Spring Prayer!

Hi friends and prayer partners!

Our GEM-Poland team fasts and prays together on the first Monday of each month. Once a quarter, we want to make a special effort to join with prayer partners around the world in praying for Poland, Europe, and the world. This month our team will begin our fast at 6pm (Warsaw time) on Sunday April 3rd and break our fast at 6pm Monday April 4th.

Did you hear that? April! Which means it’s been three months since January. That’s a whole QUARTER, folks! Which means… it’s time for me to ask if we can pray together! Now, under the present circumstances, I think it would be wasteful to actually physically get together to pray. So, here’s what I propose. Let’s try for as close to in-person as we can achieve. Would you be willing to…

• pray with me by skype?
• pray with me by phone?
• commit to praying on your own at a certain time?
• commit to fasting one meal or up to 24 hours with us?

Please let me know at shhtef @ gmail if you will be joining me in prayer. There is a lot to pray for! Check out this list.

Greater Europe Mission

Continuing to Pray in the Midst of Incredible Change
As we continue to pray in the midst of some incredible events in our world, here are three websites that can help us in our efforts for North Africa:
http://www.pray4tunisia.com
http://www.pray4libya.net
http://www.prayeurope.com 

GEM-Poland

• Pray that God would raise up a new generation of church planters who are willing to take risks and try radically new approaches, as well as that the leadership in Polish churches would fall in love with Jesus.
• Pray that people in Poznań would sense their need for God.
• For the GEM-Poland team itself, pray for unity, community, that we would live contagious Christian lives and that we would have ministries of multiplication.

Doug & Lisa

Pray that the men Doug is working with will disciple others and catch a vision to reach their city for Christ.
Pray that God would continue to open doors for Lisa to be able to share Christ with the lost.

Paul and Karen

Pray that Paul would have God's leading as he prepares to lead a session on Church Planting Movements at the upcoming Hope for Europe Conference.

Theresa

Pray for a special friend of Theresa's to become a Christian.

Stephanie

Pray for me to have sensitivity to the Spirit, moment by moment. Also thank God with me that I get to leave first thing in the morning for Espana to see mi hermana!! Jestem bardzo podekscytowana!!

Natasha

Natasha is our newest team member. She arrived less than two weeks ago! She immediately moved in with a Polish family to work as an au pair. Pray for Natasha's transition, which has been pretty tough for her. Pray that communication with her host family is clear and effective. She also asks that we pray that she is a really bright light to the family!

 

It would be a real encouragement to me and to our team to hear back from many brothers and sisters praying with us. So even if you simply commit to praying for us on your own schedule, will you let me know? 

Thanks friends!

In other news… I’ve been having tons of fun with some really amazing people here in Poznań. As evidence I only have pictures from one event. One little part of an event, actually. But look how much fun that was! Jealous? :)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the scoop check out our Foundation of Faith blog.

Happy spring!!

Praises!

In the midst of a personally challenging season, God is still God, and He is still working. A couple of weeks ago, our Poland team had the pleasure of hosting a team of high school students from Lubbock, TX who came to share the gospel and the love of Christ with Polish students.

They shared a drama, songs, smiles, love, and the gospel in Poznań schools, a home for patients with Alzheimer’s, a home for youth, and a school for the deaf. They also held gatherings in the evening. Polish teens they met during the day were invited to come hang out, eat pizza, play silly games, and have further discussions about Christ.

During this incredibly brief trip, four young women chose a personal relationship with Jesus! Amazing!

Our team is able to follow-up with these girls, and already they have felt opposition from their families and friends. We were especially praying that their parents would allow them to participate in a bible study group. Already, He has answered these prayers and these girls will soon start a bible study with one of our team members. Wooohoo!

Please join us in praying for these new believers, and for the Spirit to continue to move. Especially in other Polish students who heard the gospel through the Texan team, as well as teachers who heard and showed interest to members of our team. May we be multiplying, contagious Christians, who know the true Hope and the true Light!

Time flies…

I know, I know. It’s been, like, two months since I posted one single thing. I hope you’ll forgive me! The holidays really got blogging out of my routine, and it seems like life has just been go-go-going since then. It’s not that I didn’t expect to eventually find blogging difficult, but I hope to get back to it all regular-like soon. :)

Right now I can post this brief, unsatisfying look at what I’ve been doing. But I seriously have tons of ideas/questions/perspective changes/potential blogs swirling around in my head and in files on my compie. I don’t know how many blog posts I’ve started, only to pause to try to figure out how to be coherent, and then never come back to them. I intend to post a philosophical, long-winded, question-filled post soon! Lucky you! In the meantime…

Things I’ve tried since the New Year…

-Taking a sleeper train. Not so bad!

- Visiting Germany! Shoutout Heidelberg!

-Dancing salsa with a Latin man. (Shoutout Roberto! Really sad you won’t be in class anymore! But hope you can still make it to hangout sometimes.) Hopefully if I get to repeat this experience, I’ll do better next time. I wasn’t very good. :)

-Zumba. Coralanne, I need you to get back in town! I forgot how to go to the gym by myself! Not really, but it’s nice to have a partner. :)

-Ringing in the New Year with incredulity due to massive amounts of inebriated people shooting off immense fireworks. Seriously? It sounded like a war movie.

-Traveling with Theresa. Such fun! Let’s do it again, shall we?

-Traditional Polish dish bigos, and traditional Polish beverage grzane piwo. Shoutout Christina and Edward! Thanks for a fantastic day!

-Visiting Warsaw. See previous item. :)

-A sauna. Sitting in a room at 80C? It’s not THAT cold here.

-Jogging… jury’s still out on that one.

-Standing on a lake. The second time it looked more frozen, so I even walked out on it a little!  People were riding bikes on it. And by “it”, let’s not forget, I mean a LAKE. Weird!

-Hailing a cab. 15 złoty well-spent.

-Learning about WWII. I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. 1.3 million people were held captive. One million one hundred thousand of them were killed. This is part of why I can’t come up with a coherent, thoughtful blog post. How does one process Auschwitz?

-Visiting Kraków. Or, as it’s apparently written in English, Cracovia. But I’m going to keep writing Krakow, probably. Sorry, T.

-A totally unnecessary tram or bus on a Sunday afternoon.

-Taking advantage of the freeness of Poznań’s museums on Saturdays.

-Mystery Dinner Party! Yay!

-Wearing my woefully neglected dresses while still in Polish winter. I discovered why it’s not so unreasonable to see girls in skirts, hose, and boots that altogether seem to leave a lot of leg exposed to cold. Because they wrap their head and neck so well, it actually isn’t too cold, I think. Still looks funny, though.

-Cooking dry beans. Totally easy. And yum! Black beans!!

 

No wonder time has been flying. Just look at all that fun!

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!