Saturday, December 19, 2009
Rothenburg
Our trip to Rothenburg, Germany for the Euro-American retreat was great. It's basically a retreat for the american missionaries, but there were also just missionaries from many countries who spoke english and were able to come. There were 15 countries represented and a little over a hundred people. There were many interesting speakers and the theme was John 17, the prayer Jesus prays before going to die. The ride was about 12 or 13 hours but we are getting used to it. The lessons were all in our hotel and we were just next to the walls of the little medieval city, so thats where we were when we had free time.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Nov 16th (2) haha
We just had a retreat at the church which was great. We watched "Facing the Giants" which we would consider a simple christian bookstore movie but for them it was deffinitely to see people talk about God in a movie. We had Alexander, Ichem and Ilyes at our appartment on Saturday Night which was great, too. The church spent some good time trying to "Face their Giants" as that was the theme. It was a lot like the retreat Craig spoke at at our church. This Saturday we will be leaving for Rothenburg, Germany for the Euro-American Retreat. So there will be an update after that! and some pictures of the ancient city walls... :-)
Nov 16th
OK.
Finally going to write and let you guys know what's going on. I apologize. I've been busy and tired. Well anyways....Spain. We left pretty early on Saturday with the van full. Craig, a few teens from Marseille, us CEMistes and 2 Teens from Lille, Anna Andrejewski and Pierre-André Guillot. Albacété, Spain is where we were headed in southern Spain where they just started a new church with a preacher who went to a preaching school in Guatemala. There, we sang in plazas in the evenings and distributed papers for just reading the bible...people can come and say what they think, really kind of open, which I really take a liking to. Later in the evening, we had a conference in our hotel where we sang before there was a guest speaker or one night we had a film, which is when Greg passed out. There were other falls apart from mine which was rather dumb and embarassing. I decided to swing up on the shoulders of a few friends, but I was tired and one of them turned throwing my arm out when I had swung up a little higher than my height. Then I smacked my face on the pavement...all of this like 2 meters from a doctors office....well, kind of more like a hospital...I don't think these exist in the US..maybe a clinic...yeah, that's probably closest. I messed up my knee kind of badly but it's getting better, oh, and my face is fine :-) The last day we were there, we sang in a couple retirement homes. They were probably the most welcoming to the singing out of most people I've sang in front of. One of the guys who was at the conference gave us those opportunities. We also sang in a school that morning, promising to sing biblically. We also sang a few gospel tunes, teaching them a little about what that term means and sang father Abraham and they got to move around a little. They were very glad we were there. Little did they know we were in the same plaza as their school. We had instant response on the bible discussion nights the first day so we were pretty encouraged by that and that really kicked off our work there. The Ruiz Family are the ones who made this possible as the parents were some of the first to start the church and the 2 sons brought there family and were busy translating the whole time. I was overwhelmed as I tried to speak some Spanish as well...but i naturally translate that into my mother tongue. The trip was really overwhelming and encouraging at the same time. Esteban Ruiz really helped me out a lot when I was yelling at him in French to tell me what all these nurses were saying in the clinic. He has just lost his job and started working at the church in Geneva. He is a great guy and I know he will do great things at his church. After we came home, we had 12 hours to recover from Spain and it was off to the teen retreat at the center in the Ardèche Region. The Retreat went pretty well with more of a positive theme than past years as I'm told...but, we were really beat from Spain and I could feel the fatigue overtaking me. The retreat was really good for the teens at church as they could talk to us about their questions and try to make progress in a remote location. It's beautiful up there at this time of year, but on the other hand, starting to get cold. The two trips were great and fortunately we had some time off from classes when we got back to recuperate.
Finally going to write and let you guys know what's going on. I apologize. I've been busy and tired. Well anyways....Spain. We left pretty early on Saturday with the van full. Craig, a few teens from Marseille, us CEMistes and 2 Teens from Lille, Anna Andrejewski and Pierre-André Guillot. Albacété, Spain is where we were headed in southern Spain where they just started a new church with a preacher who went to a preaching school in Guatemala. There, we sang in plazas in the evenings and distributed papers for just reading the bible...people can come and say what they think, really kind of open, which I really take a liking to. Later in the evening, we had a conference in our hotel where we sang before there was a guest speaker or one night we had a film, which is when Greg passed out. There were other falls apart from mine which was rather dumb and embarassing. I decided to swing up on the shoulders of a few friends, but I was tired and one of them turned throwing my arm out when I had swung up a little higher than my height. Then I smacked my face on the pavement...all of this like 2 meters from a doctors office....well, kind of more like a hospital...I don't think these exist in the US..maybe a clinic...yeah, that's probably closest. I messed up my knee kind of badly but it's getting better, oh, and my face is fine :-) The last day we were there, we sang in a couple retirement homes. They were probably the most welcoming to the singing out of most people I've sang in front of. One of the guys who was at the conference gave us those opportunities. We also sang in a school that morning, promising to sing biblically. We also sang a few gospel tunes, teaching them a little about what that term means and sang father Abraham and they got to move around a little. They were very glad we were there. Little did they know we were in the same plaza as their school. We had instant response on the bible discussion nights the first day so we were pretty encouraged by that and that really kicked off our work there. The Ruiz Family are the ones who made this possible as the parents were some of the first to start the church and the 2 sons brought there family and were busy translating the whole time. I was overwhelmed as I tried to speak some Spanish as well...but i naturally translate that into my mother tongue. The trip was really overwhelming and encouraging at the same time. Esteban Ruiz really helped me out a lot when I was yelling at him in French to tell me what all these nurses were saying in the clinic. He has just lost his job and started working at the church in Geneva. He is a great guy and I know he will do great things at his church. After we came home, we had 12 hours to recover from Spain and it was off to the teen retreat at the center in the Ardèche Region. The Retreat went pretty well with more of a positive theme than past years as I'm told...but, we were really beat from Spain and I could feel the fatigue overtaking me. The retreat was really good for the teens at church as they could talk to us about their questions and try to make progress in a remote location. It's beautiful up there at this time of year, but on the other hand, starting to get cold. The two trips were great and fortunately we had some time off from classes when we got back to recuperate.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
October 17th
Hey Everyone! I will be doing or trying to do weekly updates about what all I'm doing here. This past weekend was spent working on the apartment that was just rented out for the girls (Emily and Maylis). It was not very well taken care of and we are redoing just about everything, such as paint, electrical, plumbing and appliances. That will be done soon and is coming along fast with all the help. We also had our young adult evening on Friday night, which went well. We ate dinner and studied a bit. We also had a night for the teenagers which went just about the same way with some games thrown in. Both had decent turn-outs. We also had the 5-8 year olds after church on Sunday where we made some awesome coconut gourmet cookies with the help of Djédjiga, Khaled's wife, teaching them to "make cookies" and find ways to serve others. We had our normal courses every morning, worked at the apartment on Monday, on tuesday we had club cool (which is a sort of VBS during the week) and church and tuesday afternoon bible study. Wednesday, we started going to Saint Maurt, where we will be helping out with activities and serving at a retirement home. We will be helping an organization called the "pink aprons" or "smocks" in english. They host activities every week for many at the home there. We also had lunch with Denise on Wednesday afternoon which was great as always. She had her birthday this week on thursday and she soon will be returning to the states as I've mentioned, in November I believe.Thursday we went to Eliane's as usual where we studied for quite a while. Yesterday and today we had some down time and worked at the appartment again!? I hope it will be done soon so the girls can get settled. We will be going to Spainnext Saturday to a little town 2 hours from Madrid to help with an up-and-coming church. We will be staying for a week there and after that will be having a teenage retreat at The Center. Miss Everyone! -Derek |
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)