Journey's End, Saturday 29th (and Sunday 30th) October

There. Home again. Odyssey completed: six young people safely returned to the care of their parents after a truly extraordinary week.

We left Jo'burg in the midst of a dramatic thunderstorm -- the airport (indeed the aircraft) lit up by lightning. There was a small delay both on the ground and in the air, so that we arrived in Dubai after the eight hour flight, about an hour later than scheduled. But that didn't matter at all: it just meant that we had a little over two hours there on stopover, rather than three. Given that it was the early hours of Saturday morning, we were quite glad not to have to wait longer.

At Dubai we did some further souvenir/duty free shopping before boarding the flight for home. We left at 8am local time, 5am English time, for the seven and a bit hour flight to Birmingham, and touched down around 12.45pm. It was exciting, via the inflight information screen, to watch the cities on the flight path map become more and more familiar: Basra and Istanbul giving way to Budapest, then Frankfort to Hamburg, to London. It took us some time to get through passport control and baggage reclaim, and it was almost 1.30 before we emerged into the arrivals hall. All the families of the young people had come to meet us: how lovely to be hugged on arrival as well as on departure. We had a final team photo outside Birmingham International and said goodbye to one another before heading our separate ways.

I've no doubt at all that in all our various cars, and later at home, the same kinds of stories were being rehearsed by us all to our loved ones -- stories of faith and hope and love, of inspiration and transformation, of challenge and achievement, of the great privilege of finding ourselves so at home with Christian brothers and sisters on the other side of our world. Wonderful.

Today, Sunday, Ros, Helen and I have begun the task of telling those stories to a wider audience by using the sermon slot in the 10.30am Sung Eucharist in our Cathedral. How funny to look back a week to the very different style of worship we shared in at the Family Day. We won't meet tonight as a Youth Fellowship, but will do so next week, when we'll use the time to prepare some more considered reflections on two future occasions, one next month and one in October. We are clear, all nine of us, that this partnership has real potential for development: we, in Lichfield, can make a real contribution to support our companions in Matlosane; and they, in the process, can renew us for mission.