So it's been a month.

News for the week:

-Our passports have visas in them now!

-I got yelled at [in German] on the tram for the second time. great fun.

-It has snowed everyday the past week… but most of it has not stuck.

-Three days this week we went prayer walking at the windy Dresden university in 20ish degree weather for about 1 ½ hours each day. Ice was on the ground, we couldn’t feel any parts of our body, the wind was everywhere… Talk about unbearable.

-I’ve taken [way] over 500 pictures since I’ve been here… and it’s only been a month.

-Hey, it’s been a month! The first three weeks in Dresden were rough, to put it lightly, but my team knows the next four months are going to be the best four months.

-So if you’re worried you haven’t heard much good news yet, don’t worry, there’s still plenty of time!

-On Friday the 13^th we went to a memorial service at the Frauenkirche to mark the 64^th anniversary of the Dresden bombings from World War 2 where thousands died. Interesting history on the Frauenkirche, you should for sure look it up.

-The four of us girls are starting to look more like a team, it’s an exciting thing.

-It’s incredibly hard to find a regular German bible here… If that gives you any hint on how dead Christianity is here.

-Earlier this week, we took German lessons from a lady from the church we’re going to here. She’s 86, and for a German to be that old I really can’t imagine all that they have experienced living in Germany, especially if they are from the east side of Germany. Basically from our lessons with her I won’t be learning any German, but her joy that she has really inspires me.

-On Wednesday we went over to Charlotte’s (an older lady we’re doing some ministry with here) and helped celebrate a lady’s birthday. It was the first time in a long time that she’s celebrated her birthday free of drugs. Charlotte gave her a study bible for her birthday and the lady was so excited about that bible it was incredible. People in the states just don’t get that excited about bibles, or treat them with that much respect. Talk about an incredible experience.

Oh and correction about the snow. We actually woke up with a good 1 ½ inches on the ground… but then the rain came and slush is everywhere. So not fun.

Annnd I’m going to start giving out a German word each time I write a blog, which will be randomly selected from the German Dictionary I have.

German word: genau – exact, precise

In addition, here's a picture of the 4 of us prayer walking on the university this week.

Let it snow, let it stick?

Well we’ve gotten some snow, just none of it has stuck yet. My dad came in Monday of this week, on his way back to the States from Russia and left early Wednesday morning. It was really neat for me to be able to show him around the town I’m living in and the really historic sights. It was also cool to see someone I’ve known longer than 3 weeks and made me being here an actual reality where at some points it has still felt like I am dreaming being here.

Something that has been hard for me and I’ve been working on trying to figure out is how I can say something to all my good friends back in DP or at State and they’ll get it and think it’s really funny, but that same thing I can say to other people and they can take it offensively. I guess it is being around personalities that I’m not usually around and trying to figure out how to act around them because they are going to take the things I say and the way I act completely different than the friends I have elsewhere. I’m definitely not saying that their personalities are bad in any way, just different that I’ve surrounded myself with the past years. And maybe that’s even one of the reasons God has brought me here, to break me down and make me be patient with people that are good people but are just different than most of the people I usually spend time with.

So I feel like I'm learning a lot here and catching onto a lot of the culture, which is completely different than the States. I thought I would leave you with some pictures of the snow earlier today... which did not stick at all. But it was pretty falling.

That's the church right across the street from our apartment

Let's move the mountain

So the girls and I are starting to get adjusted to Dresden life, but it has definitely not been without challenges. Yesterday our heat stopped working in our apartment, making it extremely cold. Today, we found out that if you leave a key in the other side of the door and try to unlock it, it won’t work, so we ended up locked out of our apartment with no idea what to do. Thankfully by last night most of our heaters were back on working and we survived the night, and Day and I finally got a space heater to warm up our small room where our heater had not been working since we’ve been here and have been sleeping with numerous layers on.

Ironically, we were blessed through the locked door situation and saw God in a pretty incredible way. Today we went out on our own for our first day of prayer walking and checking out Dresden to find out more about it. Even though honestly I wasn’t looking forward to it, God gave me a peace about it and by the end of it I can say I had a really good day. It was great to be able to pray over the part of the city we went to and see more of the city than we had seen so far. So after we were done, Day and I headed back to our apartment to find out that our landlady had not been able to get our door fixed and we were still locked out of our apartment. We called all of our resources and calculated that the fastest we would end up back in our apartment would be an hour, but probably more like a couple of hours. So we’re sitting in our cold stairway (because only the rooms in our building are heated), talking about how frustrating our time here has been and just trying to keep optimistic in our situations, which I am not a naturally optimistic person, so it has been really hard. So we stand back up and are trying to figure out if there is any other way into our apartment. Finally, I just go to the door and start to just push it because I was so frustrated. Day asks me if I want to try the key again, and I’m like well might as well. So I put the key back in the door and am pretty much slamming my body into the door and jiggling the key, really loudly at that, and then all of the sudden our door just opens!! Day and I start rejoicing out loud and hug, and it was just an INCREDIBLE God moment. I had just shared with our group this Sunday night that I was feeling really discouraged with prayer because I felt like God wasn’t answering any prayers. And here God showed up and said that he still answers prayer, for sure. We just gotta be patient and trust that God will do it in HIS TIME. Which is really hard to be patient, for me anyways. So I’m just feeling much more peace right now about everything.

I also celebrated my birthday yesterday, which was very different, and hard, not being with the people I am really close to back in the States, but I know what I am doing here is more important. And Cheryl made me a chocolate cake, with a big chocolate cake pig on top. It was amazing. Ok, so onto prayer requests! The United Kingdom group got denied entry into Whales and London. I’m not sure we’re they are going to now, but pray that they are able to adjust to that change in their ministry and that they really see God moving and that God uses them in even more amazing ways than they ever could imagine. Also, keep praying for my team and that even though we may not see God moving, He is, and we just need to be patient and have faith that He brought us here for a reason!

Mark 11:22-24: “Have faith in God,” Jesus answered. “I tell you the truth, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”

God is good.