Birthday Celebrations
You may look at this birthday cake and think that there is a spelling mistake, but I assure you it is no mistake. Let me tell you why. Several weeks ago, Anička celebrated her 15th birthday. For those of you who don't know, Anička is girl who has been attending the English conversations for the last two years and last summer attended her first English Camp with her good friend, Klára. After the camp, both of them became heavily involved in Youth Revolution and attend pretty much every week. When I learned that she had birthday I thought that it would be great to celebrate it during youth group, which is something that we try to do for each youth from the group who has birthday during the school year. I asked Klára what she thought about making a cake for Anička and she said that Anička would love to have a cake that looked like the cake that Harry Potter received on his 11th birthday from Hagrid. So she modeled the cake, spelling mistakes and all, after the cake from the movie and I came up with a bit of a plan to make it a little more special, but also weirder. Instead of just recreating the cake from that scene in the movie, we decided to recreate the whole scene during the youth meeting. So after Klára and I cleverly came up with excuses why we each needed to leave we got the cake and few things for my costume. Upon my text message, Kuba and Míla suddenly turned off all the lights in the church and I came back to the church under the cover of darkness and pounded on the door several times. I opened it up, the lights were turned on and I revealed myself to be Hagrid. Klára came in behind me with the cake, lit up with birthday candles. It was really weird and stupid, but Anička really liked it and everyone else got to enjoy the really tasty cake that Klára prepared. Here are a few more pictures from that evening.
Anička (on the right) checking out her birthday cake next to Klára, her close friend and creator of the cake
Doing my best Hagrid impression
Everyone enjoying some cake
Matouš posing for the camera
New Beginnings
Since the beginning of the school year, our group has been studying the book of Romans. We went through each and every one of the 16 chapters to help us understand the power and workings of the gospel, to have a greater respect for the God who orchestrated and planned all these things and to have a new or greater love for the one whose sacrifice makes mercy and redemption possible for undeserving sinners. As many if not all of you know, the book of Romans is a very dense book, full of logical and theological arguments. I knew that it was a lot for them to take in so I wanted to make our next study something that was much more simple and practical. While struggling through preparations for teaching Romans chapter 15, I felt inspired to write some ideas down, but not ideas for chapter 15. Instead the words, "Practical Essentials for the Christian Life," came to my mind. Immediately, I stopped working on preparing Romans chapter 15 and for the next hour, I outlined eight weeks of very practical lessons on the essentials for the Christian life. Several days later, I shared this with the other leaders, along with some other ideas that I got from my one on one meetings with the youth. The new direction would help break up some of the monotony by breaking up teaching weeks with weeks discussion or interviews of Christians in different walks of life. Plus we would also continue to have one event focused on fun and outreach each month.
This past Friday, we started our new study and our new plan. I began the Practical Essentials for the Christian Life study from the most basic place. I had the group consider this question for themselves, "Am I a Christian?" During the lesson, I laid out our need to recognize God as Holy, Holy, Holy. I then showed the response of Isaiah, when he was confronted with this Holy God and that true Christians need to have this recognition of their own sinfulness before this same Holy God. From there we considered what it means to have Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior. We spoke about the need to make this belief public. And we spoke about understanding that without the relationship with God the "religion" is useless. I believe that it came across in a compassionate way, while being clear and direct. I must say though that I was a bit disappointed, because the group was quite small this past week and some of the people that I really hoped would hear this lesson were not there. Pray that God would use that lesson in the lives the people in the group, even if they weren't able to be there to hear it. Pray that God would create opportunities for people to think through these things for themselves and that God might bring someone to new saving belief through it, somehow.
Here are a couple of pictures that we took from our meeting while I still had my horrible mustache
Further Steps
I believe that the last time I updated my blog, I asked you to pray for the application process that I am going through with a particular mission agency, which would allow me to continue my service here. I hadn't heard much about any progress for a couple of months so I was beginning to worry a bit. Even though my faith is weak, God is faithful. About a week later, I heard back from them and we organized a second live video interview and they sent me a second round of application questions. First off, please praise the Lord along with me that things seem to be moving forward in a positive way and that He is so faithful. Pray that God would give me the ability manage all these application questions along with all of the other responsibilities that I have. And pray that God would work all of these things out in His own perfect way and in His own perfect timing.
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