WordAlive and Thanksgiving

Recently Jo, Lauren and I have become convicted that we need to start a regular more spiritually oriented outreach for our students. Jo talked to some other teachers in Russia and got some advice on how to go about this. Next week we will start WordAlive. Right after school our students are invited over to play some games, ultimate frisbee, football, etc. Then around 2pm we will have a time for reading an excerpt from the Gospel of John and discussing it in English. Some of our friends from the International Christian Fellowship of Budapest, Calvary Chapel, Campus Crusade and YWAM will also be helping out. We are so excited about this opportunity to get to know our students better and share more concretely the love of God.

Last weekend was the TeachOverseas Thanksgiving Retreat for Central Europe. It was strange, wonderful, refreshing, and frustrating all at once. Strange because I sort of forgot that we all live on the same continent. Wonderful because we have so many shared experiences to talk about. Refreshing in a spiritual and emotional sense (this was the first time since I have been here that I have participated in worship in English!) And frustrating because our time was so short, we did not get a chance to get to talk about deep things with individuals, and I did not get to talk to the people I had met for the first time as much as I would have liked.

Thanksgiving Round Two will be at our place next Friday. We are inviting three different classes. If they all show up then we will have 105 students... we are thinking that only about 50 will come... but we will see how the RSVP's come in. Many of our friends who have said they are willing to help with WordAlive are also going to help with this. We have turkey that has been ordered (in Hungary it is hard to find whole turkeys), people have been assigned tasks: mashed potatoes, green beans, stuffing, peas and cheese salad (I am becoming my parents), apple pie, pumpkin pie, peanut butter pie, etc. We will see how our kitchen can handle all of this....

Just in time for Thanksgiving... we now have a new stove!!! Our old stove had one eye that worked... until we tried to use one of the other ones. One other eye worked, one did not. The one that did refused to turn off after we turned it on. We had to go without a fridge and stove for about two weeks. Then Bobak, the caretaker, said that they were going to buy us a new one because that one was old. We only asked for them to fix it, not for a new one. God saw our need and provided a new stove for us! The new one is bigger and shiny. Praise the LORD!!!

Prayer requests:
- Health and energy, for Lauren, Jo and me
- WordAlive! That Ss would come, have fun, and be interested in what we read
- Thanksgiving: the food to cook and be how it is supposed to be
- All my students!