The Journey: Taxis, Trains, Trams and a VERY early start.

At 5.30 on Monday morning we left Croydon for the sunny south coast of France. None of us had a very restful night's sleep on the floor of the church in Croydon, but it was safe to say the early start was worth every minute of missed shut-eye.

We made it on time to the Eurostar and by 11.30 we had arrived in Paris-Gare de Nord. But we needed to get metro tickets, navigate it, and then catch our connecting train from Paris- Gare de Lyon to Montpellier. After queuing for a long time for tickets we realised that we had about 20 minutes, to catch the metro, get to the station and get to the right platform. We were definitely cutting it fine! The short journey on the metro was spent praying and hoping time would slow down for us... we arrived with minutes to spare and ran for our train. The amount of praise and sense of relief when we had made it was unreal. Definitely a minor miracle!

We were then set our first challenge of the week, to have a conversation with someone on the train. To me this was genuinely terrifying. I had never really done anything like this, even in England, so it'd be an interesting task to complete in French! I walked into the buffet car, with my friends and we saw a woman and a little girl who were sat there talking. The woman had a similar coloured watch to me, and she seemed kind enough... so I approached her and asked which stop she was getting off at. She then proceeded to explain that the young girl was her grand-daughter and they were visiting the girl's mother in Nimes for the week. We had a really long conversation and I got to explain what our group were doing out in Montpellier and it was a really lovely conversation. A real encouragement for me to just step out for Jesus.

Once we got to Montpellier, I was beginning to embrace my role as resident translator... Ian asked me to ring the landlady and let her know our train was delayed, and then to confirm the way of getting to the house. It was pretty cool because the group had already worked out the same thing, so that was reassuring!

Then that evening we got to visit the house of the people who began the church plant in Montpellier for a prayer meeting. I loved having the worship in french and although it was difficult to adapt to, I really knew that this was where I wanted to be. The holy spirit moved in power and when we were all praying in tongues, it felt like the whole room would start to shake. A truly incredible moment! Team Monty even had the privilege of praying and prophesying over the church and I just loved it. The feeling of fellowship was awesome!

What a way to begin the week!