Thankful

Forgive me for a week's lag in posting about our Thanksgiving.

We have so much to be thankful for this year and we are mindful of it all the time. Every day I feel like I am overflowing with gratitude for everything God has done for us, in us and through us. It would be impossible to list them all.

One thing I am thankful for is that we had such a nice American Thanksgiving last week. I was having a hard time this year being away from family for the fifth year in a row. But it was made a lot easier when new and old friends invited us to join them for dinner last Thursday. We watched the live broadcast of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade while cooking and then we sat down to a traditional feast, complete with green bean casserole, sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes and turkey, and more.

Here's what it looked like.

Someone found the crunchy onions for the green bean casserole, and a stuffing mix.

We were a bit too intimidated by a whole turkey, so they found these juicy large turkey breasts.

The British do stuffing in small round shapes so we tried that.

Rachael and Thijs, former students at EuNC when we were there in Germany, live here now and it was nice to be with familiar folk. Rachael is American and Thijs is Dutch. This is Rachael watching the parade.

Rachael attempts to make gravy while Graham, the PR coordinator for NTC and the host of our meal, worked on spiced apple juice. Graham is from Scotland.

Spiced apple juice

Andrew kicking back and relaxing while everyone else cooked. :-)

Shanley, an American, is Graham's girlfriend and did a large share of the cooking.

My contribution: pumpkin pies.

A rousing game of Dutch Blitz to conclude the evening.

Curry, bonfires and new friends

It's been two months since Andrew arrived in Manchester and one month since I followed him here. Things are going very well and we are happy to be here.

Because we Americans share a language, and to a great extent, a culture with Great Britain, we very quickly felt comfortable and at ease here. Yet we still stumble across differences at times. I learned quickly, accompanied by a lot of laughter, not to say I have "waterproof pants" which here means you have Depends adult diapers. We learned that "to vacuum" is "to Hoover" and that the burner on your stove is a "hob." We have also learned that "cheers" is a multi-purpose word to cover a variety of meanings, ranging from "thanks" to "no problem" to "have a good day" to "here you go."

In October we attended Nazarene Theological College's graduation ceremony, and enjoyed imagining the moment three years from now when it will be Andrew's turn to walk and receive his award for completing his PhD.

We have enjoyed several trips to explore the Curry Mile, which is a stretch of road crowded with Middle Eastern and South Asian restaurants, stores and businesses. It is a highly multicultural area where you will see women raising the flap on their burqa to fit food into their mouths, men wearing turbans, and women wearing Indian sarees and salawas. People are smoking shisha and eating deep-fried Indian samosas or syrupy sweets.

We have also visited Chinatown in downtown Manchester, where we bought some Chinese grocery ingredients.

And we observed a big Diwali celebration at the town hall. Diwali is a Hindu festival of lights. There was a live-storytelling presentation enacted by life-size, lighted puppets, pyrotechnics and fireworks and a colored light display on the town hall building.

Last night we visited a 400-year-old British tradition of lighting a large bonfire in a park and then setting off fireworks, to celebrate the averted assassination attempt on the life of King James I in the 1600s, by the now infamous Guy Fawkes. The crowd of thousands enjoyed fire dancers as well as carnival rides and carnival treats like soft serve ice cream and cotton candy.

It has been a real pleasure for us to be in a bigger city for a change with all of these opportunities to rub shoulders with people of different cultures and to experience a taste of their homelands in our daily lives.

I (Gina) am starting to feel out my new role as a one-day-per-week volunteer for Nazarene Theological College. I have written two articles for the college which you can find here: http://www.ncnnews.com/nphweb/html/ncn/article.jsp?sid=10000008&id=10014086
http://www.ncnnews.com/nphweb/html/ncn/article.jsp?sid=10000008&id=10014082

I am also quite swamped with stories for Engagemagazine.com, and continuing to publish stories for the Eurasia Region. Our November edition of our newsletter came out this week. You can find it here: http://www.eurasiaregion.org/where-worlds-meet-november-2014-2/

Andrew is happily busy with preparing to lecture twice in the coming weeks and months, studying Latin and Greek, reading for his first big paper due in his PhD process, helping a deaf student in note-taking for one of his classes and now serving as a representative on the Student Council.

There are times when we miss our friends and life in Germitzerland. There are times when we miss our friends and family in the U.S. For me, Thanksgiving is quite foremost on my mind this year. It is my favorite holiday all year and this will be our fifth year in a row to miss out on Thanksgiving with our families in Colorado. It is hitting me harder this year than it has in past years. It looks like we will spend the day with some new friends here, three of whom are American, so I am really looking forward to that. I also plan to cook some familiar favorites for Andrew and I so we can have leftovers throughout that weekend.

This will be our third year away from our families for Christmas. I am also sad about that. We are still trying to determine what we will do for the holiday.

However, we have a trip home to look forward to. We are in the midst of planning our home assignment speaking tour in the U.S. next year. The dates are a bit in flux due to an unforeseen complication with renewing my visa next October. For sure right now we will be in Colorado in August and we are open to other places in the month of September. If you are interested in having us to come and speak at your church, youth group, children's group, Sunday school class or small group, or even a home school group or another setting, email me at gpottenger (at) nazarene.org and we can look at getting out to where you are!

We love hearing from you and sharing our lives with you. Thank you so much for your prayers as we continue to settle in and make friends and especially this year as we are away from our families during the holidays.

Settling in

Andrew and I have both now arrived in Manchester and are settling into our room, the school of Nazarene Theological College and life in England. We are already noticing cultural and language differences, learning to ride the bus system and finding out which stores carry which items that we need.

Andrew arrived on September 7 and I got my visa in mid September and arrived on the 29th. I spent my last few weeks in Busingen by cleaning and emptying out our apartment, packing up everything that was there and shipping it either to the US or to Manchester. I also did a lot of goodbyes and Last Things, such as the last time to go to my favorite restaurant, the last time to walk by the Rhein, the last time for a coffee in Schaffhausen, the last time to see my friends, etc.

Meanwhile, Andrew has been making friends and getting busy with his responsibilities here at NTC. He's auditing a Latin course at the University of Manchester down the road, as well as starting his teaching assistant responsibilities and helping to colead a pastoral care group of undergraduate students. He is also taking notes for a hearing impaired student for one of his classes. He spends a lot of time in the library as well.

I was very excited that I will have an office on campus where I can do my work five days per week, rather than having to work from our room. I will spend one day per week working for NTC and continue four days per week as full-time manager of Engagemagazine.com and managing the regional publications for the Eurasia Region. I am sad that now I am separated from the rest of our awesome communication team in Busingen but hopefully we will chat and video often with Skype. I will also miss all the impromptu chats and visits with the rest of our regional office team. Yet, I look forward to working with new colleagues here.

We want to thank you deeply for praying us through this transition and through my incredibly difficult flight experience in getting here (it's a long story). We couldn't have endured our 3-week separation or gotten everything done without your support and prayers. We miss and love you and hope to hear from you when you can. You can also keep up with our short posts in our Facebook group. Just search for The Pottengers in Germany, even though we are no longer in Germany. :-) (Facebook won't allow us to change the group name.)

A big change

Gina and I are now free to announce a change in our lives and ministry in Eurasia. We are in the process of relocating to Manchester, England so that I can pursue my doctoral research on-site at Nazarene Theological College rather than long-distance. We believe that moving to Manchester is the next natural step as we continue following Christ’s lead in our lives.

I (Andrew) arrived in Manchester last Sunday evening, and have spent the week settling into our new apartment, becoming acquainted with the NTC community, and familiarising myself with the city. With thanks to God, we can say that yesterday we received word that Gina’s visa application was approved! We also want to thank you for your prayers regarding some cryptic hints and unspoken needs we have posted in our Facebook group. You couldn’t have known what you were praying for, but God knew and we appreciate your faithfulness and support as always.

Very briefly, I would like to summarise for you how God has led us and made it possible for us to follow that lead.

Last summer, Gina and I spent three weeks at the NTC campus where I immersed myself in research. Both of us felt very welcome and comfortable here, and we began quietly exploring the possibility of staying here. Unfortunately, the legal and financial obstacles proved insurmountable and we concluded that we’d stay in Busingen.

Then, we were asked by regional leadership if we were still interested in moving to Manchester. It didn’t seem feasible, we’d just enrolled in German language study, and we were totally content to remain in Busingen at least for the duration of my doctoral program. As we continued prayerfully thinking it over and communicating with our leaders, every “insurmountable” legal and financial obstacle against relocation quickly began to fall. God gave us peace and the assurance that He would guide, protect, and provide for us no matter what. He showed Himself faithful and greater than any impossible difficulty.

We plan to be in Manchester for the next three years, the approximate duration of my program as a full-time doctoral student. I will be largely focused on research and study, while also enjoying the opportunity to serve the college as a teaching assistant in church history and theology. Gina will continue as managing editor of “Engage” magazine as well as producing “Where Worlds Meet” and “Snapshots” for the Eurasia region. She will also give a few hours a week to the college campus as a volunteer.

Through God’s faithfulness and your continued support, we are able to take this exciting new step. Even though we were not able to share details, many of you nevertheless continued responding to our multiple requests for prayer. We are so grateful for your involvement in what God is doing in this largest, most culturally diverse of all regions in the Church of the Nazarene.

Ministering in Bulgaria

Andrew and I just returned from a week of working in Bulgaria, a former Soviet Union nation in Eastern Europe. Andrew taught a Nazarene History and Polity course for European Nazarene College to two students, and preached in the church on Sunday morning. I worked with our regional communications team to gather written and video stories of all that God is doing in Bulgaria.

God is at work in this economically depressed nation. But it is a hard place to work. Rampant unemployment has led to a mass departure of young adults and families who have sought jobs and a new, more hopeful life in Western European nations. This leaves children and elderly people to try and prop things up in Bulgaria.

With vast rolling plains and gentle mountains, Bulgaria is a beautiful and peaceful country on the surface. Underneath there is still a lot of pain caused by the struggle to transition from a Communist government to a democratic one. There are pockets of Roma (gypsy) communities that are generally segregated from the majority Bulgarian population, and the two ethnic groups have no love for each other.

In Montana, the poorest region and also the birthplace of Communism in Bulgaria, the Nazarene church has faced repression from governing authorities, resistance and harrassment from neighbors, and does its best to reach out to people who are involved in the darkness of the occult, are in bondage to alcoholism, or struggling to make ends meet due to unemployment. The congregation has become a beacon of hope for not only young families but the elderly and Roma people.

We sensed the powers of darkness hard at work to discourage, divide and resist God's people in their work to expand the Kingdom. We invite you to pray with us for the Church in Bulgaria, that it would be empowered by the Holy Spirit to overcome all spiritual and physical opposition and would be victorious in the name of Jesus Christ, who is greater than all who stand against Him.

Our communications team first spent time investigating a brand new compassionate ministry center that is being organized by the Montana Church of the Nazarene. The church is setting up this foundation to assist local people in accessing information and grants from the government and the European Union to start up small private businesses that will infuse new funds and energy into the local economy, and help families no longer be dependent on government welfare. We interviewed
two people who are building this foundation, and we also visited a Roma family that has been able to purchase land and start an orchard of their own, as a result of help from this foundation. The father of the Roma family said he is the first in 10 generations to own his own land. In a nation where people are too hopeless to dream about the future, this family now has hope and big dreams to grow their own agricultural business.

We also spent a day with a woman, Geroyka, who travels around to different villages with a truck filled with household items and clothing for sale, and while doing business with the villagers, she tells them about Jesus and plants churches. She then returns to the new church plants every week to disciple the new believers. She does this entirely on her own initiative and funds her ministry through her market business.

We interviewed the Nazarene pastor in Montana, Valeri, who has an amazing testimony, and who shared with us the exciting story of how his church was started and how it grew to more than 100 people who now worship in their own building, which in decades past was the home of the very first Communist mayor of Montana.

We also spent a few hours at a home for poor elderly people, where two singers performed for the residents and members of the church handed out chocolate and cookies along with hugs and smiles. That elderly home was a hopeless and not nice place, and it was a sobering experience.

Then we spent a day with Zhana, a young woman who overcame personal prejudice against the Roma people to work full-time with Roma children in a local government school, as well as planting churches among Roma families in the surrounding villages. We visited a small Bible study group of Roma for lunch and to see Zhana at work among the people who are open and hungry to hear each week about the goodness and love of Jesus Christ.

Roma are not typically open to strangers, so we felt incredibly privileged to be invited for food and fellowship without hesitation on their part.

It was a full and eye-opening week and we are grateful to have seen and heard not only the struggles but the victories of God's people in Bulgaria. I'm excited to share our videos and articles in the coming weeks and months. Thank you for your prayers for us while we were on this trip.

From the mountain to the valley

I am realizing that trust is a fragile thing. Even trust in someone as reliable and loving as God.

I believe God has never failed me. You'd think that would be enough to clinch my undying and unending trust in every circumstance I face. That trust by now would just come automatically. But it doesn't.

Some years ago, I went through a very dark, difficult time. I cried out to God to just be with me in that time of suffering and loneliness. I wasn't asking for a solution to my situation, or an end to the pain. I just needed him to sustain me in the midst of that experience. For some reason I still cannot fully understand, he seemed to leave me alone. For the first time in my life, when I needed him the most, I couldn't sense his presence or his comfort or his peace. I felt left to my own strength and resource, which of course were weak and used up.

That experience of seeming abandonment shattered a trust in God that all my life to that point had been unshakeable and reflexive. It's taken years of hard work between the two of us to build back that trust, but I admit, it's still a bit shaky.

Just yesterday, Andrew and I took a quick overnight trip to Zermatt, a village at the foot of the world famous and iconic Matterhorn, a sharp, toothy peak in southern Switzerland. Throughout the entire drive down late on Wednesday night and subsequent hiking day on Thursday, we saw bold evidence of God's hand on us, his provision for exactly what we needed when we needed it. Everything was working out perfectly when it might have gone badly (we could have hit hours-long traffic jams, missed the 11 p.m. train from Täsch into Zermatt, been locked out of our hotel. Thankfully, we avoided these possibilities). As we hiked, we were literally "on the mountaintop" and reveled in God's stunning and awe-inspiring creation. The weather gave us a few hours' window of perfection to get spectacular pictures and enjoy the scenery before it clouded over and we could no longer see the peak. I felt close to God, I experienced his faithfulness and my trust was increased.

Then we drove down from the mountain and back home into the flatlands of northern Switzerland. We left the "mountaintop."

Less than 24 hours later, I'm face-to-face with a brick wall of seeming impossible circumstances that are riddled with uncertainty, enormous obstacles and fear-inducing possibilities. My trust is in danger of faltering. Today, here "in the valley" I am reminded that trust isn't a feeling or a state of being. It's a choice. A hard choice that takes effort, strength and determination.

I don't know why we turn mountains and valleys into spiritual metaphors. We often say we're "on the mountaintop" when we're in a moment of spiritual excitement, wonder, deep trust and comfort or peace. When we're "in the valley" we're experiencing a lack of spiritual resources, or perhaps suffering and trials, difficult obstacles, disappointment, grief, fear or depression.

Well, that metaphor couldn't be more tangible to me than today. Yet, with the view of the Matterhorn fresh in my memory, and my clear memory of how he gave us everything we needed when we needed it, I am making the difficult choice of trusting God to work everything out to his good and perfect plan, for my good (not for my comfort necessarily but for my good) and believe that he is in control when we are so obviously not able to be.

Together

We've been through three months of daily German lessons now, and the class is taking a hiatus for the month of September. There was something I didn't expect to happen when we began on May 5, that a break is allowing me to reflect on.

I didn't expect to bond so much with our classmates. Hailing from Russia, Kyrgyzistan, Bulgaria, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Syria, France, Turkey, Spain, Thailand and Nigeria, the students in our class are all on the same playing field, the same team, with no one having the advantage of being on their home turf. We are all foreigners, learning a new culture and a new language together. There's something about making mistakes together, laughing together over those mistakes, helping each other through the difficult lessons that bonds people to each other. There is no room for arrogance or superiority for anyone when you're learning a foreign language.  We are all humbled by the obvious nature of what we do not know and cannot say without help. And everyone wants the others to succeed.

I was surprised by how our classmates worked their way into my heart. They are kind, gentle and generous people who love to share their lives, even when we cannot communicate in words, by pulling out their iPhones to show each other their homes, their families, their countries, and anything else that makes them who they are. They love to give hugs. I am humbled by their exceeding and unmatchable hospitality and generosity. It was hard to say goodbye to them for the summer.

I have been praying for them, for God to bless them and their families, as well as their integration into this new culture and land. I pray that someday we will all stand at the throne of God and praise Him together.

About Büsingen

Ever wonder how our strange little village of Germany became completely enclosed within Switzerland? And how does that work?

Here's a very short but informative article about how Büsingen got this way and how it works now.

http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/253-germany-surrounded-by-switzerland

Making New Friends (Re-Posted with Additions)

The following is re-posted from a couple of weeks ago. Just trust me when I say I felt it necessary to take it down due to the potential for miscommunication and misunderstanding. I've also added some more recent thoughts at the end. I apologize for the abnormal length of this entry, but please read all the way through. - Andrew

***
I am reeling a bit after German classes this week.

The teacher asked one of the girls from Turkey a simple question for the sake of an example having to do with families. Do you have a mother? No. Do you have a father? No. Brother? Sisters? The girl broke down in a sudden flood of tears, and had to leave the classroom for a little while. The teacher, obviously, was very embarrassed.

A male student showed me a photograph of his small apartment shared with three other guys in Syria. There was a gaping hole in the roof, and the interior was covered in dust and rubble. He and his roommates had left the apartment only moments before a bomb fell and destroyed their apartment. With a smile, he showed me a second photograph of the four of them outside the building, wide grins on their faces, and middle fingers extended in the air. The implied message was unmistakable: “You missed.”
 
Another male student today showed me a gruesome image of a friend with multiple head wounds. The friend had been in an accident in Greece. His heart stopped for ten minutes and he was presumed dead. As he was being taken to a morgue, his eyes popped open. Somehow, he was still alive (though likely with some brain damage). This same student told another story about being an ambulance driver in Syria, which is a far cry from being one in Europe or the US. He wore black clothing and bullet-proof armor while driving through war zone after war zone. Ambulances were targets, and he was sometimes shot at. He mentioned snipers. He says the things he saw are like photos in his mind, and he can’t forget them. He says this with no trembling in his voice and an awkward smile on his face. You would think he’d just told you he’d gone fishing. He says he saw too many people die. When I reminded him that he had probably saved many people, he smiled (less awkwardly, with more warmth). No doubt when the images of the dead are so powerful, it is hard to remember the ones you helped save.

What an incredible, eye-opening, heart-changing privilege to be a part of these people’s lives – no matter how long or short it lasts. The photographs of protests, destruction, and the injured were not taken by reporters. I didn’t see them on a website. They were taken on the same iPhones I held in my hands as the people personally involved in these events explained each picture. When I shake their hands, I shake hands very likely once covered in someone else’s blood. Hands that balled into fists and beat the air during a protest.

Though I can nearly always find something to relate to in the story of a person who has suffered, there is not a shred of anything in my experience or knowledge that helps me understand any of this. A few summers ago, I put pressure on the bleeding wounds of an elderly man who had been in a bike accident on a busy street. This is nothing compared to what these Syrian friends have likely seen or experienced in the space of an hour. Yet that experience shook me up something fierce. I watched with horror as bodies fell, or rather leaped, from the burning World Trade Center. But I saw it on television from the remote distance of several hundred miles. This is sadly distant from any level of being able to relate to my new Syrian friends.

But they’re talking to me about these things, showing me the photographs, and even if I can’t relate I can still listen. Not only because it’s good for them to talk rather than bottle these things up inside, but because I think I just need to keep hearing these stories. I need to keep looking into the eyes of those who are telling the stories, and never forget that despite all the many things that make us so different from each other we are still real, living and breathing people. And, at least for now, we share the same space and can share stories and – for four hours a day – can share our lives.

***
Following the temporary removal of that original post, we had a two-week holiday from German class. We returned yesterday.

A girl from Bulgaria shared with Gina yesterday about her grandmother - who raised her as if she were her own daughter - has a life-threatening condition and only surgery can bring relief. However, the lady refused to have surgery because she was afraid she wouldn't survive the procedure. The girl and her husband tried to persuade her that she would certainly die without it. The girl returned to class yesterday after two weeks in Bulgaria, and does not know what condition her grandmother is now in.

A girl who seemed to immediately become attached to Gina left class yesterday due to severe stomach pain. We learned she was taken to the hospital yesterday afternoon before our class let out for the day. She's pregnant, but the baby is fine though the pain continues to be severe. She's alone in a foreign country, except for her husband who seems to be an absolutely wonderful man.

The two male students I refer to above come from the same village in Syria. Within the last couple of days, their village was arbitrarily attacked by terrorists. On one day 20 people were killed, and 50 died on another day. I couldn't believe these guys showed up to class or that both stayed the whole time. They were distracted and visibly upset, but they were present and engaged for the full four hours. Imagine you are thousands of miles away, and you learn that your neighborhood was attacked by terrorists and 70 people are killed. Never mind how you'd feel: would you even be capable of showing up for class or going to work?

I hesitate to share so much personal information about our classmates who are very quickly becoming friends. But these are the real people facing some serious difficulties far away from home: that is where our ability to relate pretty much stops.

Our hearts break for our new friends who suffer. We don't know what to do. We don't know what to say (and our vocabulary and grammar are painfully limited just yet). I'm re-learning how much it hurts to love, and how much wisdom is required. It isn't hard to love people who are so completely different from us, but it is hard to know how best to do so. We can do nothing more for the time being than pray for our friends, reach out as best we can, and rely on God to help us love with wisdom and for our friends to receive love from us in the spirit in which it's given - even if we inadvertently make mistakes in how we might express or fail to express it.

Please join us in prayer for our friends!

German class

We are in our fifth year in Germany and Switzerland. According to European Union law, when a foreign resident is in the country for five years, he or she must become proficient in the local language (German) in order to get the work visa renewed for subsequent years.

We are not proficient according to the government standards and although we tried to get an exception, we are being required to take an intensive, seven-month German course at an approved language school before we will be eligible to have our visas renewed so we can stay here next year.

Thankfully, through your giving to our ministry fund while we were touring the States last year, we now have the finances needed to pay for the class, which is rather expensive (several thousand dollars). We could not afford to take the classes prior to now. We are really grateful to you all for helping to make this happen so we can stay.

The class started on Monday. It meets five days a week, from 8:30 a.m. until 12:40 p.m., and with the exception of August, it will run from now until Dec. 23.

It's a bit overwhelming to do this 4 hours a day, every day. It makes us tired mentally and physically. However, it's also a lot of fun. We have really wanted to get a lot better in German and weren't able to afford it during the first four years. We are really excited to be able to have deeper conversations with our friends and acquaintances in the very near future.

It's also fun to be in a class with 16 other people from a variety of nations. We haven't had much chance at conversation yet, but know there will be many opportunities. Our class consists of six people from Turkey, three people from Syria, and the others hail from: Nigeria, Russia, Hungary, Bulgaria, France, Kyrgyzstan and Thailand. We are among the oldest people in the class; most are in their 20s.

We could use your prayers on a variety of angles concerning our class:

• That we will be adept at absorbing this new information and retaining it.
• That we will be able to manage our time so that we can get all our other work done with only four hours in the afternoon each day to do it and meet our deadlines.
• That God will show us opportunities to share His love with our new classmates.
• That we will have the physical and mental strength and energy to keep up. It's only been four days but we have gotten increasingly weary with each day.

Thanks again for your love, prayers and support!

Being in the valley

For some reason, for the past three weeks, Andrew and I have been in a bit of a valley. We've analyzed it, talked it over and tried to figure it out. I don't think we've reached any conclusions as to why, and thus that makes it harder to address or try to "fix."

I've had valleys in every part of my career, at every place I've worked. So I know that what we're feeling is not just because we're missionaries. Everybody has down days, tough weeks, long and melancholy months. That's just life.

I can generally point to my current feelings of being in a spiritual or emotional valley to frustration with myself for not being as productive in my missionary work as I think I should be. I've had trouble achieving measurable results, projects haven't turned out how I wanted and in my frustration I've struggled harder to focus, to stay on task and to be as creative and motivated as I normally am, which leads me to feel disappointed in myself, and thus melancholy.

Where my melancholy is exacerbated is the various additional feelings that get layered over the melancholy and complicate things.

1. Failure. Because when you only hear the good stories of victory and achievement from missionaries, you tend to think that if you're having a less productive week or month where for every accomplishment are several failures or setbacks, you feel like a failure, that you're not "doing a good job." It seems like we missionaries are constantly reporting these series of successes or results of our hard work. When you don't have anything positive to report, you feel less valuable as a missionary because you are less productive.

2. Guilt. As a missionary, knowing that your salary and support is coming through sacrificial donations from generous but not necessarily well-off people around the world puts extra pressure on you to achieve and produce consistently, all the time. You don't want to waste the precious donations of so many loving and supportive people by failing to produce massive amounts of quality work each week or month.

3. Spiritual questioning. You ask yourself: Is my feeling of melancholy, my lack of focus and concentration, my emotional exhaustion the result of some kind of spiritual failure on my part? Do I need to pray harder, trust more, read the Bible more, basically work a lot harder on my spiritual life?

When you're already emotionally and physically worn out from the work you've been doing, feeling like you need to push harder in your spiritual life just adds to the feelings of tiredness you're already battling.

I think the hardest part of being a missionary for me are these times when you spiritualize your work. In all honesty, I find it tempting to have a job "just for the money." There are fewer layers of complicating emotions that come with a job where you're simply in it for the paycheck, and don't have the conscious pressure all the time that your work is tied up in the eternal destination of millions of people around the world, as well as in reviving and upholding and inspiring the Church. For me, that's just a lot of pressure when I go to work that I haven't had at secular jobs. Yes, knowing my work has eternal significance (I actually think all work has eternal value, but you know what I mean) gives meaning to my workday, but it also adds a lot of pressure.

Anyway, a couple of things spoke to me this week in regards to these feelings. First, one day, while I was trying to force myself to put in a few more hours work to make up for the hours where my efforts hadn't produced anything, I heard the words in my head "man is not a machine." I reflected on what that phrase meant, and I concluded that I am an organic, living human being who gets tired. I am not a machine where I can turn myself on when I walk in the office door, work like a robot all day, and then turn myself off when I go home at night. I have feelings that can drain my energy, such as disappointment, loneliness, isolation, frustration, resentment and self-criticism. I think when I heard the words in my head "man is not a machine," that was God speaking to me and reminding me that there are times when I just can't work as hard or that my efforts will be less productive than other times because of the emotions I am experiencing, and this is OK.

Second, Andrew preached a sermon in church last Sunday about Sabbath. While it was mainly focused on our need to rest in God regularly, and this is generally associated with a certain day per week, it helped me realize that God recognizes our need for rest, for pulling back and recovering from our work. So when I feel how I've felt the past few weeks, it may be a signal that it's time to give myself a break and a little room to be less productive until I recover my strength in God and can push it hard again.

Third, this article that I ran in Engage by Howard Culbertson talks about how being a missionary isn't about the measurable results you can see, but in simply being obedient and dedicated to the Lord of your life. I think this can apply to anyone, whether you are a missionary living in another culture or not. I encourage you to read it. http://engagemagazine.com/content/doing-mission-well-dedication

No matter what job you have or what demands and pressures are on you, whether you are called a missionary or simply a Christian who lives a missional life in your own community, we all have these times when we need to give ourselves a bit of a break and realize that we are not machines, that we need to rest, allow ourselves to fail, and know that sometimes our efforts won't achieve measurable results to our own expectations, and this is OK. Sometimes, I think we can be harder on ourselves than God is on us.

And we need to know that, even though we are products of cultures that place greater value on humans who achieve great results, our value and worth is not tied up in our productivity and successes, but simply in our identity as the beloved children of God.

-- Gina

Teaching live webinars

For the past five weeks, I have been teaching a live webinar series on "Powerful Storytelling" to as many as 100 participants who live and work in Asia, Africa and Europe. I have been doing this each Monday in partnership with the Asia-Pacific Region's communication team, who are handling the tech side of the whole thing while I teach the lessons I've written on how to communicate a story in a compelling way.

It has been super exciting to me that the curriculum I wrote two years ago is getting out to even more Nazarene ministry personnel around the world beyond the Eurasia Region.

Since I began working with Engage in 2009, seeing the stories that people in ministry are developing for their own blogs and newsletters, or submitting to various Nazarene publications, I've realized that offering some basic writing training might be helpful to a lot of people who are already doing the hard work of telling the stories of God's work in their parts of the world. So I've dreamed of this for a long time, and waited to see if my dream was something that God actually wanted me to do.

As the different training opportunities have come my way (a presentation to field strategy coordinators in April 2011, live classroom training India in 2012 and South Asia in 2013, a workshop at General Assembly 2013, and now online webinars for Asia-Pacific, Europe and Africa in 2014), I can see that this is a dream God has given me and has been making a reality. It's amazing to see everything materialize without my pushing down any doors, that they just open naturally.

For this webinar, the series of topics is a little different than what I taught in India and South Asia because it's a slightly different demographic of participants. Here's the schedule we've done:

1. Why we tell stories
2. What makes a story
3. Narrative Writing
4. Interviewing
5. Writing news stories and blogs
6. Ethics

We will have the last webinar in the series this coming Monday. We've been recording each session and uploading each session, along with lesson documents, exercises and sometimes bonus audiocasts to a resource website so that the many participants who can't join us live can download the materials and watch the lesson later.

A week or two ago, I shared about this training with a missionary in the Mesoamerica Region (Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean) and she felt that my coursework would fit perfectly into a seminary class they're going to be offering this fall to train regional missionaries on how to communicate about their work with the local church. I've been asked to write a syllabus for the storytelling part of the class and to give them all my materials, which they will then adapt and translate into Spanish. It's really exciting to see the dream and the teaching spread around the world like this.

I feel really humbled that I get to be part of this. I know there're are a lot more qualified and experienced people out there than myself, but for some reason I just can't fathom, I'm the one doing this.

All this to say, thanks a lot to everyone who has been praying for the webinars and for me. It's been a challenging project, and sometimes we've had technology problems or our participants have had trouble logging in to the sessions. Sometimes I stumble a bit as I teach. But overall, the feedback I've been getting from the participants has been really positive and helps to affirm that this has been a valuable use of my time.

Compassion programs in Bangladesh and Nepal

I know I sort of dropped off about blogging on my trip to South Asia last October, but there was one thing I wanted to be sure to tell you about.

I had the opportunity to visit a variety of compassionate ministry projects in action that are funded through your giving to Nazarene Compassionate Ministries (ncm.org). I'd read about a lot of these ministries but to see them on the ground and the real people who are positively affected was really cool.

For background, many of NCM's projects are run through local churches and volunteers or employees out of local churches. This means that the church is the center and the driver of any activity designed to lift people out of poverty. The church helps the people in its village and surrounding villages with no strings attached -- no one is forced to go to church and they don't have to be a Christian or convert. In fact, many of the people who are participants in the projects are adherents to other religions. At the same time, spiritual teaching may sometimes be offered in conjunction with a project, but it's not forced on anyone. These projects are conducted entirely on the motive of love for fellow man and a desire to improve their lives holistically -- relationally, physically, spiritually and emotionally.

First of all, there is something called a compost project. I saw several of these in rural villages in the south of Bangladesh. Local churches teach people how to dig a square-shaped hole in the ground and then fill the pits with the dung from the many cows that are present in the village. The material turns into compost that can be used as fertilizer to make their crops more abundant and healthy.

Here's a picture of a woman with her compost pit.

Another type of project is a fish pond. Since meat from cows and chickens is probably very expensive and limited, people in Bangladesh eat a lot of fish. NCM projects enable people to dig ponds and fill them with fish, which multiply and become plentiful. It's easy enough to cast nets or fish with a stick and string and hook to harvest the fish and sell them for a profit which enables the owners to buy things they need. They can also eat them for a source of inexpensive protein.

In one project, a family is growing mahogany trees, a very expensive type of tree because the wood is very precious around the world for building furniture and knick knacks. This is a long-term project because the trees will have to grow for many years before they can be harvested.

A seed project is when NCM provides a small scale farming family with seeds or seedlings which they can plant and nurture until they're ready to harvest. From the harvest the family will collect new seeds, as well as sell some of the vegetables for project and eat the rest of the harvest. This creates long-term sustainable living for a family, who may share the new seeds with neighbors who can then reproduce the project on their own land. Here's a property in Nepal where many of the crops are from such a seed project.

The last project, which may be my favorite because I am a big fan of entrepreneurism: Self-help groups. Groups of women and teenage girls band together to save small bits of cash that they have and pool their savings as a group until they have enough to pay out a loan to one of the group members. The one receiving the loan uses it to buy materials to start a small business. With the profits from the business, the woman pays back to the loan to the group, who are still saving, and in turn they give out more loans to group members. Together, they work toward raising themselves and their families out of poverty.

The woman in this picture used her loan to buy a sewing machine and materials to make clothes which she can then sell as her own small business.

The man in this picture started a small snack shop with the loan his wife took out from the group, and together they are building their small business through his wife's entrepreneurism. Although some of the men in the village were derisive of a woman getting into business, this man said he was really proud of his wife for her hard work and business-mind and how she was providing for their family. He defended her from some of the men's criticism, which I thought was really cool.

Another major initiative of NCM is to establish child development centers (CDC). These are small educational centers where village children can come to learn spiritual truth, but also basic hygiene, and to be educated if they cannot go to a regular school -- so they might learn math, reading, English, and other basic skills. They sing songs and also play together and maybe get a hot meal or snack. Some of these CDCs are supplemental to the education the children are already getting, so they might get up at 5:30 a.m. and go to the CDC from 6 to 7 before school, or they might go to the CDC after school. Many of the children are able to participate in CDCs because of people like you who sponsor them for about $25 a month. We visited several CDCs and got to see how happy and energetic the children were.

All in all, I was very impressed with meeting all the individuals who are participating in these NCM projects. The biggest thing I noticed was how full of hope they were. They believed that by doing their part in these projects, they could improve their lives and provide for their families in better ways. They could see a way up from their previous circumstances. I have always respected how NCM operates and the vision that it has, as well as the care it takes to do only good and not harm in the way it conducts its social enterprises. But my respect only deepened after seeing the projects and the people for myself.

I also really enjoyed the chance to just chat (through a translator) with the women in the self-help groups, who had loads of questions. We asked each other what we like to eat in our own cultures, what our husbands are like, and just normal things about daily life. They were simply charming and I was sorry that I couldn't spend a few days with them, instead of a few hours.

Hühnerleber

The other day I went to the store and on a whim decided to buy some chicken livers.

I know, I know. Hey, we both like breaded, deep fried chicken livers. Don't judge. It sounded good.

Trouble was, I hadn't looked up the word for "liver" before I went. I figured with a little pantomime it would be easy enough, though.

At the meat counter I said, "Haben Sie Hähnchen..." and then I pointed to my liver. The woman seemed confused. She guessed, in German, "chicken wings" and then "chicken breast" and I kept saying, "Nein" and pointing more emphatically at my lower right side (never mind that I'm not entirely sure which side the liver is on). Then she asked me if I wanted chicken stomach. NO, definitely not. She asked another lady behind the counter and I heard the word "English" meaning they were saying that this customer probably only speaks English. Both women agreed in German they didn't know what I wanted. I said "organs" in English but still we weren't communicating. Another customer walked up and joined the guessing game. Finally she said, "Leber?" and I knew that was it. "Ja, ja!" I said, happily. The butcher pointed to a frozen meat section and I went over and sure enough, there was a package of frozen Hühnerleber.

And so we had breaded, deep-fried chicken livers last night for dinner. Yum!

King's Day, or Epiphany

I like to think that the whole country of Germany took the day off for my birthday on January 6.

In actuality, it is a national holiday to celebrate Epiphany, a time to celebrate when the wise men found and worshiped the child Jesus.

I really enjoyed having the day off for my birthday. After a leisurely morning, I decided to take advantage of the rare brilliant sunlight to go for a coffee in our neighboring medieval village of Schaffhausen.

While there, I noticed the different bakeries had kiosks outside their shops selling Königkuchen, or King's cakes. I remembered that in some cultures, these cakes are served on January 6 to help commemorate the day, and a tiny plastic baby Jesus or sometimes a small king, is embedded in one of the pieces of cake, and one lucky person will find it by presumably biting down on it while eating the cake. (There's a reason we don't have these in the States. It is actually illegal to embed an non-edible item in a confection.)

I thought it would be fun to try out one of the cakes, since I've never had one before.

I bought the smallest one they had and excitedly
brought it home to try it out. It was an odd shaped round loaf of bread with bulges here and there, and with granulated sugar and sliced almonds on top and raisins inside. I cut a triangle out and ate it. I was surprised, but shouldn't have been, when I almost broke a tooth on something very hard. I pulled out a little white plastic figure of a magi.

I guess that means I get to wear the golden paper crown that came with it. :-)

I'm sorry to say the Swiss King cake was very disappointing. It was really just dry bread. I was expecting something more confectionary, or at least a good dense moist bread, since the Swiss do bread so well. Maybe it wasn't fresh anymore or I should have gone to a different bakery. Well, I wasn't impressed.

That evening, Andrew blindfolded me, took me on a long meandering drive and then carefully led me to the house of a fellow missionary family who hosted a surprise get together for my birthday. Friends from the village came by for delicious cupcakes, cookies and ice cream and decaf coffee. We gathered around the table playing games and laughing. It was a good time. And I received some beautiful roses!

All in all, it was a fun Epiphany, or birthday.

Closing 2013, starting 2014

With Christmas and New Year Day already behind us, we would like to wish you many blessings in 2014! We hope that you spent an Advent season full of love and loved ones, and that you anticipate many good things in the coming year.

Christmas this year was much different from last year. The only common denominator was that it was our second year in a row away from our home and family. Last year we spent the week exploring Croatia on our own, and while we enjoyed the unfamiliar and the adventure, it was a bit too lonely for our liking (except when some friends returned from their own trip and spent New Year's Eve with us). It was also a time of worry, as Andrew's dad was hospitalized due to a heart attack (which thankfully he has fully recovered from).

This year we decided to stay put in Busingen, where, if we were going to be alone, at least we would have the comfort of our own bed, our own kitchen and our own stuff.

It turns out that it was a very social Christmas after all. We hosted a Christmas Eve Day brunch at our flat with overnight blueberry cream cheese French toast, scrambled eggs, bacon and coffee, and much laughing and storytelling among some friends whom we knew were also away from their families at this time of year.

That evening we enjoyed a cultural Christmas experience that was very warm and special, at the home of our friends Thomas and Cornelia. They introduced us to a Swiss/German Christmas tradition of eating together, reading the Christmas story from the Bible, singing some Christmas songs and then sharing small gifts with one another. We felt privileged and blessed to share in this sacred family time, being counted as part of their family for the night.

About 2:30 a.m. on Christmas morning, we set the alarm so we could get up and Skype with Gina's family, who traditionally celebrate on Christmas Eve. It was 6:30 p.m. their time. We had fun laughing with them, watching them open gifts and seeing our niece Scarlett opening toys for the first time, since she is just 1 1/2 years old. 

On Christmas morning, I made Andrew's family's traditional pigs 'n a blanket, with hot dogs, cheese and canned crescent rolls. We opened a few gifts. Then we spent the lunchtime and afternoon with fellow missionaries and friends Martin and Cezi, who had family visiting from Albania. We also invited Gina's chiropractor, who kindly joined us for the delicious homemade Italian and Albanian food.

That evening we Skyped with Andrew's family who traditionally celebrate on Christmas morning. We again watched them open gifts, and then they passed around the computer so we could chat with different people.

We concluded the day with Gina's tradition of watching George C. Scott's Christmas Carol movie.

On Friday, Dec. 27, we drove to Chartres, France, to visit our missionary friends Dave and Betsy, at whose home we spent last Christmas in Croatia. They were borrowing the home of another missionary about an hour outside of Paris and had brought along two of their friends from Croatia, along with their two kids. We joined a bustling household of 6 to make a total of 8, and hung out around the house talking and eating, or exploring Chartres, or taking day trips into Paris to walk the streets and visit the Louvre for a few hours. It was a great time with good friends.

On New Year Day, we drove back from Chartres, and ran into some engine trouble along the way.

About two hours into the 8-hour drive, we began to hear a sudden, loud clanging noise in the engine. We pulled up at toilet/rest stop by the highway. We poked around the engine but couldn't see anything obvious. We saw some different mechanic shops listed nearby in our GPS but we knew they would all be closed for the holiday. So we called Nikolaj, our resident car expert in Busingen, who then called our automobile insurance company in Frankfurt. They told him to tell us to use one of those SOS phones that are placed intermittently along the highways throughout western Europe. There happened to be one at this rest stop. But it was situated directly beside the freeway and the noise of the passing cars was very loud. As a result, we couldn't understand the woman who answered, and who didn't speak English anyway. 

Gina prayed that God would send someone to help us. The next car to pull over, we approached and asked if the driver spoke English. Turns out he was American who lives in Paris. He went over to the SOS phone and told the lady where we were and what we needed. 

Forty-five minutes later a mechanic with a tow truck pulled up, looked at the car and saw the timing belt was fraying. He cut off the frayed part and indicated we were good to go (he didn't speak English either). He wrote out a bill and we gave him both our debit and credit cards. But because we have American swipe cards and not chip cards (which most Europeans have now), his machine wouldn't take them. We only had half of the cash on hand. 

We tried to pantomime that he could drive us to an ATM but he kept waving his hands no. Then we used our cell phone to call some other missionaries in Paris for whom we happened to have a phone number, and asked them to talk to the mechanic in French for us. They convinced him to drive us to an ATM. To do that, he decided to put our car on the back of the tow truck and tow us 20 minutes back the way we had come to a rest stop that had an ATM. We pulled out the cash and gave it to him and he drove away. 

It was an annoying situation but we are grateful that's all that happened and that we weren't stranded on the highway in heavy rain, or at night, or that there wasn't something worse wrong with the car necessitating an overnight hotel stay or something.

We are a week into the new year now, and outside a trip to Spain for a leadership conference at the end of the month, 2014 is a relatively blank canvas for Gina, who doesn't have any plans she knows of other than her normal work routine. Andrew's year has a bit more structure and purpose. He will submit his research proposal to NTC in Manchester, UK, at the end of the month. If it is approved by their council, he will be accepted into their PhD program in the fall. He also plans to study Latin intensely during the next six months, and preach in our local church about once a month. He has also committed to teaching an EuNC course again in Bulgaria this fall.

We want to thank everyone again for your prayers, love, support and giving, which makes it possible for us to continue serving the Lord here in "Germitzerland," far away from home and family. We love you and wish for each of you a year in which you abide ever more closely with Jesus.