Another Important November 9th Celebration

I had a wonderful 25th birthday on Saturday but November 9th is also important for another reason. Twenty years ago, on my fifth birthday, two couples moved to the Czech Republic and Poland and Josiah Venture was born!

Please check out this post by Connie Patty for the details and fun photos!

Thankful for those couples that stepped out in faith all those years ago! 

Photo Friday

My favourite walk in my home town - down by the river, and only about seven minutes from my flat.

Sunday involved baking these - spiced applesauce with cream cheese frosting - for the ladies' Bible study on Monday night.

It was so fun to have the ladies gather in my living room. Most of us serve with JV and it is such a great time of studying God's Word together. I'm so thankful for this community of women from America and Czech.

Tuesday was a really grey and rainy, dark day. A lot of my co-workers thought it was miserable but it made me smile as I thought it was a perfect Northern Irish day.

These lovely people (the guys are American and Martina is Czech) serve Czech English camps and are dear friends. I had them over for dinner on Wednesday night and it was a lot of fun.

With the lovely Chestnuts on home assignment in the States for two and a half months their dog Brooklyn is being looked after by other people. That included me for a couple of nights so I got to take late night walks in my town square.

For my next Czech lesson I have to write out my testimony so I've been learning some relevant words. I drove a Czech co-worker to work on Thursday and she asked me what my testimony was and how I became a missionary. And I managed to answer both those questions in Czech! Really bad Czech with all the wrong endings but it was still Czech and mostly understood. It was a wonderful confidence boost as I glimpsed some progress in my language learning!

Edge Sports: Floorball!

Back in September I introduced you to a new ministry starting within JV: Edge Sports, using sport to reach young men for Christ. 

Well, it's not just football in Slovenia and Poland any more! In Ukraine they have started floorball teams in local churches that are reaching out to young people there.

I watched a couple of floorball games at Brodfest - it's like indoor hockey with plastic sticks and a ball with holes in it. The goalkeeper doesn't have a stick but spends most of his time on his knees, using his hands and body to stop goals. It's a fast paced game!

You can watch the video introducing floorball and how they are using it to reach young people for Christ in Ukraine here.

Joining the Movement of God (Article)

Time and time again this part of the world, and particularly Czech, is highlighted as a region where few are evangelical believers. Across the countries that JV works in less than 1% of the population fall into that category. 

Czech is actually top in the world in terms of percentage of the population "unaffiliated" to any religion with 76% declaring themselves in that category. Even China and North Korea have lower percentages than that. And the evangelical population of Czech is less than a third of one percent.

And yet this country has a glorious history of the Gospel and movements of God. Jan Hus called for reformation in the church and inspired Martin Luther. And in the early 1700s a revival broke out in this part of the world that rippled throughout the nations.

You can read about this revival in this article which even mentions the town I now live in as the nerve centre of the revival, which also went on to inspire the people who became known as the Moravians.

The Moravians were pioneers of the missions movement and prayed continuously for one hundred years. There are stories of Moravian missionaries who were willing to sell themselves into slavery in order to preach the Gospel to those enslaved through the Atlantic slave trade. They also deeply affected John Wesley, contributing to his conversion experience when he saw their deep faith during a storm on a boat crossing the Atlantic. 

God has been drawing people to Himself in this part of the world for centuries and from this region ripples have went out that have changed the world. 

It is our prayer that again we would see God's mighty work in this region, that He would call many to Himself and that it would transform not only this country but the world. 

Here's to 25

At White Rock Beach with Rose just before moving to Czech earlier this year. Rose wrote in the sand "Rach NI-Czech 2013-..." 

When I was younger I think twenty-five was one of the years I had definite dreams and plans for. I knew what I wanted to have and who I wanted to be when I turned twenty-five.

And in a week, on November 9^th, I will celebrate my twenty-fifth birthday!

Pretty much none of the things I’d planned for twenty-five will have happened. Until I was sixteen I thought twenty-five would be celebrated by Doctor Rachael. And eighteen-year-old me certainly had no plans to have an address outside of the UK. I repeatedly tell the story of how I had zero plans to become a missionary. 

But God has written a different story. A much better story.

I am so glad things look a lot different than I was expecting. Although I will celebrate my birthday in a country where I’m not even sure how to say “Happy birthday!” I know, and know deeply, that this is what and where God has called me to.

It is such a joy to be making a home here, to be battling with language learning and to be serving alongside wonderful people to proclaim just how great God is in these nations.

As I look towards turning twenty-five I have been thinking about what I want to do before I turn thirty. I am slowly writing a list of thirty things I’d love to do in the next five years.

I’ve been doing some research as I try to write this list. Some of the lists I’ve been finding are not that helpful – there aren’t really any famous people I want to meet and I’m not sure I’ll own a home in the next five years.

Some of the lists have been reminding me of the amazing things that have been crammed into my twenty-five years of life so far, of how much life I’ve lived.

I’ve travelled a lot – in the last year alone I’ve slept in thirty-two beds in ten countries. I’ve been to Disneyland and Disneyworld. I’ve seen my favourite band (Mumford and Sons) as well as two of my favourite singer-songwriters (Foy Vance and Duke Special) live.

I completed school. And graduated from Cardiff University with a BSc and whole lot of wisdom from outside the lecture theatres after four years of living in the beautiful Wales with wonderful people. I’ve walked a few marathons – although running one would be incredible. I’ve been mentored and I’ve been a mentor.

I’ve moved to a whole different country. I’m learning a second language (I’m so not going to count the five years of French in high school). I feel like I have my dream job. I’ve stood up in front of people with a microphone in my hand. I’ve served on five short-term mission teams to Romania and the Czech Republic.

And I am so blessed to have such incredible people in my life. People who have loved me and continue to love me in the midst of all these crazy adventures. I have a fantastic family and friends who love me so much. It is such an honour to do life with all of you.

God has given me so many adventures in these amazing first twenty-five years of life! And I’m so excited to see what God has in store for the next twenty-five – and how He will most likely shatter my expectations of those too!

Now to find a fourteenth thing to write on my list…

Photo Friday

One of the great things about being at Brodfest was being able to catch up with friends - including these lovely Czech interns who served with JV last year!

It was also wonderful to see over one thousand young adults worshipping God together.

Monday came and the bracelet got cut off! It was a national holiday here (marking the establishment of an independent Czecho-Slovak state after the First World War in 1918) and after the crazy weekend it was good to have a slower day.

Life here is just a whole lot multi-cultural. On Tuesday I made a trip to Poland to go to a bigger/cheaper grocery store to stock up on essentials for the next wee while (and then supplement with smaller shop runs... and no, I'm not calling M&Ms or nutella essentials but somehow they ended up in my trolley). 

I used a Latvian coin to operate the Polish trolley and my shop included buying coffee creamer for an American living in Slovenia. Czech life includes lots of other countries!

A beautiful sunset on Wednesday.

Thursday was the end of the month which inevitably means it's time to sort out my receipts and expenses! And as I'd done a lot of travelling it required a lot of work (and M&Ms) as I have receipts in six currencies!

Friday - well, I've now lived here over four months! And four months is a long time without a haircut. So I finally braved it today. Hairdressers are the same world over - I used multiple phrases for "only a little" and she repeated them back... but my hair is a lot shorter than I was expecting! Thankfully hair grows and I don't hate it - so I'm still chalking it up as an accomplishment!

Camp Team Meetings

One of the things you may have noticed if you’ve been following my “Photo Friday” posts is that I have been doing quite a lot of travelling this month. In fact, as I sit down to do my expenses for October I will be submitting receipts in six different currencies!

So, why have I been doing so much travelling?

Well, my role is to serve the camp ministry of Josiah Venture and those over-one-hundred camps happen in lots of countries! And in those countries there are people who organise, lead and serve those camps – both national missionaries and second-culture missionaries.

Most camps last a week or less but the work for them happens all year round as people recruit and prepare short term teams, work with national churches, promote camps to young people, recruit and prepare interns, prepare finances, budgets and resources… and then follow up with all those people!

So, we’ve been meeting with the camp teams of countries to go through what they’re doing throughout the year and to discover how we can best encourage and support them.

So far we have had these 4-6 hour long meetings with Czech, Poland, Latvia and Estonia and are scheduled to go to Slovenia in early December.

It has been such a joy to meet with these people who are passionately serving God and who are passionate about reaching the youth of these nations for Christ. And it has been so exciting to sit and listen to stories of how God is moving through these camps and drawing people to Himself. 

If you would like to know more about these countries you’ll find out some information about them and their ministry outlook by clicking on their profiles on the JV website.