Saturday, February 21, 2009

Flashback to January

Now that it's almost March, I thought it might be a nice idea to finish my update of January!

We had two big highlights from January, the vision trip from the U of M that came for a week, and our Midyear conference in Nerja, Spain. Here are some pictures from the two events!



The Vision Trip was a group of 9 students and staff from the U of M (and one North Dakotan who also came along). While they were here, we had a lot of fun showing them our city, the ministry, and giving them an idea of what our life is like here. This of course included seeing the sights and the guys treating the girls to a ride on the carousel!



I also enjoyed helping the students get into French culture a little bit. Here we are having just purchased new scarves to sport back in the States. :-)



One of the biggest blessings to me personally was having 4 other guys here for a week! I spent almost every waking moment with these guys, and enjoyed so much just getting to hang out and have some time with other dudes for a while. I love the women on my team, but having guys here for the week was awesome! This is us at the Skur's house. I'm not quite sure how this happened, but I think it was Ryan Larson's idea...




More importantly, having a boost of 9 fresh, energized workers for the week was a huge encouragement to us as a team. The week the Vision Trip was with us we had more spiritual conversations and were able to share the gospel more times than we ever had our first 4 months here. It was amazing how the Lord blessed us as we and they went out in faith to meet people.

One story that I particularly enjoy was from the middle of the week. Drew (one of the vision trip students) and I went out to go sharing on campus, and after some time with relatively unproductive conversations, we sat down at a small café on campus where many students spend the afternoon. We had sat down next to some guys hoping to talk to them, but they left almost as soon as we sat down, so we waited, and after just a few minutes a group of 5 students sat down. We started talking with them, asking if they had a few minutes to view this short film we were showing and get their opinion on the film. The purpose of the film was to have an easy way to initiate conversations and also to invite students who were interested to a soirée we were having at the end of the week with two short films both based on Jesus' parables.

The group was very interested, but two of the students had to leave for an exam, but asked for my cell # to get together later to check out the film. We ended up having a great conversation with the other three, and invited them to the soirée.

The next day I had a text message from the two who had left early, hoping to line up a time to get together. Their proposed time didn't work, but when we went to campus to have lunch, we ran into them! (Let me just note that the cafeteria is huge, and divided into several sections, so the likelihood of this happening by chance was extremely small) We had a great time just visiting with them at lunch, and asked them if they would come to the film soirée as well. They were very interested, so we parted ways that day hoping they would be able to come the following night.

The night of the soirée they were the first students there, and as we dived into the films we had really good discussions. Part way through the evening another friend of theirs joined us in time for the last film. The film was a modern retelling of the parable of the Prodigal Son. As we discussed the film afterwards, they were pulling out solid biblical themes from the story, and Drew was able to share about what it means to him that God's love for him (and all people) was unconditional and how He is always waiting for us to respond to his call for us to come to Him, just like the father in the story.


(Mélanie, Julian, myself, Peter and Drew (two vision trip students))

Since then myself and the team here has been able to keep hanging out with these guys, which has not only been fun for us, but encouraging as we continue to share what our life as believers looks like to these two friends of ours!


Midyear

The other big highlight from January was our Midyear conference, which was in Nerja, Spain, which is on the Mediterranean coast of southern Spain. It was a week-long conference, where we were able to connect with other STINTers from all around Europe and surrounding countries, share successes and frustrations, learn from each other and get some mid-year training and re-energizing for the second half of our year.

On the way there, Laura, Erin and I actually spent a weekend in London, because it was cheaper to fly to Spain via London (makes perfect sense, doesn't it?). We had a great time - Erin and I got to see many of the sights, including going to Les Misérables in London!



When we got to Spain, it was super refreshing to be in an incredibly beautiful location! We were blessed to be staying in a hotel right on the coast, and the view from my room was pretty awesome:





Probably the highlight of the week for me personally was getting to room with and spend the week with one of my close friends who is also STINTing this year.



As a team it was a really fantastic time to connect with other STINT team from around Europe. Here we are with the other STINT team in France. They're up in the north, where it's rainy and cold! We're glad that we're in the south of France!



One of the big answers to prayer from the week at the conference was that it really brought our team together. After living and working in close quarters for 4 months, we all had sensed an underlying tension on the team that none of us could name or put a finger on. One evening at the conference we talked, shared, prayed and worked things out together for five hours, the resulting conversations of which have changed the dynamics on our team 180 degrees. Since then, we've been closer with each other, more honest, and more comfortable living and working together. It's been one of the biggest blessings I could have asked for the second part of this year.

We came away from the conference with some new ideas for a fresh start to how we worked as a team, one primary thing being that we've been focusing on prayer a lot as a team. We've been praying together every week day either at the beginning or end of the day, and the changes that have happened in our ministry have been huge. We've suddenly had more conversations that lead quickly to explaining the gospel, and we've been able to make relational connections with students very quickly as well. We've had one really exciting story in the last week...but you'll just have to wait for that until I have time to type it up!

:-D

Sunday, February 1, 2009

More photos...

Here are some photos from our Christmas conference, Camp Nouvel An.

A view of our main meeting room:


I was assigned to be captain for team 4 - we had a competition on New Years Eve, involving several challenges, including transporting small beans across a room with a straw, stuffing one team member's mouth full of marshmallows, a quiz and blind pictionary (draw with your eyes closed, or use someone else's hand)


We had one day of outreach in the city that we were in (super cool story to follow), here is a picture of my friend Jad out with a fellow STINTer, Natalie, and another student.



When we returned to Montpellier, the unthinkable happened...it snowed! For all you Minnesotans, this is the sum total of snow that we had all season. Winter is basically over already. :-)


Here are some reflections after the conference: