Yesterday, Monic and I visited 4 different missionary apartments in Lelystad, Amsterdam (x2) and Haarlem. Over the last few weeks, we have visited nearly all of the apartments in the mission and only have a handful to go. It has given us a really good understanding of the state of repair of each of them, the good, the bad and the downright ugly!

Feeling tired, after a long day, and loaded down as usual, carrying bags of linen, bedding, pillows and our cleaning materials, we took the lift up to the last empty apartment of the day.

With the bunch of keys in hand for that specific apartment, (there were 8 different keys) I tried each of them, one by one. 1st – nope, 2nd – nope, 3rd – nope… You get the idea, until I reached the last one. None of them worked! Grrr….

Start again I thought. 1st – nope, 2nd – nope, 3rd – nope… and then I said to Monic, “do you hear that?”…”There is someone inside!” “Ring the doorbell” she said. We did so and a few moments later, a lovely old couple came to the door. We looked at them quizzically, thinking to ourselves “what are you doing here?”

A quick check of the address and to our embarrassment – we were at the wrong door! Oops! We were supposed to be at apartment 371 and had been trying the keys in door 317!!

Graciously the old couple gave us the directions to 371. We made our apologies, smiled and laughed a little and were then on our way.

With a glint in our eye, we looked at one another, chuckled together and a few minutes later found ourselves at 371!

Have you ever made a silly little mistake when you were tired?