Monday, December 21, 2015

The Adventure Continues

The first third of my time here is now coming to a close. We are doing the last few things before Christmas until we have a break for a few weeks with the ministry in the area. As you can imagine everything is Christmas themed lately. On Saturday I did an evangelistic outreach where we gave out small wrapped gospels of the Christmas story. We handed out many books to many different people from different backgrounds. We were in an area that there is a lot of immigrants. I kept going up to people and saying that this gift is for you in German. So many people looked at me very strange to only realize that they didn't speak German. Once realizing I switched to English and had many good short conversations with people. They were people from literally all over the world many who probably have never heard the Christmas story. My prayer is that God will use these small gifts to share the message to the people here.

Yesterday we helped out with the Albanian Christmas celebration. We ran the children's program which was crafts, games, time outside and just a lot of playing and showing how much they are loved. It was a lot of fun and a great opportunity to show the kids and parents Gods love through this time. Most of these families where new immigrants from Albania and were gathering together for community, to praise God and to hear the Christmas story. I don't know where these families are when it comes to their relationship to God but I believe that this time brought each of them closer to God.

Tomorrow we have our last time cooking for the seniors before the end of the year. It is going to be Christmas themed and I am excited to continue building the relationships with a couple of the ladies during this time again tomorrow. Ministry has been very good lately but I am looking forward to a little break and a change of pass over Christmas. Merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Friday, December 11, 2015

A Change that Brings Hope

A couple weeks ago I met a lady who my supervisor has been working with for years. This lady from Albania has a mental disability but is married to a Swiss man which was most likely an arranged marriage. When we went and visited she was going through a difficult time because her husband was getting frustrated with her and they were fighting regularly. Culturally she was living up to the expectation of her family by being independent and married. In Albania it is very shameful to have a child with a disability so her family tried to give her as regular of a life as possible without really having to take care of her. In reality she really can't live independently and needs someone to take care of her. Until now this has been the role of her husband. When we returned from the visit we talked a lot about what would be best for her and why it was so difficult to bring change for the better. We prayed very specifically for change in her life. We went to go visit again on Tuesday and found out that her relationship with her husband had become slightly physical in their fighting and she was in a mental institute. This isn't where she needs to be but it is a step in the right direction and a chance to really talk about what is best for her. Please pray that everyone involved will make decisions according to what is good for their loved one. Also that she will not be in the mental institute for too long. Once again I have experienced how prayer is so powerful and that change can happen much faster than we often expect.

Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Christmas Project

      The last couple weeks we have started a new project for the Christmas season. It is tradition here that every year at this time people go and make a candle by dipping a wick into wax multiple times. Once the candle is fairly large, it is cut, cooled and decorated. Every day we have school classes, nurseries, or families that come in to participate in this tradition. This is not an outreach where we specifically teach or share faith but live it out and promote other ministries through this time. Each group that comes in the teacher gets a free coffee voucher for coffee and deeds, there are promotional flyers for other community programs, pictures from kids camps as well as the Christmas story up on the wall. Even without sharing the gospel ourselves it is amazing to hear the conversations as well as see the reaction of how welcomed the people feel who come in. This morning we even had a teacher that said she already has it in her plans to come next year with her class.  The other amazing thing with this ministry is it is raising funds for two ministries. It helps us in the community to run programs with funding but also raising money for Dalit children to go to school in India. It has been an amazing opportunity to be involved in this outreach at this time.