I might never write another personal email again

There's just something about opening letters during Christmastime that have a postmark from home and real, live, uniquely recognizable handwriting by people that you love when you haven't seen their faces for 4 months that makes me want to permanently convert to a snail-mail-only lifestyle.

Thanks to all who have sent me mail. :)

war stories and winter blitz

I do believe that amid the massive amounts of snow and Winter Blitz preparations, I have neglected my blog. Oops.

So for a couple weeks now I have not been able to get the image of a guitar with a bullet hole out of my head. Why? A couple weeks ago, we had a unit chaplain visit our Club Beyond office. He noticed the guitars we have on the wall in here that we use for club and casually struck up a conversation about travelling with his own guitar that he brought with him down range. Get this: He once had to run, unarmed, with his guitar strapped on his back, to catch up with a soldier and jump in a vehicle about 500 feet away while being shot at, and after safely reaching the vehicle out of range discovered a BULLET HOLE in the guitar. We asked if he'd kept it, but he said it splintered so badly it could not be fixed. He has no idea if the guitar in some way protected the bullet from him, but I just think that's an incredible story. I feel pretty proud to be a citizen of a country with men like that who are serving God and country and risking their lives (and guitars) for us. For some reason that story just struck me with the realities of war that we are far removed from. Here's a guy, standing in front of me in my office, casually describing being shot at, without being able to shoot back, as if it's just another day on the job. And it is for them at times.

Another, less violent image in my head right now is camp. I'm so excited to go to Winter Blitz camp with my high schoolers like you would not believe. We will be doing awesome things like:
-skiing/snowboarding
-basketball camp
-going to an indoor water park with a DOUBLE LOOP SLIDE
-sledding on a 6k sled run
-club every night!
-a trip to the beautiful town nearby (for security reasons I cannot disclose the exact location on the Internet)

The hope is students will have a great time enjoying God's creation and each other, make memories, and get to know Jesus. Keep us in your prayers! Pray also for the safety of students on the slopes, as anyone can get easily hurt on the snow.

I'll be spending Christmas Eve and Day with John and Mandy, my coworkers. We are going to eat food and open gifts from our family and it will be a great time! It is the first Christmas away from home for all of us, so it is encouraging for me at least not to experience that alone.

I miss all of you during this holiday season but I hope that you'll have a wonderful Christmas with your friends and family, remembering that Jesus came to bring us great joy. :)

snow. and community. lots of it.

So it has been snowing on and off for about 2 weeks now. Today we got actual rain, only to be replaced tomorrow and the next by extreme snow. Not going to lie, I'm glad I got my winter tires put on yesterday (it's actually illegal to drive without them after a certain date in Germany). I really love snow and it makes this place look even more beautiful, especially when I go to the Christmas markets. However, I am really noticing the effect the lack of sunshine has on a person, especially when I check out Chattanooga's forecast on my iPhone: sunshine, all day, every day. So go soak it up Chattanoogans! You don't know what you got. :)

I've been really blessed with community lately. It's really rare to find a military base with a good singles ministry, and God has established one here in Bamberg just in time for me to be involved. There are two single soldiers from a unit that just got back from "down range" (war) heading it up and we go to Bible studies at different restaurants each Wednesday, go to lunch after chapel on Sundays, and have various events. This past weekend we took the train to the Nuremberg Christmas market (it's apparently "the famous one"). Above you can see me with two Germans who came along with us and Sarah, my friend who shopped with me as we held our mugs of gluhwein (hot spiced wine) close while also coming incredibly close to freezing to death.

Also involved in the singles group is my friend Jonathan who roomed with Steven (my friend that passed away this past May from leukemia) their freshman year at Covenant. Small world, huh? He just got stationed here, so it's been a blessing to reconnect with him and make friends with his fellow soldiers and have some people to explore the downtown area with. I just feel like God has orchestrated all this community and it's incredible to see His hand in that! He sure does take care of His own. :)

thankfulness.

So I thought I'd blog about how Monday was my FAVORITE day since I've been here! It was middle school/high school club day but was on a special day because of HYPE (more about that later). It began when I came into the office with Shea late morning and we met with John (new Community Director at Schweinfurt) and Elizabeth (old CD at Schweinfurt who is moving to England) to nail down the details for club. I love spending time with these people and am sad to see Elizabeth leave but I know she's going to do great things starting Club Beyond at Menwith Hill. John and his wife Mandy are awesome people as well. I met them back at training in January and they are newly married. We do high school club with Schweinfurt together (the students from Schweinfurt go to Bamberg for high school) and Shea and I travel to Schweinfurt on Tuesdays to help with their middle school club. so I get to see them all the time!

This is Elizabeth and I dressed up for the Halloween party at staff conference a few weeks ago:

and this is me with John and Mandy Ritchey:

Then a girl who is our work study student, a senior, came to work for an hour and helped us plan club and went to lunch with us at Popeye's. She is a really cool girl whose family used to be stationed in Georgia, so we both talked about missing the south. :) Then we went to the high school where we met the 8 or so members of H.Y.P.E. (Helping Youth Prepare for Excellence). They are 18-25 year olds who attend a 2-year school and commit to a year of travelling the world and performing dance/stomp/spoken word/comedy in high schools and middle schools. We helped them set up at the stage in the cafeteria while the kids were eating lunch. Their hour long performance was awesome! They spoke about Respect, Self-Worth, and Purpose. In the assembly their speaking was non-religious but later at club they were able to give their Christian testimonies and talk about Jesus. The kids LOVED the performance and were cheering and clapping, especially when they were speaking about self-worth and other things high school students struggle with. It was great to see that they could relate and needed to hear those things.

This is HYPE (for more information on them go to http://gethype.info):

Then we met after school with HYPE and the middle school students and played dodgeball in the gym/teen center for the entire club. It was so much fun and high-energy! Sadly I couldn't play because of my ankle but I reffed. One of the HYPE members spoke about having a relationship with Jesus. Then we had to get ready for high school club over at the chapel. Shea and John's wives helped with food (we serve the kids dinner before club) in one of the rooms in the chapel. It was good to mingle and eat with kids, getting to know them.

Then we had high school club in the sanctuary (which is not where we normally have club- so as not to scare off the non-chapel kids) and I was super nervous because I was not only doing music for the first time as their leader at my 2nd week of club but they have never ever had music at club before! And I was doing with with a couple off-and-on volunteers, Myles and Kelly, who are married and friends with Shea and Sandee and play lots of instruments. Kelly played drums and Myles played bass and I played guitar and sang on a mic. It was Glee themed club, which is a popular show in the states with lots of music, so we sang a few songs from that. The students LOVED IT. They raved about club afterwards saying how fun it was and how they wanted music at club more. Shea said it was his favorite club he'd done all year. Later after we dropped kids off at their houses Shea told me about a girl who comes to club because her friends are not true friends and just want to use her and Club Beyond is the only place where anyone really cares about her. I love that we can be that for kids, showing them Jesus' love when they can't find it anywhere else. We came back late to clean up some more, and Shea looked up and said "Hey Laura. Thanks for coming here." and told me how glad he was God had put me here. Despite the long journey to get here and the major transition, I know this is where God wants me and I love it. I love these students already, they are so broken and so in need of Jesus and that is so obvious. God has allowed me to contribute to this ministry using the gifts He has given me and the tough things He has brought me through. I. Love. My. Job. Even after a long, exhausting 12 hour day. God is so so good ya'll!

And that night, as I was putting my key in the door to my apartment building next to the Frucht Bar, the owner came up to me and introduced himself. He'd emailed me earlier about using my cellar space during the winter, and we ended up having a long conversation and getting to know each other and he was telling me about all the best places in Bamberg and about his life and I got to share what I was doing on the military base and how much I love living in German culture so far. He spoke pretty good English like most Germans and it was amazing to be able to connect with people in my German community. I'm not sure he understood what I do with military teens but I hope that eventually that will open doors for me to tell him about Jesus. Europe is a place that is incredibly dark spiritually.

My apartment door and the Frucht Bar:

Sorry this is so long, but I just wanted to thank everyone for the ways they are supporting me in prayer, finances, and encouragement and tell you about the ways that God is using us in Club Beyond ministry to military teens. I am overflowing with thanks this year. God is amazing!

Thank you!

Have a blessed Thanksgiving, everyone.

Ten Germany culture shocks so far.

1. Bicycles. Are. Everywhere. It's really hard to drive around them, in the two total times I've driven around (I have a car...a Honda accord!...that I inherited from the previous staff member who was given it by a military family who wanted to help out the Club Beyond ministry). I also inherited a bike from the last staff person, but I can't ride it yet because my sprained ankle isn't completely healed. But seriously, there are even elderly people riding bikes. They are really into the environment here, plus it takes lots of money and lots of time to obtain a German drivers license.

2. Everyone dresses well. All the women are wearing boots. All the men are wearing scarves. Nowhere will you see someone dressing "American": hoodie, sneakers, tshirts, etc.

3. IT GETS DARK REALLY EARLY. Seriously, at like 3:30pm it starts getting dark out. It's really messing with me. Apparently, during the summer, the sun doesn't go down until about 10pm. Welcome to the arctic circle.

4. The autobahn. I drove on this for my very first excursion alone the other day, to the Momax (kind of like a smaller Ikea) to get a bed. First of all, I have an American car so I can't go as fast as everyone else. European cars are made to go on autobahns. No speed limit= some people going REALLY fast by you and sometimes shaking your car. Also, I have to convert everything to kilometers. No miles per hour here. The rule is, if you take kph (kilometers per hour) and multiply it by 6 and then take off the last number, you get mph. 30kph = 18mph. It's true, you do use math in real life.

5. Restaurant servers don't work for tips. Having been a server, it's strange to me that you don't really tip your server. You can give them 15-20 Euro cents if they were really good, but they get paid really well. The funny thing is, they KNOW most Americans don't understand this, so they EXPECT to get an additional tip from us. So sometimes I don't know what to do, haha.

6. You can get all kinds of food here, not just German. I've eaten at a really good Mexican place not far from my house, and every day when I walk to the Morgan's apartment before going on post with Shea I walk by Italian and Chinese restaurants.

7. Germans don't really believe in using dryers. They have washing machines but usually just hang their clothes up to dry, inside and outside their home. I don't have a washing machine (yet) or a dryer. I use the laundromat on post.

8. Driving around downtown is NOT like driving around downtown Chattanooga. Their streets are not in any kind of neat, square, numbered order. And there are a TON of one-way streets (called Einbahnstrasses) and some that are so narrow you almost knock your mirror off on the buildings going by. When I returned from Momax, using my stupid iPhone GPS that tried to make me go down a one-way street the WRONG WAY, I got lost for 20 minutes less than half a mile from my place.

9. You can take your canine friend with you into stores.

10. You can only pay your landlord by having your bank automatically pay him every month from your account. I don't really understand how this works. I kind of like it though, one less bill I have to worry about actually writing the check for.

Ten military culture shocks so far

So here are ten things about working on a military base that are different and interesting and mostly awesome so far:

1. As you drive through post, there are banners made by families of soldiers in the 173rd who welcoming them back from "down range" (that's army talk for deployment to the war).

2. Being a single person on a military base is rare. Fortunately, Bamberg's Chapel is working on growing their singles ministry right now. I just went to a singles dinner last night that had a great turnout and I was able to meet single soldiers, contractors, and others and have a great time playing the game "Pit" with them!

3. You have to address people by sir a lot and chaplains as "Chaplain [last name]"

4. At 5pm every day, the retreat is played across post and if you are outside, you must stand facing the flag while it's played. If you're in your car, you stop and get out.

5. An army post is like a little city. It has everything you need: post office, PX (like a walmart), commissary (grocery store), electronics store, bank, flower shop, barber shop, auto shop, movie theater, etc.

6. It takes a long time to get computer access.

7. A lot of military families home school. I met a few awesome girls while helping lead Bible study last week for the first time who were homeschooled. So was I, so we bonded. :)

8. Being on time and going to meetings are very important. So is paperwork.

9. Chapel is not exactly like church.

10. Everything is constantly changing and people are constantly coming and going. I met a middle school girl who really wanted to come to Middle School Adventure camp next spring, but she was PCS-ing (Permanent Change of Station) back to the States and was bummed about not being able to come.

I sent out my new address via email, let me know if you didn't get it and would like it!

My first post from Germany! (more to come)

So I know you all have been dying for an update! When I first arrived I went to about 2 weeks of staff conference and training and then when I finally arrived in Bamberg this past Friday, I got a nasty 24-hour virus of some kind, and then started in-processing stuff, so I've been really busy and exhausted and I'm not even using my own internet right now. BUT I am having a blast! It's all so much to take in. First, let me tell you briefly about my first two weeks at conference and training and the important people in my new life!

This is my Community Director, Shea, his wife, Sandee, and their adorable little Cecil! They have been taking really good care of me since I got here and have been extremely helpful in my transition. Shea has been the CD in Bamberg for almost 4 years now and he loves video games, Coldplay, and Converse shoes. We definitely get along. :)

This is my Regional Director, Jim, and his wife Shannon. They just moved to Heidelberg after Jim was the CD in Alconbury, England. Jim picked me up from the airport in a British car, with the wheel on the opposite side. That was weird. They have both been great in answering my questions and watching out for me during my transition! Jim and I are friends even though he's a Cowboys fan. :)

I met staff from all over the place at the conference and training, and it was pretty laid back so I had plenty of time to get to know them and rest. We took a day trip to Triberg and Gutach and I got to see Black Forest Clocks and ride a Rodelbahn (google it!) I loved learning things about my job. I remember sitting in the business meeting thinking "I can't believe this is my JOB!" as we talked about plans for Winter Blitz, our high school outreach camp in Austria, and Middle School camp in Belgium, and I know I'm going to love everything about my job, from hanging out with high school kids to planning camps to traveling to new countries to teaching Bible studies for students. I am blessed to work with an AMAZING organization that really takes care of its staff and really loves Jesus and students!

I sprained my ankle pretty bad at the conference one week after arriving in Germany (typical me). It's healing, but I'd appreciate your prayers that it heals well and quickly! Living in Europe involves a lot of walking. I was warned that it's pretty normal for things like this to happen, especially at the beginning of ministry. I mean, hey, satan doesn't want me here, so he's going to try to discourage me any way he can, but all he can do is try!

Ok so on to my living situation! There was a previous staff member that left a semi-furnished apartment that was available to me, which is a huge blessing because it normally takes about a month to find a place that is completely unfurnished. As soon as I arrived in Bamberg, I stayed there, so I got to see what it was like before committing. OH MY GOSH. It's a small apartment, BUT it's located right in the middle of downtown Bamberg, above a bar where I can hear the DJ music. I walk out into my door and I'm walking down the cobblestone road with shops and restaurants and cafes and bakeries and everything that I imagined living in Europe to be like. I mean, there's a 1000-year old cathedral right down the street and a jazz club two doors down where the music floats up through the vent in the street. I am in love with it. I'm a 5 minute walk to Shea and Sandee's apartment and the area where they set up the Christmas markets. So I signed the lease just the other day.

When I arrived in Bamberg on Friday, I got sick for a day, then I got to start in-processing. This involves just getting me set up to work on a military base and stuff. I got an ID, an APO address, a cell phone, and tomorrow I take my drivers license test. I went shopping on post at the commissary (grocery store) and PX (post exchange, like a walmart) and did my laundry at the laundromat because I have no washing machine at the apartment. It's definitely culture shock when you wake up in downtown Bamberg and end up in "Little America" on post. It's so strange!

Today I had my first day of "work." I went to a chapel meeting with the chaplains and other chapel staff (UMT) where I sat around a conference table with lots of guys in uniform and Shea reported on things with Club Beyond. Then I went out to Schweinfurt. Schweinfurt is another post that's 45 minutes away that we will be having joint high school club with. John and Mandy Ritchey are new Community Directors there and I know them from training. They had middle school club today so I got to help and meet middle school kids. After that Shea and I and a volunteer leader at the chapel (he is a private) lead a bible study for middle and high schoolers. It was great to meet girls. Some of them are homeschooled, so we bonded over that. :)

I need to go study for my driver's test, but there's sooo much more I'd love to say! I'll try to update with more pictures with the stories behind them when I get internet, but I wanted to make sure you guys knew what was up to right now! Until then, here is a picture of the time the German fire company came to do a drill at our conference center: