Micah's Adventures in K-Town and Other Foreign Locations

The last two weeks have been filled with many, many seminars. To clarify, a seminar is up to six and a half hours of theology, which of course is completely in German. I ended most days completely exhausted from a combined course in Theology and German, but it was a good kind of exhaustion. The kind you get from working (thinking) hard and accomplishing a lot. I won't bore with in depth summaries of each topic, but here are a few stories from these past two weeks. Early on, we, the FSJ team, visited a café run by the local Baptist church every Tuesday. I will be helping out with this café as well as with the junior youth and youth programs at that church. We were able to speak with Thomas, the pastor, about what my role would be to some extent. It was a rather cool experience. Unfortunately, the rest of the day did not go nearly as well given that we spent four hours waiting outside the city hall for an appointment to file some paperwork which ended up lasting all of five minutes

Perhaps a slight bit of background information is in order. A while back, perhaps 5 or 6 years, I had decided that I'd like to take a gap year before college and go somewhere with EMM's YES program. Essentially, the YES program was one year consisting of both a discipleship training school and an outreach portion. The YES program, however, shut down recently, and I therefore was not able to participate in it as I had hoped. Nevertheless, I still had the desire to take a year before going off to college and do something worthwhile with my time. It was in this context that I stumbled upon FSJ in Kaiserslautern, Germany. FSJ stands for Freiwilliges Socialez Jahr, but the English nickname for this particular program is Free to Serve Jesus. Since I am pretty interested in serving Jesus, and the program consists of nearly the same elements that comprised the YES program, it seemed like a good fit to me. Of course, it doesn't hurt that I've taken five years of German in school