The Time We (Literally) Missed the Boat

I woke suddenly, a little disoriented, but with a nagging feeling building through the grog. Contemplating the gray, but fully lit sky through the window, I sat up with a start and looked at my phone. 6:58 am. Not a chance on God’s green earth that we would make our 7 am departure. I called to Tania and she woke immediately, looking a little disoriented herself. “We’re going to miss our ferry,” I said very matter of factly.

After all of the careful plotting the night before, including who would take the first shower, and the route we would take to arrive at our destination, we had both failed to set alarms for a 5 am wakeup. Yup, here you have two intelligent, professional, responsible women… and neither of them remembered to set an alarm for a time of morning with which both are far from accustomed.

The initial stress only mounted as we contemplated our options, as the website wasn’t allowing us to rebook for that evening, and we discovered the customer service line was not open on weekends. But the mood quickly changed, as we realized that this gaffe also afforded an opportunity (as so many disappointments do in the end): We would be able to attend church in Athens and take the sacrament. As it turns out, there’s even an English branch that meets in the afternoons, so not only were we able to understand everything, but there was enough time to get a little more sleep before getting ready to go (sweet, sweet sleep).

Having to re-purchase tickets at 40 Euros a pop stung a little, but in the end we were both strangely pleased to have missed our boat. As Tania says, “At first we both felt like ‘aw crap, now what?’ but the mistake became a lesson and a blessing, because we both had the intention of setting aside time to be reverent and acknowledge the Sabbath day, but we didn’t prioritize it enough to really plan to do something about it. This felt like divine intervention.”

The little branch, located directly across from Hadrian’s Arch, was so welcoming and diverse, made up predominantly of expats and a veritable small army of missionaries, each of whom greeted us in turn.

After being spiritually fed, we filled our bellies and made for the ferry landing, a walking and metro journey of about 35 minutes. Heavily laden, we were more than happy to drop our bags at the first unoccupied comfy seats we could find and settle in for the 6-hour ride. Somewhere around this point we realized that we had a night mysteriously unaccounted for in our schedule— we wouldn’t lose any time in Santorini after all!

Tania sums up our feelings about this well: “Often we don’t see through His eyes. We’re so stubborn. He wants us to prioritize according to His plan, but He loves us so much that He doesn’t do it in a mean-spirited way. This goes to show that when we put our faith in Him, we are blessed, and who knows, He might just make it even more special.”

Sampling Oregano chips on the ferry, because obvi.