A Great Day!

Hello faithful readers! I have news to share...

I have been in touch with the travel agency, made the necessary adjustments to my trip, and am happy to say it is "officially" back on. My deposit has been paid and I will be meeting up with this other group who is leaving the States from JFK Airport in NYC on Thursday, May 13. The tour itinerary will be as per my previous blog (arriving in Frankfurt), and Ken will be coming to Germany somewhere around May 21. Those details of the trip are still being worked out, but we are both getting excited about the opportunity of a week in Europe together.

Thank you so much for your prayers. It seems that this is all going to work out after all. God is so good!

The other really fun news is that around Christmastime I met a new pastor in town who just happened to spend 16 years in the Germany/Switzerland area. He and his wife are missionary pastors and are both fluent in the dialect of German that I know. This is a definite answer to prayer, as I had been asking God for help to find someone locally with whom I could practice my German. And, as it happened, this pastor, Thomas, his wife, Barbara, and I were scheduled to staff the booth at a local fundraiser for our Ministerial Alliance. We got to talking and when we discovered we had this in common, I jumped at the chance to practice. He seemed pretty excited about it, too.

So Thomas and I met today at the local coffee house for our first of many conversations "auf Deutsch" and let me tell you, I had a BLAST! I can't remember the last time I had this much fun! I could understand him very well - there was just an occasional word here and there that I could not understand (or at least could not figure out from the context of what he was saying).

He also gave me a copy of a German Bible - it is written in "High German" or "Schrift Deutsch" (literally written German) and it happens to be a copy of the translation done by Martin Luther. What a treasure! Pastor Thomas suggested that I read this Bible out loud so I can remember how to pronounce the words. He says this will be the best and fastest way to get my conversation level back up to where it will need to be in May. Today we read a portion of the Sermon on the Mount (The Beatitudes), the first few verses of the Gospel of John, and then prayed The Lord's Prayer together as it is written in Matthew 6. I will work on committing this to memory - somehow being a Lutheran pastor, having this in my "bag of tricks" will serve me well! Thomas and I plan to meet again next week and hopefully will continue to meet weekly as our schedules allow.

I am so excited. This is really, really going to happen. I CAN HARDLY WAIT!