentally checked out already. I didn't really want to make new friendships at first because in my mind I was just thinking "I'm just going to leave again soon." But I know now that was just a distraction from what God had for me. My dearest big sis, Mrs. Burke, uses the term "cracking a code" which is very much how my super analytic brain likes to think about most things. I was trying to "crack" lots of codes this weekend which turned into a disaster. I wanted to know about my future, and mainly what comes after this year of crazy adventures. On the last night we had team time where Johnny asked us to share about our experience so far. I basically shared my frustrations about leaving Holland when I'm just getting settled, and not being able to be completely still in my mind. Seems to be a problem ay? Over thinking, over processing, over analyzing, over calculating, over doing, over saying, over planning, over worrying... are just a few things I "over" do. The line "I'm having a level 5 meltdown" has been a sentence I use on a daily basis to explain my anxious mind. But after my time in Spain, it seems to have calmed down. Behold, the word surrender and the friend who made my weekend so incredibly more clear.

Saturday night, walking to my room. Chillaxin. Ready to PTHO (pass the heck out). And a friend from room 131 was just standing outside next to my room. He went on to tell me that for him "being still" means to LET GO and surrender everything over to God. Funny thing is those words were exactly the words I hate to hear..."letting go" of stuff has been a big issue for me. Still is. He told me he was just in his room praying and felt like God was telling him to walk outside, and then 3-2-1 I turned the corner and he told me all those things that made everything click. The whole weekend I was fighting....with my future, with my present, with my past... when I should've just been surrendering it over the entire time.  Thus began the letting go process which left me feeling in tip top shape by morning :) I'm so blessed by my friend's obedience to just walk out of the room not exactly knowing why... that in itself was just cool.

So Spain treated me well! It was full of hard learned lessons, sand in my socks, dutch humor, black licorice I'll never like, 22 hour bus rides, 11 mile bike rides, and surrender.