Chapter 6, in which I might have waited for something exciting to happen before posting

I know it's been a little bit longer since I last posted than I meant for it to be, but hopefully my audience can forgive me. I knew that we had a church retreat coming up, and I thought it might afford an opportunity to really talk about something a little bit more exciting than my ordinary day to day life.

Every Friday we have a believer's course called Al Masira here in the Elim-Zentrum, and a week and more ago, during this course we, the church, invited along any participants who would be interested in coming to our church retreat. Given that it was an invitation, they were invited along free of charge to a weekend of bible study, worship, games, and authentic German food. But I get ahead of myself.

Five adults and one girl from the course participants piled into our big white church van Friday evening, and it was off to the retreat. Friday night we had dinner and then a session. There were four such sessions, each including a time of worship as well as approximately an hour to go into a small group and read a bible passage from John and discuss it. At first an hour seemed fairly long, but it was neat how deep the discussions with my group grew and how quickly the time flew.

One of the Syrians that had come along expressed his gratitude on Friday night that they had been allowed to come with us to our retreat, and added that in his two years in Germany, he's never been invited along to do anything like this with Germans, and he was looking forward to the integration and just spending time with us.

On Saturday afternoon everyone gathered together to play a game that Kris and I had cooked up, a sort of multi-faceted competition amongst teams. We made sure to split up our Syrian friends evenly among the teams, and although a few people may have been wrapped in toilet paper or buried in leaves, the best part was seeing everyone working together and bonding, and seeing these refugees being included as part of the group just like everyone else.

I personally really enjoyed the deep discussion and relationship building of the weekend, and am looking forward to seeing my church family again on Thursday for Thanksgiving, in which we will be introducing some good American cooking to many people from the community as well as friends and family of the church members.

Please pray that God's hand would be over the Al Masira course and that we could continue to form deeper relationships with the participants. Pray also that God would reveal Himself to them and to us as we enter into conversations with them.

I have an interview on Thursday with a Christian school here in Kaiserslautern at which I hope to work part time, so I would also appreciate prayer about that.

And now, some photos from the weekend!

 A picture of the place where we stayed.
 Two of the kids in the fort they built.
 They were supposed to spell the word Jesus, somehow it seems to have come out backwards.
They found mushrooms!

I'll try to write again in around two weeks and not keep my audience waiting too much.

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