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.
