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| Evangelism with balloons |
It seems like an age since I last posted anything on my blog. It was a challenge just posting my photo a day (for more photos of our time away... and all my photos that are on my blipfoto site, please click here). Part of the reason I haven't been able to write is down to lack of good internet access and because we spent three weeks in a country that doesn't welcome missionaries, and will actually kick them out. So we had to keep our heads down and play tourists for three weeks, without mentioning what we were actually doing. It was extremely challenging because I couldn't even tell my parents what I was up to.
To start with where I left off in my previous post. We spent a few weeks in Munich, Germany. God really worked in all of us, as a team, in the area of trusting Him with everything. Often we woke up in the mornings with no clue what was going to happen that day. It really forced each of us to depend fully on God and what he wanted us to do.
During this time God really led us to do a lot of evangelism. That's one of the joys of Europe is that we can do that so freely. People were open to talk to us about what we were doing and we found innovative ways to start conversations with people. Thankfully, most people spoke good English and were open to talk with us. There were a few people who didn't want anything to do with us.
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| The Newspaper Article |
A few days before we left for the Middle East one of the team, Alisa, interviewed by this German woman who worked for a Munich newspaper, called Hallo Munchen. We were able to share a lot of what we were doing in Munich and what we were going to do in the Middle East and in Berlin.
After Munich, we went to the Middle East. I can't say where we went for safety reasons. We were there for about three weeks doing all sorts of practical work with refugees, like renovation and painting. We did a lot of that, as well as demolition whilst we were there. We also got to cook a meal for about sixty holocaust survivors and war veterans, which was incredible but also tough because Sarah, from Denmark, and I ended up having to peel and chop about thirty raw onions. That night we ended up sleeping on the floor of a food dispensary, which was a first for me.
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| All Covered Up |
Whilst we were there, Marta (one of the other staff), Sarah and I got the incredible opportunity to help teach an English class in a university. So we had to make sure we were completely covered up, as you can see in the photograph on the (left). The girls loved being able to show us how to wrap the shawls around our heads. There was a lot of laughter at the length of my hair. Girls in the Middle East don't have short hair like I do, but its growing.
From the Middle East, we traveled to Berlin to help out the YWAM base there, for ten days. We joined a few teams, from the United States, who had partnered with Europe Initiative (if I remember correctly), so we did evangelism with them. We also did some more practical work, by helping the base sort out of the new apartments they'd been able to rent but it needed reconstruction so we helped with the demolition.
I know I've not been able to go into an awful lot of detail but if you're interested in more stories from the students themselves, you can visit their blog. Their blog does mention where exactly in the Middle East we went, but for safety reasons I must highly ask you not to write the country we visited in the same sentence as the organisation that we're with, due to safety reasons for the team out there.