Thanksgiving

The group picture - borrow from Connie.

Moving to another country and culture inevitably means you start to celebrate a couple of new holidays. One of the fun, new ones for me is Thanksgiving. Not that Thanksgiving is a Czech holiday, of course, but I serve with a wonderful American missions organisation who celebrate it.

So this year on Thursday 27th was my second time celebrating Thanksgiving! Missionaries from Czech, Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, and Hungary gathered at our hotel and conference centre in Czech to celebrate.

We start with dinner on Wednesday and go until lunch on Friday and it’s just relational time. On Thursday it starts with a “Turkey Trot” (a 5 kilometre run around a nearby reservoir) and then some flag American football (I kind of ran, I did not play flag football).

The dessert table.. but not even all the desserts!

After that we have Thanksgiving dinner! We get the turkey from a man from our church who raises them. And then everyone brings a few dishes – sides, desserts, stuffing.

After dinner there is a talent show with the kids performing. Being so far from family means they don’t get to have their extended family, aunts, uncles, grandparents at school plays, so for one night we, their extended family, get to watch them perform.

This year I didn’t get to watch the talent show because I was taking the wonderful Yormans to the airport to head off on home assignment. Thankfully driving their seven seater on what I still consider to be the wrong side of the road was very uneventful.

Dave, in the grey shirt, our president, leading us in grace and singing.

I’m so thankful for my Josiah Venture family - for this group of people who understand what it is to leave home and call a new place home. I’m thankful for the relational time we got to spend together.

Just before we said grace before the meal we sang “Great is Thy Faithfulness” – it was a beautiful reminder of God’s incredible faithfulness. Even in new countries, new cultures, and new traditions there is one thing I know, deep deep down know, He is faithful.

And I am thankful.

A retreat, a birthday party, Thanksgiving, and a broken boiler

How is it Monday again? And once that question has been answered can someone tell me how we got to the last Monday in November? Although that does mean I have just four sleeps until my Christmas tree is going up.

Once again this Monday morning finds me in McDonalds before 7am with a cup of coffee and a little space to write. So here are some thoughts at the start of my week.

This past week has been a full one!

On Wednesday I headed to Selah. When people ask me why I picked Josiah Venture as my missions organisation one of the reasons I give is their pastoral care for their missionaries.

And Selah is one such example of their commitment to provide access to care to their missionaries. We have a cabin on the other side of the valley from our offices and hotel/conference centre. I booked the cabin for two nights last week.

It was so good to have a couple of days to rest and get quiet enough to listen to that still, small voice. God was so gracious to meet with me there and refresh me. I feel like I’ll be processing what I learnt for a while and I’m so thankful I was able to take a couple of days out, without looking at email or even touching my phone, to be refreshed.

Saturday was quite a full day – the daughter of teammates, the Thomasons, had a birthday party to celebrate turning three! So that was a lot of fun with a lot of little people running around.

I had to leave the party a little early to head to youth group where we had our Thanksgiving party. This is a special event that we use to invite students from camp to again.

Landen, an American missionary who moved here a couple of months ago, talked about Thanksgiving and how we can and should incorporate thanksgiving into our daily lives. It was good to be reminded of the many blessings we have! His lovely wife Jenny, a Czech, translated for him.

After they shared we had a feast! A lot of the girls had baked, we ordered turkey from a family in our church, and I brought a big pot of mashed potato. It was so good! And good to have extended time to hang out afterwards.

On my way home from youth group I stopped at Tesco for a couple of things and arrived back to a flat in need of a clean! I hadn’t really unpacked from my time at Selah, and it had been a full Saturday complete with making four pounds of potatoes and sewing a birthday gift.

Well, I started cleaning after putting my heating on because it was fairly cold. And then… my pilot light went out! This happened when I was gone in Latvia so the Thomasons, who had been staying here, had had to deal with it – a quick call to them helped me know what I needed to press.

And I got the flame relit! Until I turned the hot water on. Casey came round to have a look at it but couldn’t get the flame to stay lit. So we turned off the gas supply.

Washing a lot of dishes without hot water wasn’t super fun.

Yesterday before church I texted my landlord asking what I should do. They gave me the number for the man who had been at my flat a month and a half ago to fix my boiler before.

I called him after church and he wasn’t able to come that day but he’s coming today at 5pm. Still, the phonecall seemed a success because I was able to communicate! I’m thankful that some “every day” situations are becoming less scary in Czech.

Getting out of bed at 5.30am is never easy but this morning it was especially painful. It’s a wee bit cold. So I’m praying that it all gets fixed today! Thankfully I was able to shower at Casey and Kristin’s and I have a wee hot water bottle.

So, that was my full week.

This week involves three days of work and our Josiah Venture Thanksgiving celebration. I still need to decide what I’m going to make! I’m excited to see lots of lovely people and celebrate Thanksgiving for the second time.

Upside Down!

Every year there is a particular theme for our camps - it helps us with the materials such as the t-shirts, printed books and flyers, etc. And the name of the theme is based on the evening programme talks.

Every night at Josiah Venture's camps there is an evening programme with games, songs and even a special camp song with motions (we pick a new song every year that fits the theme and create motions for it). But the most important part of evening programme is the talk.

This year the theme is Upside Down. And you can look at it a couple of ways. Clearly this world is upside down. Even the young person who is most opposed to God will generally easily admit that there is clearly something very wrong in the world. There are wars, famine, greed, pride, anger.. and I could keep going for a long time.

So during the week we will talk about a King who came as a baby. The Lord who came to serve. And that He invites us all to be a part of His Kingdom where things seem Upside Down as we love our enemies, forgive our debtors, lose our lives to save them. A kingdom where it's not about anything we've done or could do to earn His love but where that love is freely given by grace because it was bought with an incredible cost at the cross.

I'm excited about what God will do through these talks and the discussions that happen after them! 

Camp 1000!

Go click on this link and spend 90 seconds watching a very cool video put together by our communications team!

This Saturday is a very exciting milestone! We knew that this summer, somewhere in the midst of the 119 camps we're doing, would be Josiah Venture's 1000th camp. So I sat down with an excel spreadsheet of camps and dates and tried to figure it out.

The exciting things is that it can't be figured out - there are seventeen camps beginning this Saturday, 12th July, with JV in Latvia, Poland and the Czech Republic. One of them is Josiah Venture's 1000th camp!

I have been doing camps with JV since 2007 and now my role has me serving them year-round as I help equip and resource those serving in our camp teams across JV. 

I passionately believe in these camps as a valuable ministry pathway. Not only have thousands of young people had the opportunity to hear about a God who loves them, but because we only do camps when we partner with local churches, they are also an incredible leadership development tool.

It is so exciting to see God at work through camps. I'm thankful for His faithfulness and the knowledge that He will complete what He has started. 

Today marks the beginning of two camps near to my heart - the one with Dejvice church in Prague where my home church will be serving (the camp I was a part of for four years) and my own Czech church's camp. I'll be at my Czech church's camp all week and I'm so excited to see what God does!


You can read a blog post on this milestone from Josiah Venture's president here. 

The Nations Sing

At Intern Training we re-created one of the highlights of my year. On the last night we sang How Great is our God in all the languages represented at Intern Training - Romanian, Polish, Latvian, Slovene, Slovak, Estonian, Czech, Ukrainian, Finnish, Spanish and English!

There’s something so wonderful about being reminded that God is the God of all nations, that He is worshipped in those eleven languages and so many more.

As camps begin across JV would you pray that many in these nations would join us in this song this summer?

Spring Conference

From 30^th April until 4^th June Josiah Venture had our Spring Conference. Josiah Venture has two big conferences every year – “Fall Conference” in September which is a training and equipping conference and “Spring Conference”. Spring conference is a family conference for our second culture missionaries – people who serve in a culture that is not where they were born.

This was my very first Spring Conference, which a lot of people questioned. It seems it’s not just me that felt like I’d been here a lot longer than the ten months I had been until that point.

If you had asked me honestly how I was feeling headed into conference I would have replied that I was excited… but also nervous. One of the things I love most about JV is our community and how it feels like a big family. But it is a big family – I think Spring Conference had 250 adults and children at it! And so I was nervous about feeling overwhelmed or, you know, if I had the right, cool enough, backpack. It felt like it was my first day at a new school.

But, I really shouldn’t have worried. It feels weird to say I felt welcomed into the JV family because I’d already been to Fall Conference, the Academy and the Ladies’ Retreat and met most of the people… but there was something about being at Spring Conference that really made me feel part of JV. It was my final first in the yearly JV calendar.

I am so grateful for the people, the family, I serve with and alongside. One of the core values of Josiah Venture is “dynamic community” and it is so wonderful to live that out. We celebrate each other’s strengths and show grace in weaknesses. Over cake and in late night conversations we laugh and listen. Even though we’re from different cultures and countries we all know what it means to be far from loved ones and learning languages and cultures.

Our speaker for the week was Bryan Chapell, who flew over from America with his wife. The theme was Relentless, and it was all about how the grace of God is the relentless theme of the Bible. It is grace that gives us hope for whatever we are facing. And everything we say and do should be centred on grace.

It was such a refreshing week – to be reminded of God’s incredible grace in the midst of a community that show such grace.

How JV Began

Josiah Venture is celebrating it's 20th birthday this year! I am so thankful to be a part of this organisation. If you would like to read an excellent post on the story behind the start of JV, and more about our vision and mission click over to the JV blog here.

And, while you're there, bookmark that page! Every week between now and the end of the year there will be a new blog post talking about what God has done, and what He is doing, in these nations.