Captured By Love

            Living in a different country is… different. You think that would be obvious, but you don’t realize how different cultures are until you are there living smack dab in the middle of it. German culture is pretty different than Canadian culture. For example, I’m used to being as loud as I want during the night. However, here in Germany they have something called “Quite Hours”. Staring at 8 pm things outside have to be almost silent and at 10 pm things inside buildings should be quite as well. I am NOT used to this whatsoever. Things I used to do back home, like playing grounders until 3am, would NOT fly here.  This is disappointing because I love being outside at night having fun, but it is good in because it helps to make sure that I actually get to bed at a decent hour at night. 

We also take care of the trash quite differently. In Germany they sort ALL of their garbage. They have about 4 different categories of garbage, which are enforced everywhere, even in places like malls and outdoors. If we sort our garbage wrong at the base they can actually refuse to take our garbage that week. If we get repeated warnings they can even tell us that they aren’t taking our garbage at all anymore and we have to take care of it ourselves. They take it very seriously over here. I actually like it though. I wish we could adopt something like this back home… that is, until I have to throw out my to-go drink cup that I had my tea in, and need to use 3 different garbage cans for it! Haha.

Interacting with people in everyday life is different too. For example when I go to the store they usually don’t hand me my change directly. There is usually a shallow bowl that they put the money into. Line-ups are a free for all too. Just yesterday I had people, even old ladies, try to budge in front of me.

There is one interesting thing that I found out about. During lecture one of the staff brought up that when we worship on the street we have to be careful about how we raise our arms. They said that we have to be aware of how we angle our arms so that it doesn’t look like how the Nazi’s did back in WWII. I thought it was just out of respect, but after talking to a German, I found out that it was actually illegal to hold your arm like that in public. I found it interesting how much times have changed, but things from WWII still effect how people live their day-to-day lives.

My DTS left Herrnhut last Sunday for Nürnburg do to mini outreach. This being my first time doing any mission type stuff ever, I probably don’t need to explain how excited I was, especially if you know how excited I get over just about anything. We had our entire school (all 120ish of us) waiting at one bus stop, which must have been a sight for anyone passing by. We had called ahead to the bus company and warned them that we would be traveling in such a large group. They said that it was no problem and that they would send two buses. Guess who didn’t send two buses!! First miracle of the week… fitting 120 students, complete with traveling backpacks, camera equipment, musical instruments, art supplies and whatever else you can imagine, onto ONE bus. I was buried under about 4 or 5 backpacks! It was actually so much fun (although I’m sure that the bus driver would argue otherwise…).

From the bus we got onto a train, and then transferred to get to Nürnburg. I have never gotten motion sickness before and now I can officially say that it is NO FUN! Oh man… It was the craziest train ride I have ever been on. It didn’t help that I was riding the entire way backwards… that’s probably what did it to be honest. I have a new found sympathy for people who get motion sick.

Because we are such a large group of people, once we got to Nürnburg it was time to split off into groups to stay in our specific locations. My group is staying at the YMCA right smack-dab in the middle of the city, which is awesome! We’re really close to everything and get to explore the city at night too (also it’s perfect for late night McDonalds runs). We are a 3 minute walk from the old cathedrals and the closest location to the huge castle at the highest point of the city.

As a school we were still in lectures this past week. We would listen to lecture and from there we would go do street evangelism. So far, it’s looked different every day. Sometime we lead worship on the streets, other time we approach people and talk to them. At times its more subtle, like leaving notes in books and change rooms of stores for people to find.

God has been working so much since we’ve been here. There are countless stories of how he’s shown his faithfulness and timing here. I actually got quite discouraged my first few days here. It seemed like every time that I tried to evangelize it would just turn into a big flop. Nothing would happen and I would feel like a failure. I was trying so hard I think that I forgot that it wasn’t me that needed to do the planning, but God. He has the correct timing for everything.

A group of 3 of us were sitting in McDonalds and one of us needed to go to the bathroom. We looked at the bathroom and there was someone collecting money. Depending on the store in Germany, you have to pay to use the bathroom. I knew that Starbucks was a place where you didn’t need to pay to use them, so we headed off there. She went to the bathroom while Ally and I stayed outside and tried to take advantage of the free wifi. I was having some issues connecting to it because my iPod touch is positively ancient so we were “complaining” pretty loudly in a joking manner. A German boy around our age asked if we needed help. We said no, and that we were just being winey about the wifi and he laughed. We noticed that he had a guitar case, and being from an arts school we asked him about it. We got to talking and he invited us to sit down. We told him what we were doing in Nurnberg and he asked if we were going to talk to him about that “Jesus stuff”. Ally said that we could if he wanted to, but he insisted that he didn’t want to. Instead we talked about his band and how they play on the streets and in bars. He talked about how they were in the process of mixing and releasing their first CD. We were planning to do worship in front of the old cathedral that night, and since he was into street music we invited him and then we parted ways for the day. We didn’t think much of it until later that night. He actually showed up and got prayer and talked to us for a long time about Christian morals and our beliefs. He played us some of his songs and we invited him to the gallery night we were going to have so he could play some music.  He ended showing up and we got to talk to him some more. Hopefully we’ll get to keep pouring into his life for the next week we’ll be here! It was just so cool seeing how God works!  I asked a German afterwards and she told me that the lady at McDonalds was actually asking for donations and not payment, but had we known that we would have never gone to Starbucks and would have never met him.

There have also been countless other things that have gone on here like healings and other “coincidences” like the one that I had (I don’t believe in coincidences anymore). God is just so perfect and amazing.

Today is our lazy day; we get to explore and relax and then it’s back to the streets for another week of awesome! If you wanted to pray me and my DTS, prayer for a continuing of God’s amazing works through us and for our energy to stay up would be amazing. God is so good and I’m excited for all the stories that I’ll get to share about how much he works in all of our lives and missions here.