Hi Everyone… just got back from two weeks in Budapest, Hungary, where we participated in a world-wide Student retreat. Set in a former communist pioneer camp on a hill overlooking Budapest, we welcomed several hundred students from as far away as Argentina to come and encounter God and one another. More details about this in our newsletter!

We had the privilege during this time to have a sort of mini family reunion, as all but one of the sibling-units was able to come and play a meaningful role in the camp. The boys were able to get to know their Aunties and Uncle a lot better as they worked on their food-begging skills during the various breakfast times.

We’re back in Berlin now, and we realize more and more how much at home we are in this city. There’s a lot of work ahead of us… I personally have three websites I’m working on in this time, as well as all the prep needing to go into the coming semester.

It is a blazing hot 95 degrees here in Berlin… (no air conditioning)… and Johnny is out in the heat at the Technical University passing out free ice tea. This is a way to meet an immediate need of those hot and weary students walking by, but at the same time to touch a deeper thirst that lies within. Each week Johnny has been at the university handing out free coffee, ice tea, or Bibles, a way to show Christ’s love to the “thirsty” students. Pray for those who have received, who are thirsty, and who desperately need Jesus in their life.

Last week our semester officially came to an end with our last large group gathering of SfC-Berlin. In fact even then many of our students were in the midst of exams and writing term papers. Fascinatingly enough, nearly every University and school seems to have their calendar, making it rather challenging to pinpoint an exact end. Exams started taking place a week or two ago and the exam period will go all the way till the week before the new semesters starts in the second week of April. The name for this in between time is “Vorlesungsfreiezeit,” which means “lecture free period.” For many profs this is an excellent time to give their students a nice long research paper to write, or prepare for a killer exam. I have lots of sympathy for our students!