I’m looking back over my Feb – March calendars in order to find a theme and all I see are first names! It’s pretty obvious that we are focusing on community and relationships right now:

I continued helping Ma Belle weekly through February and I’m pleased to announce that she’s now maintaining her place on her own. The apartment odor hasn’t changed unfortunately, probably because she has 6 large bags of her son’s unwashed clothes still stacked in her salon. After 6 months, I don’t think he’ll be back to retrieve them, but she’s not convinced yet. She still has junk stored in her basement that she is ready to part with, but the stairs are intimidating for both of us. I’m hoping that we can take care of that in May, when some young teens from Bethel Christian School come to visit for a week. Sounds like a perfect missions project for them.

She bought herself a paperback French-English parallel Bible awhile back and I’m not sure why, except maybe because of her affinity for me. I admired it greatly as something I would love to own as well, but couldn’t justify buying when I can get any language on my Bible app for free. What a surprise to unwrap it for my birthday last month! She was given a used, hard back Bible recently, and decided it would be more durable and lighter to carry around. I was touched!

Speaking of my birthday, quality one-on-one time with 8 different girlfriends spread out over 3 weeks is my favorite way to celebrate! David and the kids inundated me with books from my Amazon wish list and Emilie, our boarder, made sure I had a homemade dessert complete with a candle to blow out along with her gift. This relationship has also been a real gift for both of us. She has expressed that our home has been a safe place to heal emotionally and physically, and I love having someone “in house” to correct my written and oral French!  We will miss her when she has to move out next month (so that our Americanized Olivia can move back in!)

At church, our discipleship efforts are going well. The young adults chose the adult with whom they wanted to serve and confide in. Mine is a young lady that will be moving back to Paris this summer to be part of a new Christian school project. So I’m not raising up my replacement for Sunday school, unfortunately. David, however, has 2 disciples in the technical department who aren’t going anywhere and the love and respect is mutual. He also just supervised another young man from our church, who spent his internship analyzing our sound needs as part of his studies in audio engineering.

On top of that, no less than 5 couples are marrying from our church this summer and one of them has asked us to do their pre-marital counseling. What a refreshing challenge it will be to spend time with a couple in love, instead of the hurting ones we’ve ministered to in the past. Our first church baby in 4 yrs was just born last month too – a precursor to a big shift coming to our little church’s age demographics! Needless to say, this discipleship thrust feels like God’s perfect timing and forming home groups will probably be the next one. The building renovation work is finally moving forward as well, so it feels like our church is being prepared for the coming harvest. Europe shall be saved!

Our annual 12 hours of worship happened on Easter Sat. this year. I tend to do the prep work in advance, creating spaces for personal encounters and then playing with the kids that attend for a short time. But David is fully engaged with logistical planning AND the entire day of the event between running sound, projecting words, leading a worship team or playing an instrument for other groups. Then on Sunday, he had a wedding to attend, while I manned Sunday school. So it was the first year I didn’t make a big Easter dinner – Emilie had a simple, delicious meal waiting for us when we got home and it felt very good to simply receive. (As an added bonus, Easter Monday is also an official holiday in Alsace!)

In other news, we were disappointed to be turned down for French nationality last week. This means that after David finishes his US taxes this week, and then his French taxes next month, he has to start preparing another dossier to renew our 10 year residence permit. Will he still be able to do this at 67, 77, 87 yrs of age? This is what we were hoping to avoid, but God knows better. Apparently, the government needed to see more French income. Wish they’d told us that up front. And because we will soon lose boarding income and IT freelance work is still sluggish, David is now actively applying for part-time telecommuting work with other companies. (And if he goes with a French company, we may re-apply for nationality again in a few years.)

Happy springtime to all of you, Angela

This month’s letter will be a long one because I want to recount the 2 yr saga of my efforts to obey Jesus’ command to care for “the least of my brothers.”    The French are good at caring for the poor physically, as they are housed and fed and have access to job training and full health care. However, their souls and spirits are bound by generational sin, a victim/poverty spirit, and demons of addiction and mental anguish. My efforts to befriend my neighbors have fizzled for some of those very reasons.

Now let me introduce you to a lady I call Ma Belle, a saved member of our congregation. She could check all those boxes, except addictions, but lived in a codependent situation with her son, who was an alcoholic. They have lived in the area their entire lives and are well-known by local churches and social workers. They both have learning disabilities and live more like a street people since they can’t drive and avoid their apt during the day, not letting anyone in.

So besides attending free workshops for retired and mentally handicapped citizens, she started attending most of our House of Prayer sets where she loves to draw. But she was in constant turmoil, always asking for prayer for her son to get help (without being able to set any boundaries,) for her heart condition (which seemed to come and go) or her irrational fears (like being evicted.) Since she still didn’t want anyone to interfere and wasn’t a victim of domestic abuse, all we could do was pray with her to get her through another week, and hope that her son would be removed and that she would let him go.

This is how David and I got to know her better in the last couple of years, often driving her home after evening sets, wondering what she went home to, but relieved to see that she was in a decent little historic building, rather than an ugly high-rise. I was one of the few who greeted her on Sunday mornings and celebrated her birthdays. Then last spring, we started Sozos when she decided to break off an unhealthy relation with a man. With her son still at home, I wasn’t sure it was worth it, but then I decided it might free her of soul ties with both men more quickly. We did 6 sessions over the summer, when she easily forgave every single person in her whole life who had mistreated her.
And that was just about everybody.

When she stopped making progress, I said we needed to wait until her son was out of her life. And to everyone’s amazement, he was accepted into a rehabilitation community at the beginning of Nov. That same week her water heater broke down, but she refused to call a repairman because she was too ashamed to let him in. Everyone told her to call me as the best candidate for help, but it took her 2 weeks without heat to finally surrender. Don’t ask me to do hospital visits; I don’t have the stomach for it. But filth and clutter have no hold on me. The dirtier the job, the more excited I get about changing the atmosphere!

The odor she carries fills the hallway before you’ve opened her door. Inside, all the drawers and shelves were broken and emptied, leaving 3 years of stuff on the floor a foot high. She blamed her son’s violent outbursts for all the damage. Her bedroom was intimidating, but the salon where her son lived was overwhelming. So I started with the easiest and got her entry, bathroom and kitchen floor clear in 3 hours. Now she could let a repairman in.

On the next visit, the apt was warm and the floor was still clear, so I was motivated to keep going and coerced David to change a light socket and unclog her bathroom sink. I got her a hot plate and pot from the church kitchen to heat food  since all of her appliances were broken, washed mountains of laundry in vinegar and swapped out her rotten mattress for her son’s, giving her fresh bedding from my attic.

She wasn’t a hoarder and every little advancement made a huge difference. Yet she would still apologize for being a burden to the point of wondering why she was even born. My response was that she was teaching us how to love like Jesus did. I dreamed of having it all done in time for Christmas and started contacting social workers about how to get some help to empty that salon. I also wondered if I could get hired as her personal house keeper in order to earn enough money to take care of some of her needs, as well as mine. In the end, it sounded like I was on my own. I couldn’t hire strangers to clear it out because they wouldn’t be patient with all the sorting and Ma Belle’s potential reactions. And I couldn’t afford it anyway. And while everyone admired me, no one was interested in getting their hands dirty. It was feeling heavy and I needed reassurance that Jesus was going to make this burden light.

Then I looked at my calendar and saw that our missionary care weekend was coming up, (as described in the last newsletter) and David agreed we needed to take advantage of it. I reserved on-line and got a personal message back saying that the other reservations had cancelled and so all the pampering would focus on us! A team was there from the states to take our portrait, cook us a romantic meal, (besides all the others) and give us free counseling sessions!! This was my reward!!

We drove through rain, sleet and snow 3 hrs through the countryside, arriving at night to a darkened village. And it was absolutely surreal to knock on the front door and be warmly welcomed by gushing Americans!! It was a delightful escape that ended on a magical note: The ancient village church wasn’t open that Sunday, so they got the keys and we had an (unheated) English Advent service all to ourselves! Wrapped in blankets, we sang carols and hymns in a cappella that I hadn’t sung since I was a child. God bless the Sutherlin family!

On our return, Ma Belle’s heart started acting up, so my break continued over the holidays and I started talking to the young adults who help me clean the church about this mountain. At the same time, we welcomed Emilie, our pastor’s niece, as our new boarder. (Priscille ended up staying only through Oct.) Emilie’s joyful presence especially brightened up our holiday week without family and relieved financial pressure.

So this month, after 4 more tedious hours, I  finally got her bedroom floor completely clear, allowing David and Thibauld, one of our young men, to set up a proper bed frame and repair her broken bedroom furniture. She was so happy that she bought me a gift. A gift I loved.

And Thibauld ended up being the key to conquering the salon. As a mover, he’d seen worse and even had a trailer to haul stuff to the recycling center. So the mountain became a molehill when he along with 4 other volunteers showed up for 3 hours last weekend to get the worst of it into the trailer to haul away.  Believe you me, I’m taking it as a prophetic sign for the work still needed for our church building!

David got this verse for 2018: “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.” What a great image of our journey with Ma Belle thus far. And even if you never meet her here on earth, you certainly will on the other side, when she will be transformed back into the beautiful woman God created her to be. And I’m sure you’ll recognize her because she’ll be the one that smells the sweetest!

Christmas Greetings Dear Readers,

I am looking out over a snow-covered hillside outside Lafauche, pop. 80, in Champagne-Ardenne where a wonderful group of Americans with a heart for missionaries is living out an open vision that they received, slowly renovating a “chateau” as a free member care ministry for missionaries and ministers who need a little TLC. We are taking advantage of it after an exhausting couple of weeks, but more about that in the next newsletter!

Our fall season was beautiful and David’s intercession trip to Copenhagen and Oslo was one of the highlights! He has joined the Operation Capitals of Europe initiative (https://oceprayer.com) on several occasions, but he had been waiting 5 years for these particular capitals to come up because he is half Norwegian and had never visited. Thanks to YWAM connections, the 2 week trip cost next to nothing. He had never been with a better group of people from all over the world and enjoyed quality time with everyone. He got access into beautiful government buildings and leaders for prayer, thanks to the local intercession teams. He felt a real connection with Scandinavia and stayed healthy. The Copenhagen news reported a breakthrough in an area of corruption that they prayed into that very week.

In Oslo, he received 30 minutes of prophecy, not only for himself, but for our entire family – a real gift of encouragement! The icing on the cake was a visit with 2 old Norwegian friends from his year with Up With People 36 years ago. The last time he saw them was at our wedding, but they picked up right where they had left off and he was treated like family. Truly a dream come true for him. And my time at home was equally refreshing!

The second dream has been to move to a residence where we could age gracefully. Our current house is starting to feel more and more like a carnival fun house, where the floors are wonky, the stairs steep and narrow, the doorways low, the view depressing and the windows are few. I am also craving a private place to sit outside. Unfortunately, our house has not appreciated like the ones in Denver and Scotland. We love our village, but other local homes in our price range have similar problems, being built in the same era. We also aren’t interested in apartment living, which feels very confining here for two homebodies who still want to welcome others comfortably.

Well, last month our dream started to take shape: Our pastor’s son, Raphael, is in the credit business and an opportunity fell into his lap when a house sale fell through this summer. He had been keeping his eyes open for a new home for his own family and his parents. This property looked ideal, but he needed one more couple to help finance it, as it would be big enough to cut up into 3 large apartments. Would we be interested in seeing it? You bet! We jumped in the car and drove a few minutes to a sleepy village in the foothills.

We’ve nicknamed it “The Beast” and we bagged it for a ridiculously low price, leaving plenty for the complete renovation needed with the sale of our current residences. We plan to move in a year from now, but I am already the on-call babysitter for Raphael’s 3 children, 3, 4, and 8. There is a mutual understanding between myself and his wife Ekaterina because she is also a foreigner and far from family support! She calls me her Mary Poppins…
She runs a Montessori day care in their apartment on the 4th floor without an elevator and cannot wait to live at street level on a cul-de-sac with a yard! Our pastor Luc and his wife Manuela, who founded the school, still live in the school chateau, but are passing on the baton, so they too are eager for calmer environs for retirement. Manuela is a wonderful grandmother, but she also has her mother and 3 other children in town who need her support, not to mention all the needs at the church. So this plan suits us all!

Blessings, Angela

The last couple of months have been full, leaving us little time to enjoy or lament our empty nest! (Olivia is doing well, working in French immersion classrooms as a substitute teacher. She joins Rachel in weekly indoor rock climbing, has found a life group for spiritual nourishment and family fun fills up most weekends!)

Our first connection was with Drew, who arrived from the Omaha House of Prayer the day after Olivia’s departure. With a heart for France and needing a change of scenery, he took a 6 week tour of the French houses of prayer this summer. We hosted him for a week so that he could visit the 3 in our region and David scheduled extra sets to take advantage of his keyboard skills.  A blessing both ways.

David’s connections in Basel continue as he was invited to play with 2 worship teams for 2 different events. The great thing about Swiss churches is that they pay you for serving – no sign of the poverty spirit that we live under here in France! The best thing was that one of the events fell on our anniversary, so we got a free hotel that weekend to celebrate together!

With our part-time income streams slowing to a trickle this summer, we sent out our first-ever support-raising letter to our newsletter subscribers to find out if this was part of God’s solution for us. Apparently it was not, but a week later we were contacted about boarding a young lady from our church for the school year (and requests for PC repair by friends suddenly came pouring in…) Priscille is eager to make us her adoptive parents, filling holes her parents can’t, while she figures out what she wants to do with her life and volunteering at the school. At 20, she is sweet and selfless, but she needs to be listened to. Needless to say, she is filling my mothering cup as well!

This new relationship is also perfect timing, as this year the church council’s focus is discipling our twenty-somethings. It started with a bang 2 weeks ago when this generation finally grasped the urgency of our building woes over the last 6 years that has kept us at a standstill. So we will be attending leadership and coaching training together this year to build relationship and momentum. Fortunately, Sunday school will take a backseat with fewer children coming regularly, freeing up my energies to focus on young adults. But I am still getting my fix by babysitting, loving on kids without the pressure of preparing a lesson every week!

The summer finale connection was a beautiful Alsatian-Chinese outdoor wedding last weekend. It was a 12 HOUR event with a 1920’s theme with guests from all over the world. I felt like I was on a movie set. David translated the sermon into English and I pushed myself physically to enjoy it to the fullest. These are moments when we really feel like part of the family here, (as we pose with our pastors,) but I am still recovering!

Happy fall, Angela

PS: Want to know an easy way to impact Europe? The Awakening Europe team started an initiative asking for everyone all over the world to declare out loud, “EUROPE SHALL BE SAVED!” at 5pm every day. I’ve chosen church bells for my reminder and found that it makes a real shift in my spirit when surrounded by all the negativity!

I am writing to you on France’s Independence Day weekend that is really the start of the official six weeks of French summer holidays. Our church took the risk of a low turn-out and decided to host a worship weekend with singer/songwriter Samuel Olivier, who is creating my current favorite French worship songs as he experiences Father God in deeper ways as a new father. David so enjoyed playing alongside him, and for me, a song is even more powerful when the writer is singing them himself!!! The timing ended up being perfect because it carried us, as the church council, through a church crisis that was coming to a head this very weekend that would have been much heavier otherwise.

Getting back to this month’s title, Olivia has been the biggest focus of our attention since our last newsletter. She will literally fly the nest next month as our last French baby bird to bravely reconcile with her American heritage (before tackling her master’s to decide what she will do professionally with her multilingual studies.)

Since leaving the states at age 3, she has never felt comfortable in American culture, only returning for short periods at different stages of development and never really bonding with extended family. She also needs to re-establish relationship as an adult with Noah and Rachel, who left her daily life by the time she was 13. So she has grown up feeling like an only child with parents who are 10 yrs older and much less active than her friends’ parents. And because the French spend all major holidays with extended family, her French friends have always pitied her, which made her feel like an outsider, which she kind of is.

This is the lot in life of the Third Culture Kid, where your global life experiences are incredibly rich, but the most dreaded question in the world is “Where are you from?” In Europe, she can sound French, but she grew up with our American filter of the culture. In America, she will sound like an American, but she will react through a European culture filter. She has had the opportunity to testify of her need for Jesus’ help and healing in her personal struggle for healthy identity that we ALL have to wrestle with in one way or another.

So in a dizzying June… Olivia moved out of her dorm and said goodbye to all her college friends.

She found a 6-week internship in Germany teaching at a language school as her last requirement to graduate and rented a private room in a local German couple’s home.

She sang her heart out for the annual school fete.

She bought her plane ticket for her 10 month stay in the U.S. and applied for part-time work in Indianapolis.

And she attended her uncomfortably long French citizenship ceremony on one of the hottest days of the year 8 months after the fact. (A disappointing culmination when she was handed yet another bureaucratic form to fill out in order to get her French ID card!)

We are so grateful to our family members who are waiting with open arms to welcome her, especially David’s sister and brother-in-law, who have offered to house her, as they did for Noah. Do keep her in your prayers as the Lord brings her to mind!

Happy Summer !

Angela

Greetings from our sickbeds where 1/2 of our church seems to have caught a spring virus!
So, if I could sum up these last 2 months, I would say they have been unusually international, which is always an enriching (and fatiguing) time for us:

“Those who prophesy strengthen the community.” I Cor 14.4

Last year, the director of Bethel Christian School came through for a visit to see if there was a connection to be made with our school here. We enjoyed a meal with him between Americans, but that was the extent of our connection. This year a small group of students wanted to come to start an exchange program, but their only available week was during our school’s vacation time. So the Kleins, a family in the church and school who organized the trip, had them come to minister at the church over the weekend. They decided to work on a relational connection and then enjoy a week of tourism, which was exciting for Jeremy, the team leader, because he is also their history teacher and it was his first time in Europe. And since he was raised in Montreal, he  wasn’t afraid to dust off his childhood French!

We ended up housing him and one of his Canadian students. Because families from all over the world attend the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry, their Christian school has kids from many nations. One of the boys is from the Netherlands. It was amazing to have five normal 8^th graders who were very comfortable hearing the Lord’s voice and unafraid to offer it to others. They gave short teachings Sat. night and Sunday morning, offered words of knowledge to church members, handed out prophetic drawings while sight-seeing and taught the basics of prophecy to my Sunday school class.

In the natural, it didn’t look very anointed: the 3 girls were jet-lagged, using posters in English, needing Olivia to translate, and not making much eye contact to keep the kids attention. My biggest fear is bored kids and I started getting nervous. Then just when they wanted to start “activating” the kids, they were called to go back to the adults. With a sigh of relief, I jumped up and started quizzing the kids to see if they had retained anything at all. They had and they were all ready to have a go. I had not had much success in leading them in “listening to God” exercises in the past, but those girls had deposited their anointing after all. Following Jeremy’s model that encouraged taking risks in a safe environment in order to practice and grow, we practiced prophesying over each child in 4 different ways. And they all participated fully. For the first time. It was beautiful.

The team and the Klein family also blessed the church with some manual labor, tackling the invasive Japanese knot weed that is trying to convert our parking lot into a bamboo jungle. I was also waiting on their arrival to tackle 3 big trashcans filled with stinky unsorted garbage that someone had anonymously parked in our parking lot. They would never be emptied because they weren’t legal bins registered with the city. The only solution was to transfer the trash to our bins and pay for the extra weight ourselves. And because they had been outside for a few months, they had also filled with putrefying rainwater. They were so heavy that I could not tip them over. At least the men could take care of that for me, but surprisingly, no one else was as motivated as I was to open and sort 15 bags of trash in order to keep the weight down! (Recycling reduces weight charges and is not weighed.)

So like the Little Red Hen, I did it all by myself. At least the sun was shining and I was not all alone. The Klein children were at least willing to hold open recycling bags for me so I could practice my shooting skills at the same time. I filled 6 of those and 2 hours later had a dozen smallish trash bags piled next to the giant pile of knot weed. I was promised that the bins would be gone within 24 hrs so that this would not be a recurring event. And they were. Whew!

“ In that day Egypt and Assyria [Iraq, Iran, Syria, Turkey] will be connected by a highway, and the Egyptians and Assyrians will move freely back and forth between their lands, and they shall worship the same God. And Israel will be their ally; the three will be together, and Israel will be a blessing to them. ²⁵ For the Lord will bless Egypt and Iraq because of their friendship with Israel. He will say, “Blessed be Egypt, my people; blessed be Assyria, the land I have made; blessed be Israel, my inheritance!.” Is 19.23-25

The next international experience was a conference at the beautiful Basel House of Prayer to learn more about God’s view of the Middle East as laid out in Isaiah 19, shedding a lot of light on the refugee crisis. There are entire ministries working and praying to see this beautiful prophecy of reconciliation come true and we wanted a deeper understanding.

“Keep the fire on the altar burning day and night.” Lev. 6:3

Over the next 3 days, local Syrian refugees told their stories and got prayer. A Jordanian who is starting an Arab-speaking church for them in Basel, translated. A German pastor who had personally counseled Angela Merkel to keep welcoming the refugees despite protests (and who could pass for Burl Ives) contributed with authority as an early pioneer of this reconciliation movement. A messianic Jewish rabbi from Tel Aviv prayed the Sabbath blessing over us. The assistant pastor of the largest evangelical church in Cairo led a worship set, partly in Arabic. Then the main speaker, Tom Craig, honored everyone’s work and shared on his book, which we are now reading.

Praying with the German staff before worship.

We were reminded that Jesus is the only answer to the Middle East mess and God is even able to redeem war by getting Muslims to Europe where they are being saved by the thousands. (Unfortunately, it is only the bad news that gets reported because the good news is too dangerous to release publicly!) In between sessions, we were praying and worshiping and getting to know the staff there. David was thrilled when they adopted him as their drummer for the weekend. We also ran into one of our intercessors who came down from Italy and had a delightful Vietnamese lunch and prayer time together.

“I will praise you, Lord, among the nations; I will sing of you among the peoples.” Ps 108.3

The final international moment was last Sunday when 30 (French-speaking) Congolese children and their chaperones entered our sanctuary and worshiped with us and for us with African abandon. Their Christian school is the fruit of seeds planted by our pastor many years ago. Our typically passive French kids looked on wide-eyed at these kids dressed to the nines, sang accapella and who knew how to sit still and listen to their team leader preach a fiery message on prayer. (It’s a good thing because I couldn’t have fit them all in our Sunday school room!!)

Congolese worship

Love, Angela

I hope you are coming out of the winter doldrums, enjoying the sunshine on your face and the flowering trees along your path!

The highlights this month were about getting out of town to both give and receive:

Mid-month, a new American missionary friend, Christi, invited me to accompany her to Zurich for a women’s breakfast where she was the speaker. Sadly, it was supposed to be a father-daughter trip and he passed away suddenly just 3 weeks before the date.
She decided to keep the engagement, but needed moral support for the 2 hr drive without him and I was thrilled to come along, all expenses paid, just before my birthday.

It ended up being pure “soul food,” sharing deeply with English-speaking ex-pats during the table talk time around Brené Brown’s theme of being courageously vulnerable.  (When Brown’s 2010 TED Talk went viral, her career took off and Christi is a certified facilitator with her Daring Way counseling program.) Christi did so well that my support role was minimal –she was a beautiful model of grace in all circumstances for herself and others! I even got a free copy of Brown’s book, Daring Greatly!
(I would include our selfie here, but my phone died with my photos inside…)

Birthday joy continued for the next couple of weeks, including the means to buy a new phone and a romantic afternoon in Colmar, with lots of other surprises and love from friends and family near and far.

David did road trip #2 to minister in Orléans last weekend. You may remember that Alana put out a French worship CD last year and David contributed some background vocals. Well, a group of charismatic Catholics and evangelicals there who meet together weekly to promote unity and worship got a hold of her music and invited her to come do a concert! On the group’s site, which is translated “Worship at the Center,” they promoted the event and you can hear one of Alana’s songs, read the program, and watch her promote the evening in French.

Alana was surprised to get this opportunity and rented a 9 passenger van for her “Trésor European Tour” with a team from church that included David. It was a 6 hr drive with stops and a very rich time for everyone. The lady battling cancer, that I mentioned last month, joined them as an intercessor and even though undergoing chemo, she felt great the entire trip. The organizer posted this video of David modeling how to “worship with the Word” after a brief teaching. He is singing Heb. 1:3 and got an enthusiastic response during and afterwards from the participants. He wore several hats, playing drums, the cajon, teaching and singing. They were also able to minister to the youth that were present and the organizers also took lots of her CDs to sell!

This coming together of different streams came at a good time because our apostolic network of churches in France is currently being attacked by an anonymous French heresy hunter site. Pretty heart-breaking, but a real wake-up call to communicate better who we are. David will be preaching his first sermon at church on Sunday based on the book The Culture of Honor by Danny Silk as another gentle reminder.

And on that note, we’d like to make you aware of Pray for France – the only American prayer initiative for this country. David has had lots of email conversations with the founder and was also the main contributor to the worship aspect of the prayer topics. Our pastor also contributed to prayer points for Christian education. Register on their site to get emails with the daily topic of prayer through Easter. They also have a Facebook page!

55 and holding, Angela

The first 2 months of 2017 have felt like new foundations are being put in place for the future and according to prophetic voices, this is supposed to be an amazing breakthrough year in so many areas! To those of us in Europe, this year also marks the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, and we expect God to bring new revelation to the Church to be a real answer in these challenging times.

With our church council, we are now meeting weekly to fast and pray over lunch before starting our “business” meetings. We are still struggling to get the renovation of our building finished 5 years later and that is slowing down the growth of our ministries. We are tired of banging our heads against a wall and against each other as we jostle for space and we are at the end of ourselves, asking Him to come through.

We were also back at square one with our preschool program, now that we had finished grieving for Flavy. It was basically up to me to get something of substance in place again, in order for young parents to make it worth their while to get themselves and their kids to church. The death hit the other young mothers very hard and I don’t want to lose them, as all 4 are great moms and the best ones qualified to teach this age group. So I listened to what they needed and wanted and what they could offer over a dinner. Because these kids are already in the Christian school all week, these women want to see them having real encounters with God on Sundays, not just more Bible knowledge or character building. So for the first time in 5 years, we have a real schedule in place where 1 mother + a young person rotates in once a month with clear guidelines, prayer coverage and accountability. With those foundational structures in place, we can go to new places!

In my corner of Sunday school for the 6-10s, I have been the only teacher with rotating helpers for the last 3 years, which is fine with me because I still get the worship and communion time, but I don’t usually get much from the sermon anyway. David and I are firm believers that you need to be feeding yourself all week rather than wait to be fed on a Sunday morning. And how easy is that when you have a a House of Prayer to participate in, a Bible lesson to prepare and podcasts at your fingertips? This is a visual generation, so I spend a lot of time digging through images that represent a spiritual truth to teach most lessons. A tablet beaming with gorgeous art and photographs beats the heck out of a flannel graph! Anyway, while surfing for ideas, I’ve realized that free helps for French Sunday school teachers are seriously lacking on many levels and I have decided to fill that void with my own French blog called “Over the Doorposts.” The idea is that kids take home something that is lasting and beautiful that is worth hanging on the wall, fulfilling the command in Deut. 6:9.
This year I am creating a Biblical ABC book with the kids and I know it is something that they and their parents will keep in a memory box. I have never had so much fun and see it as a prototype for a children’s book I want to write one day. At the same time, I am dependent on others to correct my text before posting, but it’s high time I started making a concentrated effort to bring my French up another notch. Unfortunately, the lady I enjoy working with the most is dealing with a recurrence of cancer – please lift her up to the Father with us!

Another good reason to work on my French is because we will have to take a French test next month as part of our application for French nationality. I have no doubt that our level is sufficient, but still… Applying for nationality feels like another foundation that we need to shore up this year, esp. as our visas expire in 2018 and we are eager to put bureaucracy hurdles behind us. Having the right to vote also feels more important in these turbulent times.

With Olivia leaving the nest this year, it also feels like the time to consider a new foundation in the form of a home for our retirement years. An interesting option has come up that could to be the answer to our wants and needs within our budget! We’ll share more details if it starts to look like a reality by springtime. David and I have also been shoring up our marriage foundations this month, thanks to 14 free mini-coaching videos offered by Danny Silk to get us talking about an area where we have disconnected as a couple. It couldn’t have been better timing and we are moving forward again!

Ready for springtime, Angela

Greetings from sunny and warm New Mexico, where I am celebrating Christmas alone with my parents – our first one together since Olivia was born back in Denver 21 years ago. I’ve always wanted a break from the exhausting pressure to make everyone happy and everything beautiful, and I’ve finally gotten my wish. I am downright giddy to have nothing more to do this week than to help my dad, shop with mom, eat at new restaurants and write this newsletter.

I’ve earned it this year, though you wouldn’t know it since I haven’t written since mid-Sept. That’s because I had a crush of people that needed my support: a friend who was having knee replacement surgery, a new missionary kid who started 5th grade at our school without basic French and needed my intervention, a hoarder who needed help throwing out before her move to a new apt., lessons that needed to be created for a new year of Sunday School, on top of weekly Sozos, church council meetings and House of Prayer sessions.

Then at the end of Oct, David’s dad, Jim, had a stroke, stealing his memory and making him less stable. Once he was back home, it was clear that they needed to make the anticipated move to a retirement village. But David’s mom, Florence, would need a lot of support to make that happen and everyone in the family was working full-time. So we volunteered to fly out mid-November and stayed 5 weeks. It was truly a grace-filled time: I cooked and de-cluttered and made sure Jim’s brain and body got exercised daily on the therapists’ off days. David led us in daily worship and prayer and did lots of administration for his mom, while keeping up with his own part-time work responsibilities. Florence dealt with Jim’s more personal needs and starting sorting thru 9 years of accumulation. The bonus was being with family for Thanksgiving for the first time in 14 years and celebrating 4 family birthdays in person!

Once David’s parents were settled in their new apt., the cold weather hit hard, so David was eager to fly eastward to be with Olivia for Christmas and I couldn’t wait to fly out west.
My parents are doing pretty well, but very isolated from family out in the desert. I’ve enjoyed this time so much that this needs to be an annual trip, as they are usually alone at holiday time and my kids aren’t nearly as sentimental about being together then.

However, our absence was harder on Olivia than anticipated because our church went through a tragedy while we were gone. A young family of 7 moved into our village/church/school community a few years ago (4 girls and a boy, ages 2-11, the youngest having serious heart defects.) Guillaume was a teacher at the school and was being groomed to take over as president of the school board. His wife Flavy was a beautiful stay-at-home, vegan mom that I had befriended as a neighbor. Her kids filled half of my SS class and she had just taken on the preschool program at church this fall. Then to everyone’s shock, she caught a flu and died of meningitis 5 days later. Of course we weren’t getting any emails to pray until she was in the hospital, so the news was very sudden and hit the day before Thanksgiving, making us very grateful to be near our family.

Our church contacted a respected French woman who had witnessed a resurrection in another country for her testimony. Eager to start living out Jesus’ promise that we would do greater things than He did (even in France!) they fasted, prayed and worshiped around the clock for a miracle until the moment she was lowered into the ground 3 days later. Apparently Guillaume has dropped everything to father his kids, as their extended families live on the other side of France. His mother stayed until she landed in the hospital as well with another problem. I haven’t heard what he will do for the long term, but I am relieved that we had flown out before this happened because it would have been very difficult to leave at such a time of need. People are needy everywhere, and so few have free time to help. I am so glad that I can be that person, as a supported missionary, whether at home or abroad! (And any resources on accompanying children through grief would be much appreciated!)

In happier news, Olivia now has her dual citizenship and showed me her French passport over Skype this week! David and I hope to ride on her coat tails, applying for citizenship next year before our ten year visa expires. This will reduce the time we spend on bureaucratic paperwork and allow us to vote – the candidates are looking promising!

A blessed 2017 to all of you, Angela