Saturday, October 18, 2008

Two greats

Yeah, this really has nothing to do with ministry or France, but this is a phenomenal clip of two great singers singing one of my favorite jazz standards...

Prayer

18 Octobre, 2008

Answers to prayer

One of the coolest things since arriving in Montpellier has been seeing how God has very specifically answered prayers. It has been both a powerful witness to confirming His calling for us to be here and to His continued faithfulness to provide for myself and my team.

Here are just a few of the ways that we have seen the Lord work:

That we are here, and that we arrived on time. Last year the team had to wait several weeks before coming because of needing to finish up on support, and so the very fact that we were able to leave on time and we didn’t have to change plane tickets or deal with the emotional stress of thinking that we would be leaving and then not being able to go right away was a huge blessing.

Housing. This was a huge prayer request once we arrived here. Over the summer I was blessed that the Skur family offered to let me stay at their place until I could find one for myself, which was fantastic that I didn’t have to spend all sorts of extra money paying for a hotel room for the first week and a half that we were here. Then, to have found a perfect apartment after being here for only 10 days was a huge blessing. The location and building I am living in now is such an envied place – we were very lucky to get it (well, not lucky…it was the place that the Lord had provided!).

Roommate. Once it became apparent last spring that there wasn’t going to be another guy STINTer here this year, we began praying furiously for someone for me to live with. My chief requests were that he be a believer and speak some English. Secondary were all sorts of other things like non-smoker, doesn’t hate the violin, etc. To be honest, by August I had basically given up on finding a roommate. The contacts that the girls from last year had looked into in their churches had fallen through, and all other avenues had seemed to dry up. Then Claire called me in the beginning of August (on my Dad’s birthday, actually) to let me know that someone had responded to a posting that she had put up for me on a French Christian housing website. It was the only response we had received all summer. And that’s how I got connected with Greg, my roommate who is a believer and wanted to live with someone who was a Christian and grow in his faith, who speaks English and really likes to, having studied English in London for 9 months this last year, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t really like to drink, is a student just moving to Montpellier and is just my age! It almost seemed too perfect to be true. It still does, though sometimes the cultural and living style differences are a little interesting…it’s working well though.

Man on the team. Since early this calendar year, so many people had been praying on my behalf that another man would be raised up to serve in Montpellier so that I wouldn’t be the only guy on the team. We went all spring and summer seeing no fruit in this area. It was hugely encouraging to me to have so many people praying for me in this specific area, but again, by the beginning of the summer I had basically resigned myself to being the only guy on the team. While it was at some point early in the summer that we found out that the Skurs would be joining us as an ICS family (long-term staff living and working abroad), it took until the middle of some staff meeting about two weeks into being here that I suddenly realized that I was totally not the only guy on the team, and that the Lord had brought another man on the team, it just wasn’t another STINTer. This revelation sort of bowled me over, and I was super excited that the Lord had definitely answered that prayer, it just took me a while to see it.



Our whole team here in Montpellier!


Community. One of my biggest fears before coming here was that once I got here I would feel very alone. With the rest of the STINT team living together and away from my normal social networks, I was very afraid that loneliness would quickly set in here. In Collobrières last weekend I really saw how completely untrue that was. It has been such a huge blessing that my team has bonded well together, and we are continuing to learn about each other and how to work well together. It has been a huge blessing that I haven’t felt lonely being away from home – not that I haven’t missed the people who I am not around right now, that’s totally natural, but the Lord has given me a great sense of feeling at home here with my team and in Montpellier.

Spiritual Climate. This past summer we had a group of 28 students and staff spend six weeks in Montpellier working with Agapé. They were here to meet students, develop relationships and share the gospel. Many of their friends they have put us in contact with so we would have some basis to start on in building relationships with people here. When they came back at the end of the summer, I was able to talk with several of them about their experience in Montpellier. One thing that many of them spoke of was the sense of depression that they felt here and the spiritual darkness that they saw in so many students. Historically people in France has been very unwilling to talk about God and typically when we would mention that we worked with a Christian organization and that we wanted to talk about spiritual things people would throw up very defensive walls. We, and many others, have been praying that God would start to change these things, and that people would be more and more willing to engage in dialogue about what they believe, and that we would be able to share more freely without people feeling like they need to be defensive. We really believe that we are just starting to see that happen. Since getting here in September, we haven’t felt as much this sense of depression in students and people here that we were expecting, and we’ve really seen more students willing to talk and share very freely about their beliefs and ours. We really hope that this is the beginning of a change in how people think about God here, and that we can continue to see more openness in this area!

Relationships with students. In France the most effective way to share the gospel is through established relationships. Also in France it is more difficult and often takes a lot more time to establish relationships. We have really been blessed with several relationships that have taken off very quickly, and even one group of students that have been intentional about inviting us to do things with them (which doesn’t happen very often – usually we to most of the initiating). This has definitely been a huge blessing to us as we continue to meet students and go out to share.

Agapé. Going into this year we had asked several students to be a part of a leadership team, hoping to develop students into being more invested in the ministry. At the end of the summer there were five students who had committed to being involved as a leader, but that quickly whittled down to just two as September got underway. We’ve been really praying for more leadership and involvement of students, so initially this was a little discouraging. However, as we’ve seen those two students really start to take ownership and be more integrally involved in helping to lead the ministry, we’ve been hugely encouraged. It’s our goal to work ourselves out of a job – to train the students here to be able to do everything and more than we can, that the ministry would be led by French students, not by Americans.

We’ve also been praying that the students who are involved with Agapé would be more aligned with the vision of Agapé nationally and that we would see a transformation from a “club” to a real movement this year. We presented our vision at our first meeting, and are taking the next three months to really unpack it practically, and so far we think that it is going well. We’re seeing students get more actively involved and we’re praying that that continues to grow!


Wow, well that’s just a few things that we’ve seen, but even that is a lot! Thanks for continuing to partner with me and my whole team in prayer!

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Team Retreat

14 Octobre, 2008

Collobrières

This past weekend marked the successful conclusion of our first six weeks in France. It’s rather amazing that the time has passed so quickly, and at the same time it seems that we’ve very much settled into life here in Montpellier. It’s a strange dichotomy: we’re still just beginning, and it seems as if we’ve been doing this for a long time.

To celebrate a successful first six weeks, we took a team retreat this weekend to a small village called Collobrières this weekend.

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There is a couple there who own a small “maisonette” which they make available to missionaries and other Christian workers in France to use expressly for this purpose. When I mention that the maisonette (literally translated ‘a small house’) was small, it would be difficult for me to exaggerate how little it really was. The house had two rooms, one serving as a bedroom, with just enough space for a double bed, a bunk-bed and an amoire. The other room served as kitchen and living room all rolled into one, with a stove and sink in one corner, a table taking up most of the rest of the room, a couch against one wall, refrigerator and hot water heater on the last wall. There was a lean-to bathroom off of the bedroom, which actually was relatively nice. Needless to say, our first challenge of the weekend, after figuring out how to get into the maisonette, was to make ourselves fit into the space. Being the only boy, I got the whole kitchen/living room to myself each night. 



I digress for a moment to relate some of the creative problem solving we had to do to properly open up our small home for the weekend. We had instructions, but being both a little ambiguous and in French, it was not necessarily obvious for us to figure out how to accomplish all of the tasks required to get the house up and running.

We arrived in Collobrières after several hours of driving (no one knew how long we were on the road, and it didn’t matter, this countryside is so incredible and we were entertained for good portions of the way by Laura and Erin dramatically singing along to various Disney movie tunes from their childhood – they know all of the words too!), and found ourselves in a super quaint village nestled in a small valley. It was gorgeous. We had a map to get from the city to the maisonette, but it wasn’t very specific, so to get there we drove out of town, me inventing decisions for which way to turn each time we came to a place with a fork in the road. I was the navigator for the trip, and so at this point I was used to making up directions to get places. Our route from Montpellier to Collobrières was completely invented, the directions we had printed off in advance serving only as loose guidelines as we changed our route based on confusing ronds-points, roads that were completely unlabeled, missed turns with no way to get back, and various cities that we encountered that were not even mentioned on the map we had. So as we made our way through Collobrières and I was asked if I knew for sure where we were headed and I said “no,” the team wasn’t too thrown off base. We eventually stopped and asked two people out walking their dog where the place was that we were looking for. It turns out that we had gotten pretty close, but had just gone too far and missed it.

And so we arrived at our home for the weekend. First priority was to figure out how to unlock the place. The instructions stated to find a key to a shed in an abandoned mailbox, unlock the shed, then inside would be the key to the maisonette. We found the shed key easily enough (the shed was actually called a “hanger” and we’re not really sure why), but found it impossible to unlock the shed. All five of us tried to no avail, and I also discovered it impossible to break into the maisonette without the key, the door and both windows being properly locked. Eventually it was discovered that there was a specific length into the key hole where the key would turn – not all the way in, nor just inside of the hole, but some unidentified distance partially into the hole. We got in, found the key in the dark (thanks to the small flashlight I always carry from Adam Go – I can’t tell you how many times it has come in handy in a tight spot), and got into our tiny home.

Fortunately the last visitors hadn’t figured out how to turn off the electricity or the water, so all that we had to do was plug in the fridge, turn on the gas under the stove and decipher how to run the hot water heater. At this point we had high hopes of being able to shower. We figured it all out, at least so we thought. The fridge worked, the stove worked, and the switch to turn on the hot water heater had been flipped. We left to go search out groceries.

That night we discovered our first real challenge when we started running out of running water. By the time it got time to brush our teeth the water was gone. There was no sign of hot water, so what water we had we heated on the stove to use to wash faces, etc. We read in the instructions that the maisonette runs on a very small supply of water, as the region always is running on a water shortage. The supply that the maisonette does have takes between 4 and 8 hours to refill.

The next day we seemed to have even less water. The hot water heater was still not working, and so it was decided that more desperate measures needed to be taken. Claire and I worked on the hot water heater for almost half of an hour, and finally figured out how to make it work after discovering the gas tanks behind the house that needed to be opened (just one, though!), the three valves that needed to be opened inside the maisonette, the other dial that needed to be turned that we couldn’t see behind the folded up picnic table umbrella, and how to properly set the dials on the water heater that were behind the removable panel that we couldn’t find the night before (which setting do you want: snowflake, sun, or +10?). We later discovered to our dismay that we turned on both the hot water heater and the radiators in the house because we set the hot water heater to “+10” instead of the sun icon. Dinner that night was a very warm and stuffy affair despite the chilly air outside.

Saturday morning and early afternoon was spent in the city. We visited a chestnut roasting stand. The guy there was roasting the chestnuts in a roaster shaped like a train engine. He had the prime location just off of the 12th century (very narrow!) bridge that leads into town. We were in search of lunch, and asked him where would be a good place, and so he pointed us to two (out of about 5 total) restaurants in town. They were both a little expensive, but there was a local pizza place up the street (literally, you had to go either up or down a hill in this town) that we
checked out.




It looked closed, but the owner had just opened the shutters, so we asked when they would open. They were closed for the day to prepare for the big festival the next day (we were told that so much had to be done! as they were relaxing in their restaurant, eating lunch and drinking some wine…such is life in southern France). We asked where we could find a good inexpensive restaurant in town. He exclaimed that he was the good inexpensive restaurant in town, and promptly opened his doors to us and invited us in. We were all shocked, because he was definitely closed, but told us that he would open his place up just for us to have lunch. It took him a while to get the kitchen fired up and dash out of the restaurant for some immediately important errand (leaving us in the restaurant with these two little old ladies who also worked there). However, once we were served, we had a fantastic meal! Pizza in southern France is very different than in the states, and it’s good! Tip is always included in the price of food at restaurants here, but we left him one anyway for opening his restaurant up specially for us.

Afterwards we went back down to the chestnut place, and I had my first fresh roasted chestnuts! They were pretty good – I wouldn’t fly all the way back to France for them in the future, but I really enjoyed them this weekend (Chestnuts roasted on an open fire…how can you resist?). We then visited a monastery close by, which was in this incredible setting up in the mountains. The road to get there was super narrow, and the locals were out picking chestnuts for the festival the next day. We got the scoop from two of them when we stopped at a particularly scenic outlook.




After the monastery, we returned to the city, remembering that we needed to by butter and water at the grocery in town. We left with one stick of butter and 16 liters of water. The water only lasted us one night and we went and got more the next day! We celebrated Katie’s birthday and enjoyed the evening together.

Sunday found us checking out the chestnut festival in town. The town had somehow exploded with people and artisans selling their wares (lots of chestnuts, and
everything else from hats to exotic olives, which Erin immediately sampled).



We had chestnut ice cream (glace marron), which was amazing, and were able to explore the ruins at the top of the city, which were super cool. It felt like we were in Narnia or Middle Earth. We had a great day and went back to the maisonette, armed with more water and had dinner and played Nerts all night (which is a new big favorite of mine). Katie snowed us all every game, but we had good fun anyway.




Sunday night, just when we thought we had made it with the challenges in the maisonette, suddenly the stove stopped working mid heating up water for evening cleaning rituals. It was quickly discovered that we had run the stove gas tank out of gas. Fortunately there was an extra gas tank next to the stove, but it was impossible to change the two without tools. We found none in the maisonette, although we discovered several other things we had been searching for all weekend. We decided we had to go out to the shed/”hanger” to try to find some. Claire came with me, which was good, because it was totally dark outside but for the moon which was fortunately out. As funny as it is after the fact, going outside to a creepy shed that doesn’t belong to you in the middle of nowhere in a foreign country to search for tools which you’re not sure exist in the dark and without any lights in the shed was needless to say, unnerving. It felt a little bit like I was in an episode of Scooby Doo and was about to stumble upon a creepy monster. I succeeded in getting the shed open in the dark, and then was able to find proper tools, once again thanks to the flashlight I always keep on my keychain. Once this was accomplished, it was a simple task to change the gas, and we were back in business.

Our last night was spent relaxing, and we got up early the next morning to take off again for Montpellier. Miraculously we got everything back into the car (was was much too small for ourselves and our luggage), and got back to Montpellier successfully. We had to stop for gas once on the way, and when we were stopped calculated that our little diesel car that hardly could power up the steep hills we were driving on was averaging almost 50 miles to the gallon. We felt much better about our little car after that.

We’re back in Montpellier now, well rested and ready to go for the rest of the week!

A little humor

13 Octobre, 2008

A little amusement














I haven’t eaten weasel yet, but some of the meat that they have here is rather different than in the states…

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

First Agape!

07 Octobre, 2008

Le premier Agape

Tonight we hosted our first weekly meeting of Agape – the event we’ve been looking forward to basically since getting here. Language classes done, planning with the student leaders begun, and my apartment all cleaned (J’ai nettoyé beaucoup!), we hosted the first meeting at my apartment. Including the six of us “official” Agape folks, there were 16 of us there, which filled basically every chair available. We were thrilled with the turnout!

The evening began with (in typical French fashion) the sharing of a meal. It was potluck style, which was a pleasant reminder of good-old Minnesota get-togethers. Everyone brought something, and the table was filled, with all filling their plates. The meal was blessed, and we all dove in, conversation filling the room, in both English and French. After everyone had eaten, the meeting officially commenced. Our purpose tonight was to present the vision of Agape nationally, share our vision for the campus, and talk about how that can be lived out practically in students’ lives. The national vision of Agape is the same of that in the states, which is “win, build, send” or “gagner, construire, envoyer.” We talked about as a campus that “on est la pour encourager chaque étudiant à prendre le prochain pas vers Jésus et à le suivre où il l’envoie.” This means that we are here to encourage every student to take the next steps towards Jesus and serve him wherever one is sent. Fitting into our vision of “win, build, send,” this means that we are motivated to reach out to students who are non-Christians to encourage them towards Christ as well as build into students who are believers to help them grow more Christ-like and develop them in their walk with the Lord. “And serve him wherever one is sent” speaks to our desire to send students out to all nations and occupations committed to serving Christ and being a witness wherever the Lord leads them in life.

We had a time of worship, which I led with a guitar (it went pretty well, but let me tell you, I’m no Matt Damico…). We sang one awesome French song that I had never heard before yesterday called “Jusqu’au bout,” which means “Until the end.” (I’m pretty sure…) It talks about being sent out into the world clothed in the light of Christ (but in French). It’s a pretty sweet song. I enjoyed being able to play it, and was sad when the girls who’s guitar I borrowed took it back.

Afterwards we had announcements, and then dessert! It was Katie’s birthday today, so we surprised her with a sweet fondue cake thing with trick candles and sang “Happy Birthday” in French! (“Bon anniversaire à toi!”) People hung around for a little while, enjoyed dessert and more conversation in French/English, and then took off for the night, until the meeting next week.

Overall, my impression was that it was a successful meeting, it was certainly fun to meet some of the other Agape students finally. After putting my apartment back together, I celebrated with a glass of peach-mango iced tea and some Bach violin sonatas. Mmm… (some things never change, right?)

Monday, October 6, 2008

Some more pictures...

Here are some more pictures from the last couple of weeks:

Most of them are from our day trip to Anduze:


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We rented a car which Claire drove. It was quite an adventure, involving getting locked out, remote service (like OnStar, except in French), filling up at a gas station for the first time in Europe, not being able to start the car because we didn't know we had to re-activate it...maybe I'll write more about this later...




















Here is a picture from Anduze - it was a quaint little town on the river.

























Anduze is home to a "Bambouserie," which is the largest bamboo forest in Europe.




















"The Valley of the Dragon" - feels like we're in Asia, right?




















And the next day we had the Skur children for the day, the highlight of which was a half an hour of running in the Poseiden fountain close to my apartment. We let the kids run, and we just took pictures (along with several other very curious French bystanders).





















More later...

Sunday, October 5, 2008

End of September Update

You can find my end of September Update here!

Enjoy!

To be welcomed in...

03 Octobre, 2008

To be welcomed in

One aspect of French culture that I find both very interesting and very different than American culture is the reality of social networks here. In the United States, many people have as many friends as they can find, with perhaps a small circle of them that are close friends. Social networks are made up of people from acquaintances to family, and value is given to those who have many friends (for a good example of this, see any facebook profile page).

Here in France, things are very different. Social networks are often very small and very close. A group of friends may consist of four to six people, and those are the people who you interact with almost anytime you do anything social. The tightness of these social groups means that sometimes it can be difficult to really become friends with someone (and building a relationship takes a lot of time here), but once you do, you’re in.

Here, we have been blessed to have been invited in by for sure one group of friends already. It was a connection made through Katie (see team picture below) when she was here a year ago on summer project. After meeting Arnaud once, and being introduced briefly to his friends, they invited us to join them for lunch the next week. We did, and there decided that we needed to go out together later that week again, and we were invited to join them for lunch any time (they eat at the same time each day). Now, for French people to be purposeful about inviting us to do things with them was fantastic and slightly surprising, as we were anticipating to be the ones initiating the social gatherings to get to know people. Let me say that it was a very welcome surprise. Pray for these guys, you can read about them in my monthly update too!

Correction

In my update, I managed two moments of dyslexia, one while writing my address, and one my phone number! Yikes. Here is the correct info:

Erik Rohde

Esplanade de l’Europe

Batiment 19 Appart. 20

Port Juvenal 2

34000 Montpellier, France

06.82.11.11.47 (cell)

(it’s fixed on the update linked above)