Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland

This past Sunday, after church and a flat tire some friends and I drove down to Switzerland for two days. My friends were visiting from the States and were checking out Malachi. After a very busy week and half we decided to take off for a few days. I suggested Lauterbrunnen.
Lauterbrunnen is one of my favorite places in the world. As a kid our family would go camping there every summer. We even stayed at the same campground my family I would stay at, Camp Jungfrau!
While we were there we were able to hike through the snow, enjoy fondue and rest in quiet moments with the Lord. There is something about Lauterbrunnen that always calms my heart.

2 In Less Than A Week?!

After three years in Wiesbaden, I still am always suprised by how God works in students hearts. In the past 5 days we have had two of our High School boys come to know the Lord personally. Both have been attending our youth group for a while but have never made a decision for Christ.

Story 1- Saterday Night Church
Last Sat. night our youth group band was asked to be a part of a local German youth rally, Saterday night church. This SNC is a movent across Germany were local churches from different denominations get together and have worship and speaker share the Gospel. The SNC rally we were apart of was both German and American churches. How powerful it was to be singing and hearing German and English being sung at the same time!!

We took about 10 students from our youth group. One of the students was "Bob". Honestly I was suprised Bob was coming. I have heard stories of his partying and never has seemed to have any instrest in anything spiritaul. But he came. After the program Jim (my co-worker) came up to him and saw he had tears in his eyes. Jim talked with him for a while and they prayeed together soon afterwards. I will never forget Sheldon coming downstairs with Jim and walking up to me to tell me. There were groups hugs and cheers! It was so fun to watch our other students welcome him to the FAMILY of GOD!

Story 2-
Last night at youth group, we talked about forgiveness, offering and recieving it. We had students lead our small groups, which is always powerful. At the end of the night the students were to write some things or names of those who they need to forgive or be forgiven on a notecard. The notecard was eventually thrown into a fire. After we all finished one of our boys, "Andrew" went and found Jim. And he gave his life to the Lord! It's amazing to see how God's forgiveness is so much more powerful than our hurts and lacking to forgive others!

Chapel Lunch & HYPE

I am tired! There are just times in youth ministry you have days where you are just physically tired.

This is one of those days. After taking my car to the shop, at 7:30 am, I came home and climbed back into bed and slept till noon.

Why am I so tired? Really since Friday morning until now I have been going non stop with students and friends. So much has been going on lately but what I want to share about just happened yesterday.

Since I arrived in Wiesbaden, we have been doing an event called Chapel Lunch. Because both the Middle School and High School do not have cafeteria's and have to eat lunch "off campus." We, the youth group will a couple times a semester provide a Free Lunch. Our chapel is right across the street from both schools. We will usually serve around 300 students but that can also vary a lot. (MS and HS lunches are right after each other). This is a wonderful outreach event because we will come in contact with many students who never would normally step into a church.

Well, yesterday we had our chapel lunch! But this time on top of normal chapel lunch, we had a group called. H.Y.P.E. come and and hang out with our students. HYPE is a Christian group who uses hip hop, break dancing, stomp, skits, and other such stuff as a venue to talk about "living with excellence" in schools. They do assemblies all over America and in Canada in public school. After performing and hanging out at the schools they will often do a night rally at a local church and present their testimonies. Go to gethype.org if you want to know more about them.

Well they came to our chapel lunch! I have never seen that many students at our chapel lunch! I think the entire MS was there and I think all the MS students were late to class because they were hanging out with HYPE. =) It was so much fun to see God working through the HYPE team through just teaching students about break dancing. =)

HYPE is coming back in two weeks to our community to do an assembly at our High School and a rally at our chapel that evening. Please be praying for all the details and for the Lord to touch students hearts through HYPE!