Tea House

On Saturdays we serve tea. It is very sweet, black, hot tea.  It doesn't matter if it is 106 degrees out or nearly ready to snow, our refugee friends love their tea.   Our doors are open on Saturdays from 12 to 4 pm and any refugee may come...no tickets required.  It is a great time to meet new people and no better place to meet new people than the kitchen window where the tea is served, which is typically where Kenn hangs out.  He gets to see everyone who comes.

An Afghan young man (maybe 20ish years old) comes looking for Kenn.  A week ago Kenn gave this man a Bible to read and told him to come back and ask his questions.  So Kenn comes out of the kitchen to sit with him in the big room to chat with him for a few minutes.  He is surprised that the man has no questions.  No questions?  How can this be?  Finally, Kenn realizes that there is no way this young man is going to say anything in a big room full of people he does not know, so Kenn pulls him back in the kitchen.  No questions?  "No questions, I just want to know how to follow Jesus."   Aziz, our teammate from Afghanistan joins them to translate and the young man enters the kingdom.   I came by the kitchen a bit later to eat my lunch and this man's sisters are in the kitchen talking with Ebi and Carolyn about what it means to follow Jesus.  They are a bit more confused and don't pray that day, but do stay for the Seekers class after Tea House at 4 pm.  I get to play with the 4 year old boy for an hour and a half, while all 3 of the adults learn more about Jesus.  Kenn is continuing to meet with the brother to disciple him and soon we will make a plan to meet all together with the sisters too.

Meanwhile, back at Tea House, Aziz is approached by an Afghan father of 3 teenagers who has had a dream that he does not understand.  He asks Aziz to ask Jesus to tell him what it means.  In the dream he is in a mosque praying.  A man in white, he thinks maybe it is the Pope, pulls him from the mosque and offers to reveal truth to him.  He does not want to go and fights with the Pope.  Finally he relents and the Pope takes him to a Christian church and when he opens the door, his daughter is already sitting there.  They have been reading the Bible in their home with his wife and 3 teenagers trying to understand what this can mean.  Aziz explains that it is probably not the Pope, but Jesus, who is the truth who is bringing them out of the mosque and that perhaps the daughter will be the first one to follow Jesus.  He directs them to keep reading their Bible and invites them to the Seekers class.  

Fast forward to Tuesday.  Tuesday is a ticketed meal for Farsi speakers with a gospel presentation.  During the gospel presentation, there is a children's program similar to a VBS program in the states.  The husband does not come this day, but the wife is there with the teenagers.  They can't find Aziz, so they find his wife Donna is the children's room.  With 40 kids in the room, she can't leave and go chat with them.  She encourages them to go find Aziz.  As they leave the kids room, they get separated.  The daughter finds Michaelis, who finds Ebi and Carolyn and they take this teenage gal into the clothing room and explain to her how she can follow Jesus because the office is full of other private conversations.  She prays and is so excited to become a follower of Jesus.  At the same time, Aziz is praying with the son in another quiet place.   Not great staff communication on our team...we are just too busy some days.  Not until the next day when we are sitting together praying for refugee friends do we discover that two members of one family on the same day prayed with different staff people!  

God is doing something here in Athens.  We are so blessed to be here and to be able to see first hand what God is doing.

Our "Stay-Cation" (aka Vacation at home)

We decided this year to stay home for the week our ministry is closed in August.  (We close for a Greek holiday...most of the Greeks are gone for the month, not just the week.)  Anyway, we decided we would rather spend our money going to England in September than to try and go someplace in August.  It turned out to be a good decision, because I caught a summer cold and was miserable the first half of the week.

Wednesday was the first day I felt good enough to be bored, so we decided to head to the "pay beach" near us.  We have rarely ever been to a pay beach, because, of course, you have to pay and the free beaches are good enough; but this is our vacation so we decided to see how the other half lives!

I did not have my camera, but South Beach looks a lot like this picture.  What you get when you pay is: a parking lot, showers, dressing rooms, restrooms, restaurants, loud music, a lounge chair, a beach umbrella and soft sand (that someone probably brought from Australia!).  For more money you can rent a paddleboat that comes complete with a waterslide.   The crystal clear, 80 degree water you can get anywhere in Greece this time of year.  If you come after 7 pm, you get all of this for free, but if you come earlier you pay 4.50 euros to enter and another 2 for the chair.   At some pay beaches you don't pay to enter, you just have to order from the restaurant to use their chairs.  The sun doesn't set here this time of year until almost 9 pm.  While this sounds expensive, think about what you paid to park at Balboa beach, plus gasoline (this is minutes from our house) and you had to hike your own stuff and you didn't have a shower or a dressing room or risk getting run over by teenagers jumping off a paddle boat.

The complete antithesis of a pay beach is Kenn's favorite beach, which he prefers to go at 7 am in the morning. Really it can be 80+ degrees most summer days at that time of the day, with the water almost the same temperature, it is not as insane as it sounds.  Here you get parking that looks like this:

You get no music, in fact no noise at all.  You bring your own chair.  There is no shower or dressing room or restaurant but, all this quiet is free, aside from the 45 minute drive to get there.

The other place we spend a lot of time, is just a small cove near our house with no beach at all and lots of deep water to swim in.    I need to snap a picture, because it is smooth rock and deep water and a small island to swim around.  It looks completely different.  After a hot day, you can dive in, swim for an hour or two and go home, with nothing more to carry with you than your towel; or maybe your towel and something to float on when you get tired.  We spend most of our time there.

Finally, there are the ministry beach days.  This requires a beach that is easily accessible by bus, and lots of shallow water because most refugees can't swim well.  This beach is free.  We bring our own umbrellas and lunch.  You park on the gravel or take the bus.  No restrooms.  No showers.  No dressing rooms.  I laughed out loud when I saw it on an airplane magazine advertised as the Greek Riviera!   I have lots of great memories here.

So...if you were Greek, you would count the number of times you have been to the sea this summer.  Do you know?   I think I am at 15 or 16. 

Really? Almost a year?

I knew it had been a while.   So what has been happening in the last 11 months?   Well....

• We went on furlough ("home service assignment") from October 28, 2011 through May 22, 2012.  We were in California most of the time.  We spoke in churches and small groups; visited friends and family.
• We have 2 new grandsons.  Welcome Kalix and Kamden born in November 2011.
• We are back in Greece and this is home.  Greece is in a recession, something akin to the Great Depression in America in the 1930's.  Life is very difficult for our Greek friends and neighbors.

Last Friday was a personal ministry day.  It was blazing hot, triple digit weather.  The men have a meal downtown and a gospel presentation, so Kenn was downtown.  The women are smarter!   We invited our refugee friends to swim in the sea.  

The refugees, the short term team from Nebraska, and a few of our staff rode the bus.   I got picked up in the car because so much of the community beach stuff gets stored in my basement.  So with our 3 beach umbrellas, bag of toys, bag of towels, water thermos, chairs, bag of bathing suits and our foam "noodles", we piled in a very small car and drove to the beach.

It was very windy when we got there.  So we tied our umbrellas down with clothes' line and grocery bags of sand to keep them from blowing away.  About the time we got set up, the bus arrived with all our friends.  

The most interesting thing I saw that day (besides us swimming in our t-shirts and shorts, while the rest of the beach is in bikinis and European swim attire,) was a group of high school boys who buried an exercise ball in the sand so that only half of it was uncovered.  In honor of the Olympics starting the next day, these wanna-be gymnasts were doing back flips off the exercise ball.

Our refugee women were fearless!  Off came the Muslim head covering.  Gone was the Ramadan fasting.  These women were here to learn to swim!   We had 5 kids with us.   Not one kid napped.  Everyone was in the water.  The water was very warm and clear and kind of choppy from the winds, but we don't get real waves here.  Perfect for learning to swim.  The only time people were out of the water was when we came up for a lunch of Arabic bread filled with feta cheese, cucumbers (we eat them whole), peaches and chips.   

These are the kind of days where new friendships are born.   With new friendships comes the trust that builds opportunities later to share your faith.   Tough job?   I think I love it.  It did take some doing to go back and fix dinner and clean up the house to host a Bible study in our home at 8 pm when all I wanted to do was sit on the couch and close my eyes.

Road Trip: Day 13-15

It is now Monday, our last day in Italy. After a lovely breakfast at the hotel, we took the girls with us back to Venice. We toured the Doge Palace, the Fedrer church and ate gelato (italian ice cream) in the San Marcos piazza. Venice is a bit overwhelming with its elaborate architecture and crowds of people. What I like best about Venice is sitting in a cafe and eating a meal listening to the live music. It is a great place to people watch and I love Italian food.

The next day we packed our bags and drove the 5 hours south the Ancona to catch the overnight ferry back to Patra and then we drove from Patra another 3 hours back to our home. It was a great trip.

Road Trip: Day 12

We arrived on Saturday night and went out for pizza. We had missed Italian food during our time in Switzerland. Our hotel was a former villa just a little north of Treviso outside Venice. They still grow grapes on the property. It was nice to have a bathroom in our room after our week at the Bible college.

On Sunday we got up and went to Calvary Chapel Treviso Italy. The pastor there was from Old Bridge in New Jersey, where ECCU and I had loaned money in my "banker" days. It was fun to worship in Italian. After church, a new friend from the church took us to downtown Treviso for lunch and headed us in the direction of the train to Venice.

The girls who were traveling with us, hung out by the pool at the hotel and rested, so we were alone on our first trip around Venice. We took the vaporetto (water taxi) from the train to the San Marcos Piazza. We had downloaded the Rick Steves audio tour to listen to on our 45 minute ride. This first day we had a late start, so we shopped and walked around and ate dinner and watched the sunset and then headed back on the vaporetto to the train to the car to our hotel.

Road Trip: Days 6-11, IT Europe Conference.

The whole reason for our "road trip" was to attend this conference. International Teams Missionaries get together regionally every other year and our region is Europe. It is a chance to worship together, be taught in the Word and find out what others are doing. It is a bit like summer camp for grown ups. We had a worship team from the Netherlands. They did an excellent job of leading worship. The speaker, Jeff Fountain, is the chairman of the "Hope for Europe Council". He talked about the past, present and future history of what God is doing in and around Europe. We saw former teammates, missionary friends from training and we made new friends. I even met a man who went to the same elementary school I did (Wagner Elementary in Placentia, CA)! They had a great program for the children and teens that ran concurrently.

Kenn got to practice his medical skills. Anytime there was an injury Kenn got to look at it and decide who needs to go the hospital. I think he made 3 hospital runs. One afternoon, our schedule felt completely random...we had finished our required sessions, taken a nap, walked into town for ice cream and had just sat down in the lobby to catch up on our e-mail when a frantic children's worker walked in with a kid who needed stitches. He was bleeding and she could not find his parents and Kenn was just there, saying "Can I help you?". It was a little tricky because the boy spoke only German, but God used Kenn to bring calm to the situation and I got to go to the car and get the first aid kit instead of watching and throwing up or fainting.

Thursday afternoon we had the afternoon off, so we went for a walk up this beautiful valley across the lake from Beatenberg. We watched a group of guys from Australia, base jumping with parachutes from the cliffs above. This sport is illegal in the US and in Australia, but not in Switzerland. They seemed to be having the time of their lives. We enjoyed watching them.

All too soon our time was over and on Saturday, after breakfast we drove out of Switzerland back over the beautiful pass and back into Italy. This time to the east side towards Venice.

Road Trip: Day 5

We drove north out of the Cinque Terra and into Switzerland. We had lunch near Como Lake on the Italy side and said good-bye to Italian food for a few days.

Later, we were parked for several hours on the highway waiting for access to a tunnel, which put us behind schedule. Once we came out of the tunnel, it was raining in the alps above us, but we were driving in the sunshine. Water was pouring off the cliffs around us.

I had been sad to miss camping with my family this year at Yosemite. Yosemite had one of their largest snow packs ever and the falls were very full this year. Yosemite has nothing on Switzerland. I was touched that our creator God would give me this gift of driving through this valley with water falling everywhere to allow me to enjoy His creation on another continent. Very much the same as what I would have missed, but oh...so much better.

We also saw glaciers and meadows and chalets and everything you would imagine Switzerland to be. The girls in our backseat were crawling all over each other to hang out the windows to take pictures. We were running too late to make many stops.

We arrived at Interlochen around dusk. We missed dinner at the conference, so we stopped in a local restaurant and had Swiss food. We were the only people in the restaurant at 9 pm at night except for the owner's family. They took good care of us.

Finally around 10 pm we arrived at the Bible College in Beatenberg and found our dorm room accomodations complete with shared bathroom down the hall!