den sas halase

I don’t even know what that means, but it’s about the only thing I’m sure of over here. That’s the name of the wifi network we miraculously connected to. I don’t mind when things are different and I don’t expect things in Europe to be the same as how they are in America, but we’re having trouble getting accustomed to a few things:

-ovens (I burnt my hand trying to figure out why it wasn’t heating)

-toilets (throw your used toilet paper in the trash, don’t flush it)

-door knobs (we got locked out of the parsonage testing the door lock)

-showers (the head of the faucet disconnects from the sink and then you squeegee the bathroom floor when finished)

-street signs (where are they-and what do they mean?)

-body gestures (holding out your hand as in to wave or how we would indicate the #5 apparently means “Go to hell” or worse, I forgot that as I gratefully did that gesture when a car let us walk across the street)

Oh, and one other little thing: THE LANGUAGE...Yia what? Besides the fact that we were still dealing with jet lag and a 7 hour time difference, it was so hard to concentrate on anything that was going on. We’ve had to receive so much information in the past 48 hours on such little brain capacity, I’m pretty sure after a while we started to drown out even the english spoken to us. 

Tonight we worked at a festival for children, doing face paint and playing Twister...all without speaking English. Well we spoke English but the kids didn’t know what we were saying. The best part was when a little boy asked me to draw a Greek flag on his arm and I didn’t know what that looked like, so Mollie told me to just draw an American flag on him. A) what american kid would ever ask to have our flag painted on him and B) I’m sure the greek boy wouldn’t appreciate my patriotism. 

At the end of the festival a few of the boys were breakdancing and it was really cool. The majority of the kids don’t have parents who ever know where they are and are also Albanian, facing a lot of racism from the greeks. The festival is set up by the community center which is one of their places of refuge and somewhere they can get attention from adults who care about them. Pray that these kids see Christ’s love and acceptance for them through the volunteers who run the Community center.

God is so much bigger than our minor details in life that seem so huge when we can’t figure them out. We stomp and yell and get irritated when we don’t see the bigger picture because we don’t trust that the Lord has it all figured out. We need to remember that He meets us right where we’re at and then says “let’s do this thing together”. I’ll take Him up on that offer, because I know I’m not going to be able to do this on my own.