Random thoughts this day...

I was talking with Karen at breakfast this morning. She brought up an interesting point that hit me quite profoundly. Many times I am rather disappointed in myself because of what I have NOT been able to learn or NOT been able to accomplish in the almost 4 years of living in Germany. Come the end of August of this year, we will have officially been in Germany for 4 years. That seems like a very long time. Sometimes it seems very long for me… sometimes it seems like I blinked and it is over. Know what I mean? I think you do. Okay, her point. She made the statement that we have lived in three different cities in the last 4 years. First was Bremen. Bremen is a city of officially about 500,000 people. Add in the surrounding small towns that actually connect to it and you have over a million people milling around that city. Ha, that was our first place to live in Germany. I say ha because we came from a city, Little Rock, that with its surrounding towns probably had somewhere over 200,000 people. Big city for me and then we moved to a huge city. After living there for two years we moved to a city in the eastern part of Germany, it is called Chemnitz. It has relatively the same population as what we were used to in Little Rock, but the difference is that it was a city that earlier, before the wall came down, housed over twice that many people. So the city itself was much bigger than what I was used to, just only having the number of people that I had grown used to. Then our next move is to Leipzig. Leipzig has over 500,000 people and then it has many towns around its edges to make it quite a metropolitan area. Again, like Chemnitz, many of its inhabitants left for the west when the wall came down. Many of the industry was closed down after it no longer had the support of the communistic government to keep it running and staffed. So ultimately my rambling today… Have you ever moved to a new city? I am sure you have. Had your set of problems with that? I know you did. New places, new people, new ideas, customs and even sometimes a different way of speaking by the people in that city are what awaited you. I know. I too have experienced that… three times in the last 4 years. God is good, God is faithful. He has brought us through these moves. He has enabled us to learn and to grow beyond what we could have ever imagined. Does that mean it was easy? I say emphatically, NO! But life is not easy. That is what is so great about the promise that we will spend eternity with our Father. Where everything… EVERYTHING is good, great, wonderful! We all struggle with different things and changes in our lives. It is life. But God is with us as His children. We are not alone, even in a city of close to a million people when I know only a handful of those people. I am not alone! You are not alone! Thank you Father for being with us even in our tough times and also being there in our times of victory and triumph.

Warm weather

We have so much to be thankful for. I did not believe it would ever get to 28° (80°), but it did! I do have to say, that I still like the heat better than all that snow we had! Okay, it can get a little difficult, or uncomfortable, because there is no air conditioning, but I realize how much Karen and I are adapting to this European climate.

We are in the middle of our LST (Let's Start Talking) campaign. We now have three students living with us that come from the Sam Houston University in Texas. They are meeting daily with people here in Leipzig that wish to improve their conversational skill in English. I am so humbled by seeing how God is working in so many different peoples lives. People coming from many different walks of life, wanting to develop new relationships. It is such a blessing for us to have these students here. On so many levels. I do so enjoy seeing them interact with different people. Talking, laughing, and just getting to know people with different ideas and many times a very different way of thinking.

It has also been a blessing to have them here because it helps Karen and I recognize just how much of the language and the culture we really do know and understand. Have you ever learned a foreign language? Have you ever been to a place where you could actually use this language and speak to someone who spoke that language as a native tongue? Maybe a better question is, have you ever been to a country and not been able to speak, read or communicate with the local people? Yea, it is not so much fun. In a tourist area you will probably find someone you can communicate with. Often, in many foreign countries the people can speak English as a second language, but not always. I think you get the picture I am trying to paint for you. So, it is not an easy thing to do to communicate with someone who does not speak your language. I have been reminded through helping these students read how to get somewhere, understand what someone is saying to them, shopping in a grocery store where everything is written in a language you cannot understand (thank goodness for pictures :-) ) and general just getting around in a city of nearly 3/4 of a million people. It feels very good to be able to help them do these things. It reminds us that we have learned a lot... ha, yes, we have much more to learn... but when we stop learning... well, I guess that is when we leave this earth, yes?

I am thankful for friends. I am thankful that we have a best friend in Jesus and I am glad that we are here and have the opportunity to share the good message about Jesus with the people God puts in our path in this city. Thanks for reading, praying and caring!!

Mark