Sunday, September 29, 2013

Regional meetings and Ludwigsburg palace tour

Work in the Regional Office was quite different this week! There were meetings mid-week; the Field Strategy Coordinators were in for meetings, convening for the last time with out-going Regional Director, Gustavo Crocker.  Dr. Crocker was recently elected as one of our newest Nazarene General Superintendents!

I was drafted to help with the breaks and lunch on Wednesday; it was great to meet Dr. Crocker and the other fellows who I’d only communicated with by email.  It was actually fun to be part of the “catering team” that made their schedule work efficiently.

Our off-time was busy too; three evenings this week, we had scheduled Skype sessions with 2 of the missions candidates that we’re coaching and one with our coaching leader.

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Medieval Rothenburg and South Africa Sunday.

What a week this was!  Dan changed our return-trip airline tickets so that we can stay a few days longer, to be available to help with the Eurasia Region’s retreat at the end of November. We’ll be 2 more “sets of hands” available to help with all the details of the retreat with over 150 adults and over 20 teens and more than 50 children!

The previous week, we had a reprieve from the autumn weather and we got to wear sandals! But this week, it’s cooler again. The leaves on the trees are still green but we’re excited about enjoying the fall colors here this year! We’ve missed fall for the last couple of years!

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Busingen Honeymoon

As soon as I viewed the quaint villages of Switzerland and Germany, I knew I would take lots of photos of windows, shutters, doors, shingles, and flower boxes!  (Dan says that he will soon add a slideshow here in the blog to show some of these.) Being from North America, I’m easily charmed by the age of things in this part of the world; almost everything is so much older than similar things in the US. (Even in the US, I remember the first time I traveled to the East Coast, as a teenager, and noticed how much older were the city buildings than in the Midwest.)  Many buildings still have rolladen (the rolling, metal, black-out shades on the outside of windows), our apartment building included. (Here’s a video from youtube.com that shows how they work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KePLmie7lE.)

Sunday, September 8, 2013

All about food…

Jesus said "I AM the bread of life, Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty."  As we continue to have these opportunities to work in places that enable this message to be delivered to those that have not heard it, we also benefit from a wide variety of daily bread.  Our first weeks here in at the Eurasia Regional Office, while busy getting oriented to the life and work, has also been filled with lots of food and fellowship.

Sunday, September 1, 2013

Eurasia week 1 - adjusting to life in Busingen

We arrived at the Zurich airport on Monday, August 26, and were amazed at how quickly we were able to get through Customs! Brad and Nancy Firestone were waiting for us on this gray day and the 45 minutes to Büsingen passed quickly as we enjoyed the countryside on our way. It took very little time for us to unpack our things in our nice apartment. We took a look at the groceries already stocked in our kitchen(!) and made a list of additional things we’d like to have on hand.  After walking back down the main street past the Eurasia Regional Office building and about another block, we arrived where Dan will work with Brad. The back of that building is the Firestones’ apartment.  Piling into their car, we crossed the border (as we’ll do many times each week) to shop at a store called Lidl (similar to Aldi, lots of those here too!) to get additional groceries. Then, the Firestones treated us to dinner out at a German/Italian restaurant.  We rode around through several small towns – in both Germany and Switzerland; all these towns are close together but with beautiful, rolling, farmland between.