The Color of Autumn

Enjoying Some Seasonal Fun

Yesterday was the perfect autumn day.  The sun was shining, illuminating the brightly colored leaves outside of my apartment building on Žilinská street, while the crisp fall air made me want to just bundle up with a hot cup of coffee and enjoy my Sunday morning.  Our church service begins at 4:00 in the afternoon so it is nice to be able to relax throughout the morning and enjoy the day as a day of rest.  The previous week had been a busy one.  Despite not having to come up with a lesson for the youth group I did I have to organize our Halloween Night, visit a school, lead conversation groups, teach an English lesson, and go to my Czech language lesson.  Although traditionally, Czechs don't celebrate Halloween, young people here are increasingly adopting this holiday so we took a bit of a break from our normal routine and had a Halloween Night at Youth Revolution.  We were hoping to have a few people that we haven't seen in a while join us but several of them had other plans at the last minute.  We dressed up in costumes and took some pictures, we played a game, and we had a pumpkin carving contest.  For most of the people in the group, this was the first time that they carved a pumpkin so I had to explain to some how to do it.  The final products came out looking pretty good and we only had one person cut themselves.  Thankfully it wasn't bad. Sabča, who we haven't seen in a while, was able to come and earlier in the week she asked if I would help her with her English.  We didn't have anyone new but hopefully in the future more people would invite friends to come to these events.  Pray that in the future people would invite friends so that the group might grow and the gospel might spread.  The evening went really well and everyone had a great time.  I even got to be creative once again in creating my own costume.

The Minecraft version of myself (And no, I couldn't see at all)

Who's this guy?!

Our group photo

Jack O' Lanterns in progress...

More artists at work

The finished products

More School Visits

Over the last couple of weeks I have made three school visits.  One of the schools that I visited was the school of several people from the youth group as well as people that I have met at the English Camps but I didn't visit any of their classes.  I visited the classroom of a girl named Magda.  She and her mom come to the English conversation group on Thursdays and I met her last year at the teen conversation group.  She is very heavily involved in YoungLife so I don't expect to see her very often at Youth Revolution but I am happy that she is involved in some sort of youth program and that she is a believer.  Pray that the Lord would open up more opportunities at that school because despite the request of several of the teens from Youth Revolution it seems as though several of the English teachers are not very interested in having me visit.  The more opportunities that I get at the school the more relationships I can build with people that my youth groupers already know making it easier for them to invite people to Youth Revolution activities.  I also visited another school in Ostrava twice in two weeks.  One week I visited several English classes of a guy who is a coworker of one of the people from the church.  He is a believer and really enjoyed my presentation and would like me to visit his other classes as well in the future.  I also visited Renča's classes and spoke with them about labor law in the United States.  Pray that God might use these visits for His purposes, whether it is bringing people to the conversation groups, to the youth group or to the church.  Tomorrow I will be making another school visit to Míla's school.  I visited them twice last year and they are actually doing a pen pal program with my mom's classes.

Brodfest

Thursday thru Sunday this week, several people from the youth group and I will be attending a gathering of Christian youth from across the country.  Pray that the Lord would watch over us as we travel across the country, that God would use this weekend to grow and to challenge everyone that attends and that they would build relationship with other believers so that they might be encouraged.  I am happy to be able to attend this with them especially since at this time last year I was traveling to Croatia to wait and hear news of my visa.  Spending the time with the teens from Youth Revolution is the way that I would much rather spend my time.