Chapter 10, in which life has sort of gotten into a rhythm

During the past few weeks I have really hit my stride here in Germany as I have gotten into a nice rhythm of work each week. I feel especially appreciated and needed at the elementary school, where this past week so many teachers were sick that four grades stayed home and I was given the opportunity to be a secretary rather than a teacher's aide for one day.

A cool story from this time was that a few weeks ago the FSJ program took a trip to Augsburg, Bayern to visit a prayer house there. For the Americans among my audience, I suppose this area of Germany would be known as Bavaria. The prayer house there has prayer ongoing 24/7. There is often live music played during the day, and it was an incredibly enriching experience for me and the members of my team. Afterwards I even had a good conversation with Mike about some stuff that I felt God had laid on my heart during this time.

We have gotten slightly bigger as well, here at the Elim-Zentrum, as we have some guests staying with us from a land in the vicinity of where I once lived. They cooked supper for us last Thursday, and it was a wonderful time filled with fellowship and amazing food. Afterwards we were able to play some ping-pong and various variations of the aforementioned game. The audience may be pleased to learn that I was triumphant in several of the games, but of course the most important aspect is that all present had quite a lot of fun.

My work with the youth group is also progressing quite nicely, and I have been entirely in charge of Saturday nights for approximately the past month. Although language can sometimes be a slight barrier in terms of clarifying information about biblical passages, I have been able to engage them in some meaningful conversations. A few weeks ago we took a trip to a technical museum, unfortunately none of the girls wanted to join us, I can't imagine why not, and the week after Kris and I went to see Black Panther with some of the guys from the youth group. It was a really cool experience to just hang out in such a low pressure setting.

 Unfortunately I don't have a ton of photos this time, I blame that on the unfortunate circumstance that arose, namely that I didn't feel like taking photos. Here is the part of the youth group that took part in the trip to the museum, and in the background one can see the planes into which we were able to go during this day.
Here are a few old-timer car fans in a car out of their childhood.

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