Friday, April 29, 2011

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Deutschland April 2011

We got to go back to Germany last week!!!! It was just a 5 day trip but it was soooo good for my heart to be there again with so many amazing people as well as new and old friends. In case you don't know, Ryan and I work for a church planting organization called KontaktMission and last week was their workers conference/ retreat.

A week ago, Sunday, was the main conference day where different KM missionaries got to set up tables to showcase their different ministries as well as tell a huge crowd of other workers and supporters about KM and the work that they are doing all around the world!


The very first picture on this post as well as the one below are both of the view from our hotel room our very first night at the conference (sooooo beautiful)! After this first night all of the mission workers all went over to a different little village to a retreat center to have more of a retreat/ community building/ sharing time for the rest of the week.


We had a wonderful speaker come to the retreat who shared great lessons on living and working a holy life within your church as well as your family. It was great to have a time to be filled with encouraging lessons and stories. There was also a lot of time devoted to sharing about our different ministries, singing (in a crazy little combo of English and German), laughing, crying, dreaming as well as planning, meeting great new friends as well as reconnecting with old ones. It was such an encouraging and heart warming trip- We can't wait to go again next year!!! It was especially good to see the people that we worked with in Jena again! I had missed them so much!



The whole experience really left me with a sense of family. Even with so many different cultures, languages, ages, and talents- these are the people who get me. These are the people who I'm going to turn to for answers to my questions, for advise, for help when I can't figure out how I'm supposed to raise my children in a foreign country, when raising support is too overwhelming, when I don't know how to do Visa stuff, when ministry is at it's best ...or worst. So all in all- it was one heck of a short week given all the traveling that was involved, but it was so worth it!

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Hi, remember me?

I'm finding it really difficult to try and balance both blogs that I have. (Well I haven't actually been trying that hard) So hopefully some of you have gone over to my other blog to see what's been going on in our crazy lives!

Anyway- we leave for Germany on Friday! It's too bad that it has to be a SUUPPPER short (5 day) trip, but we're also very excited to go to the conference and see some familiar as well as new faces :-) It will be so good to be in beloved Germany again, but also hard since we will have no time to go up to the city that we lived in last year.

No worries though... just a month after we get back from this trip, we're heading out to Germany again! And this time we're making sure we have time to go back to Jena for about a week to see our friends that we have been missing so incredibly bad! Another really cool thing about the trip happening in May/June is that Ryan and I are actually going to lead a missions trip! It's a trip that we went on as participants about 4 years ago- and now we're leading it! We're so excited! Especially Ryan- he's the one who will get to drive a van full of American college students all around Germany, Austria and Belgium for 2 weeks :-) Anyway- I may post a copy of our support/ info letter that we finished last night just to give you all a bit more information.


So, just to let you know- I am going to be trying harder to remember to post on this blog some more. I would just drop it and go completely over to my other one... but I love this one too much to abandon it! How are you guys doing? Hope you're all having great weeks so far!

xoxo elyse aubrie