2011?!?

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!! I can't believe it's going to be 2011 in three days!
I hope your holiday celebrations were as fun as mine! I was truly blessed and had a great time here in Poznań with the Mitts and Haenze families. Now I'm looking forward to ringing in the new year in Germany! With one of my FAVORITE people from home!! I'm so excited! 
One thing I said when I arrived in Poland was that I thought this year was as much about what I had to learn as it would be about serving or helping other people. And, certainly, I've found that I have a LOT to learn! One of the things God is teaching me about is the value and discipline of prayer, and of fasting.
I have a request for you to consider. GEM missionaries and partners set aside the first Monday of each month to pray and fast.  My team and I agreed at our last meeting that we would love to involve our prayer supporters. Would you consider helping me kick off my day of prayer and fasting by praying with me on Sunday, January 2nd, 2011? (2011... weird!)
You can expect a 15-30 minute block of time, and expect that we spend it mostly in praying rather than, say, catching up. :) If you are free sometime between 1pm-4pm Central time on Sunday, January 2nd, and if you're interested in a prayer-call, please let me know.
Email me at shhtef@gmail.com and tell me...

1. which part of that window (1pm-4pm central, January 2nd) are you available?
   
2. should I call? What number? Or should I skype? What's your skype name?
   
3. what are your personal prayer requests? (Like I said, I plan to keep our catching up/prayer requesting to a minimum, so communicating about it before will be nice! Make the email as long as you want!)

In the future, this will hopefully fall on a more convenient weekend, and I can email you back a for-sure time. Since I’ll be out of town, you probably won’t hear back until I call you on Sunday!
Whether or not you can pray with me via technology this Sunday, please keep our GEM-Poland team in your prayers. Here are our most recent requests:
GEM-Poland (my team): We as the GEM-Poland team are all praying for a movement of the Spirit. Pray with us that we find people of peace in whom God has already been working, and for leadership in the Polish churches to fall in love with Jesus.
Haenze family -  Pray for restored health! Paul still has internal injuries because of falling on icy stairs and Karen is still fatigued from fighting pneumonia.
Mitts family - 
*       That we would walk in step with the Spirit.  We desire to join God where He is already working in seeking those that are lost and are ready to hear the Gospel. *       That we would continue to be faithful in discipling disciple makers. *       That God's Spirit would pour out on Poland and Europe and that we would see signs of a church planting movement in the near future.
Theresa - Pray for a special friend to become a Christian.
Stephanie - Pray for the hearts of friends to be open to hearing the gospel and obeying God's word. And continue to pray for my brother Chris, sister-in-law Lucy, and nephew, Joshua, who is in the womb, (and kicking a lot his mom says!) but has severe abnormalities and is not expected to survive.

Graffiti

So, there’s a substantial amount of graffiti around Poznań. Most of it is quite ugly, just scrawled words/letters. None of it means much to me, because it’s not English-based graffiti. :)  However, I wish the people who create it would just… not.

But the other day I got on the tram, and even though someone had defaced tram-company property, I had to smile.

 

Can you see it? Someone carved adorable dog silhouettes from the tinting on the windows. Ha! And it was on every window in the tram! Happy! My favorite is the one hanging from the top of the window, ears flapping and carefree! So, Fonzie, Jet, this one’s for you! Miss you adorable little guys!

Really?

Nobody likes to deal with bureaucracy. Just think what it feels like when you need to renew a driver’s license, talk to the IRS about your taxes, or get paperwork from a previous school… No fun! It turns out than when you move to a foreign country, there is a lot of bureaucracy to deal with. Lots of paperwork to collect, copy, organize, turn in… The office I’ve been to most is the visa office. (I call it that… I’m not sure what the Polish name is! It’s something long and full of consonants. Shock!)

So, when I first arrived I went through the necessary processes to have documents to turn in for a visa application. About a month in, I turned in the application and all the paperwork I had. A few weeks later, I received a registered letter that asked for a few more documents. I had to bother my landlord and roommates for all kinds of stuff… I finally made it to the office. I wait.

It’s not right. I need such and such bill; I need to show the approximate costs of living each month. So I go bug landlord/roommates some more, collect more stuff. Copy more documents at my closest Ksero place. The girls who work there and I form a little friendship based totally on smiles and my broken Polish. They’re willing to repeat the cost several times. (Dwadzieścia dziewięć grosz, proszę.) I turn in the rest of the paperwork I collected.  Yay. 

Then! A few days after this I receive another registered letter, this time with only one request bullet-point, but more words bolded.  It was asking for the same financial paperwork I thought I had just turned in! Ack! What to do? My field leader tells me, well… print copies again of what you already took to them, then print more detailed financial documents, in case they really do want something more. He prepped me with the questions I needed to make sure I asked them. Back to the visa office I go.

I wait.

Thankfully I get the young lady who speaks good English, and does it gladly. (The older woman speaks good English also, but a little more grumpily. :))

I go in. I explain the situation. She says, “Hmm… It looks like you already turned this in!” (I KNOW! I thought so too!) “If you will wait a moment, I will call the woman in charge of your case.”

“Oh, it turns out, you DID already turn this in. The most recent letter was probably written a day or two before you came back. If you can wait a few more minutes, they can just check over your decision letter, have the director sign it, and I will bring it to you.”

What! Really? How funny! Yes, I can wait!

So, thanks God, for having a sense of humor, and for the visa! I get to stay in Poland now! Woohoo!!

Verified

So, you know how you always hear about snowflakes, and how they are each a unique creation of our awesome God? And you know how you’ve seen microscope pictures of the crystal structures and how totally cool they look? Today I verified their existence with my own eyes! It turns out there are actually big enough snowflakes, in REAL LIFE, to be able to see them land on your coat, as though they’re a tiny little paper-cut-out-snowflake. But they’re not paper. They’re tiny-ice-cutout-snowflakes, made by God, just for us!

I know my camera doesn’t really show it, you just have to trust me… I’ve never really been able to see snowflakes this big, with this clear of a crystal. They’ve always been snowclumps in TX.

    

So… in other news, here’s the new haircut… The one I got by saying (through Theresa’s translation into Polish), “Just not too short… otherwise… do whatever you want.” Learning how to style it. As the hairdresser said, “Bardzo seksowa, tak?”

 

This is me, today, wondering how I got talked into going onto Theresa’s balcony wearing only two layers. No shoes, even! But she, the girl from Montana, said it was “dry snow” and we could “just brush it off.” Hmmm… Let me know how well that worked out for your now wet living room floor, T!  :)

But! The mission of making snow angels was definitely accomplished.

 

You can see one of us has had a little more experience making snow angels… I’ll let you guess which one I made and which one Theresa made.

 

Happy December, all! I’m praying that we each find time to slow down in the busy holiday season to marvel over whatever snowflakes God puts in our path each day!