A Typical Day in Herrnhut

Aright. So far I've given you things that God has been showing to me. But some have just been asking, what is a normal day like in Germany? Well, there will be no more waiting, my friends. Come with me, let's walk through a day together in Herrnhut.

First I wake up, typically around 7am to get ready for my day. I don't live at the castle where the majority of my day happens, I live in the apartments in town. I have to leave the apartment by no later than 8am to get to the castle in time for morning activities. Since breakfast happens from 7-7:30, I usually don't make it in time, so I will stop at the local bakery to pick up a tasty pastry or bread roll to eat along the way. I get to walk through the forest to the castle every morning, which is absolutely beautiful. Living in town has it's disadvantages, like no internet, 1 washing machine and 2 bathrooms for 40 girls, etc, but some of it's distinct advantages include the forest, being closer to the Penny (the local grocery store), being closer to the Döner (the "hangout" spot in town), and having an excuse to walk off all the carbs we eat at the castle.

So since I'm on the topic, a typical meal at the castle includes either bread, pasta, rice, or potatoes. It's a carbohydrate overload all over the place. According to the Germans here, we're not really eating typical German food. We're eating food that will feed a lot of people for a less money. So sometimes it tastes really great, like when they make us mashed potatoes. And sometime it's not quite so much to my liking, like when they serve mushroom soup. But I'm trying to eat everything, as a practice for outreach where I probably won't have the option of being very picky. So I've eaten more mushrooms int he past 3 weeks than I probably have in my entire life. I still don't like them though...

So back to the normal day. Things start happening at the castle at 8:30am. On Mondays and Fridays we have an hour of worship, on Tuesdays-Thursdays we have times of prayer and intercession. It was during this time that the 15,000 euros were raised for the Justice DTS teams. These times end around 9:30, and then we'll take a 5-10 minute break before we begin lectures. Each day is broken up into chunks for lectures and art tracks and work duties, 9:30-11:00, 11:30-1:00, 2-4, and 4:30-6.

Every week we have a different guest speaker who does lectures. This week we have a woman who our guest speaker last week called the Ninja Grandma. Her name is Donna Jordan and she's teaching us about hearing the voice of God. Normally the speaker will have the floor until 11:00am, and then we'll get a coffee break and then art tracks will begin. However, sometimes the speaker will just have lots to say (like Donna this week) and so at 11:30 we will reconvene to have another session until 1:00 pm. When this happens, all the art tracks meeting that day just meet at the 4:30 time slot instead of some meeting at 11:30.

My art track is the hand-made art track, and we meet at 11:30 when the speaker doesn't take that time slot. We don't meet every day, so far it's been at the beginning and the end of the week. I know I came into this DTS thinking that I would be following the photography track, but I decided to switch about a week in. I just felt very torn between the two, wanting to do both, and so I decided to go with hand-made because I felt it would be more of a challenge for me, and that I could finally have the time to do all the things that I've always wanted to do but never had the time or resources to do. So far I've made a journal, and later today we'll be starting stamp making/linoleum printing.

Lunch begins at 1:30 and is the big meal of the day. When it's warm outside we sit outside the castle, but when it starts to get too cold we'll all eat in the dining hall, which is also where we have lectures. It's not a dining hall with chairs and table though, it's just a big room where we all sit on the floor.

From 2-4 most people have work duties. My work duty is a little different, however. I work in the café here at the castle. That means my work duty is any 2 hour time slot between 11:30 and 6pm every day, some days as late as 8pm. It's more work than most other work duties, but I think it's more fun. I'm starting to get the hang of making the espresso drinks and getting to just sit and talk with people is always a pleasure. Sometimes in the evenings I'm by myself which is great too, because it gives me time to just think and process and talk to God.

More art tracks happen from 4:30-6, I usually get some time to get on the internet or work in the studio or just hang out with people around the castle. And then at 6pm we get dinner, which is more like an American lunch during the week. It's almost always the same, bread, cold-cut turkey, cheese, and salad. It's not very exciting, but I try not to complain.

There's usually people to hang out with and talk to for a few hours after dinner, so I'll normally leave the castle to head back to the apartment between 8 and 9pm. Then it usually takes a long time to get ready for bed just because there's always someone in the bathroom and someone to talk to. But eventually things quiet down and we go to sleep, ready for a new day.

On weekends things look a little different, there are no lectures or art tracks, and breakfast runs a little later. You pack your lunch at breakfast, bread and cold cuts and cheese, and then dinner happens at 6pm, and it's a hot meal, vegetarian on Saturday, meat on Sunday. Other than that, the day is yours to do whatever.

So that's a day in Herrnhut. I'll leave you with a few photos.

 

 

Nothing is ever too big.

The past week has just been one giant testament to God’s faithfulness and provision here in Herrnhut. We began a journey of faith on Wednesday evening of last week. We called it a Faith Walk, where we split into lots of small teams of four or five people and left Herrnhut with one euro each. Myself and 4 others hitch hiked to the small nearby town of Bautzen and started looking for people to bless in whatever way we could. Logically, we should have expected to spend every night out in parks and under trees, with one person watching to make sure no one stole any of our stuff. But no, God led us to a roof over our heads and food in our stomaches every single night of the walk.

Some of the highlights from the trip included...
-Spending the 3 nights at 3 different places: a youth hostel, an “attenheim” or elderly home, and a church.
-Meeting Khalid, the Pakistani restaurant owner who gave us not one, but two meals, dinner the first night and lunch the next day, for absolutely nothing.
-Getting to know the different people on my team, two other Americans, one guy from England, and one girl from Germany
-Blessing the people at the attenheim by joining in at their autumn festival, serving them dinner, making strawberry banana mush, and taking them on a walk
-Meeting Kaas and his wonderful family. Kaas and his wife are the leaders of the church we stayed in the last night. They are originally from Holland and are tri-lingual, which means we could actually converse with them in English (the rest of the trip was spent saying things to our one German speaker and having her translate for us). Their whole family lives together, three generations all under one roof.
-Handing out fliers to young people all over Bautzen advertising a youth service at the church
-Little comforts such as coffee every morning, showers every morning, safe places to store our backpacks/sleeping bags/passports, and beds on our last night.

Everyone came back together on Saturday around dinner time and we had a time of just sharing all the ways that we saw God moving throughout the country. Some people went as far as Berlin, others left the country completely and went to the Czech Republic and Poland. We saw a few other teams around Bautzen, a lot of teams ended up spending their first night together at the train station in Löbau under a tree. Some really cool things happened like miracle Nutella, and some not so fun things happened, like sleeping outside and being chased away by the police. But I didn’t hear a single person who came back wishing that they hadn’t gone.

We got some real sleep over the weekend, have been having some really awesome lectures with Andy Byrd, our guest speaker. Right now he’s working at the YWAM base in Kona, Hawaii, but I found out that he was one of the instrumental people in getting the YWAM base up and running in Lebanon, PA, so he used to live there. It’s a small world.

But the best part of the week happened this morning during our time of intercession ands prayer. The Justice DTS is preparing to leave for outreach in just one week. There are three teams going to Nepal, Cambodia, and Kenya, and none of them had enough money. Some people hadn’t even paid off their lecture fees yet, so we had a time just to pray for them and ask God to provide. And then they invited anyone who felt called to give money to them to come and do so. They wrote on the white board how much each person needed, and the total was well over 15,000 euros. Which is well over $20,000. In one hour, as we praised God for the money we all knew He would provide we raised the entire amount, plus a few hundred dollars. Every single team had all the money that they needed to go on outreach, from 150 missionaries. Missionaries blessing missionaries. It was so beautiful.

When I saw all the thousands of euros needed on that white board, I never thought that we would be able to raise it all, I mean we all have our own lecture and outreach fees to pay yet. But suddenly people who had close to 2,000 euros of debt had a surplus of 1,600, enough to pay for all the other members of their team. By the end of the hour every cent was paid off, which almost never happens for any DTS that leaves the Herrnhut base.

God is real and He wants us to know that. He is faithful and he will provide. We have been so blessed, and now that blessing becomes our gift to the world. We are blessed to be a blessing.

If you have any questions or want to hear more about the faith walk please e-mail me, I would love to give more details!

Until next time!
Charlene

Diving right in...

September 3rd dawned bright and beautiful, and it was the first day of DTS. All of the students who had arrived for the school were herded into the dining hall where we began our registration. For this event we were told we needed to bring a few things with us, our passports, our health insurance information, a sleeping bag, and warm clothing. Why the last two? Well we all assumed that we would be be told that we would be sleeping in cardboard boxes that night, to gain a sort of solidarity with all the homeless people of the world. Because that is exactly what happened last year.

We were wrong of course, because after an evening of worship and introduction of the different art tracks, we found out that we would be living like refugees that night, provided with sheets of plastic and some rudimentary wooden stakes. It was too dark to make tents so we ended up wrapping the plastic around ourselves to keep off the dew. Dew was the least of my worries, however, because I was not prepared for how cold German nights get, even in the late summer time. It was a long, chilly night of cold feet for me, with very little sleep.

Morning came soon enough though, and I wrapped up my sleeping bag and moved it out of the elements and back into the castle. As the morning got progressively warmer I shed my layers and put them in the castle as well, until I was down to a t-shirt and sweatpants after breakfast. Then the bad news came. We were told in the beginning that if we chose to participate in this simulation, that we would be in it until the “UN” came to liberate us. Well, Derek “The Commander” (also the drama track leader) told us in no uncertain terms that the camp was still on that whole day and that the castle was now off limits except at meal times. Anything in the castle was now lost to us and we might as well go set up our tents properly.

That day we didn’t do much at all because we were confined to the camp boundaries. The threat of rain loomed for that evening, so we found some cardboard to lay on the floor of our tent and some extra plastic foraged from the trash bins to lay on and form an extra wall for our tent. Eventually night again fell and we obeyed the strict lights out rules. I slept much better out of sheer exhaustion until it began to rain. The plastic bags blew at us and made a lot of noise. And then the thunder and the lightning began in the distance. I slept on and off for a bit more and the storm grew louder, larger, and nearer. Just as it began to peak an alarm went off outside and Derek’s Australian accent came through a loud speaker saying “Wake up, everyone, and good morning. Wake up and collect your things quickly, we will be moving inside until breakfast. Hurry, hurry, hurry.”

As the storm raged on 100 sleepy-eyed, surprised students ran through the rain and into the castle, the girls sent up to the larger student floor and the boys sent into the dining hall to sleep a few more hours. I was a little shocked that they had brought us in for this because I know that real refugees do not get to be evacuated when the weather gets bad, they sleep outside int eh good and the bad.

Once I slept outside with a thunderstorm literally right above me, when I was on a week long hiking trip. Because of this I know how utterly terrifying and belittling a storm can be. To be unsure of whether or not lightning will strike a nearby tree and send it crashing down onto your tiny tent roof. To feel the vibration of the ground you are lying on as the thunder cracks louder than the drums at any rock concert you’ve ever been to. To hear the howl of the wind tearing through the trees, hoping that it doesn’t take your only shelter with it as well. Until this point, the refugee experience we had been going through seemed to be ringing false. We had too much stuff to be really living like refugees. We were too warm, ate too much food, and were not constantly looking over our shoulders to make sure we would be beaten up or raped. However, as I lay in my tent listening to the thunder come closer and seeing the lightning grow brighter, I thought that maybe this would bring this thing closer to real life. Maybe this would help us begin to understand the fear a refugee experiences everyday.

And then, to both my disappointment and relief at the same time (disappointment because of what I said earlier, relief because...well, it was a thunderstorm) we were moved around 5:30 am. When we went out to look at our tents after breakfast, we saw how everything had gotten soaked, including the cardboard we’d placed as our floor. It would have been an unpleasant night indeed.

Most of that day, Monday, the first real day of the DTS, was spent in the castle learning about the basics of a DTS, rules, and more. A lot of sitting and listening. By dinner time we were actually getting anxious to get outside and live like refugees again, but then the news. The simulation was supposed to have lasted until Friday, but unfortunately, the weathermen were calling for rain everyday but one, and our leaders regretfully made the hard decision to bring this refugee life to an end. They had lots of other things planned for us such as midnight kidnappings, food shortages, and other things, but knew that if we weren’t getting enough sleep at night then it would affect how much learning would be going on with the other aspects of the DTS. There were still a few girls who wanted to keep it up, and so they still have not taken a shower and there are some still sleeping on the floors in the castle. But for most of us, the refugee experience ended that night. However, our thoughts persisted. We have been given a glimpse, although it is still a skewed one, into the lives of millions of people around the world. Sometimes God calls us into uncomfortable situations, and hopefully now we can be better equipped and more willing to experience these, to put ourselves in a place that is maybe a little painful, in order to love on the people who are hurting, forgotten, and alone. There was one thing a girl named Katie said during a processing time, that if we had given up our sleeping bags and stuff in our tents, we could have fit many more people, and that the more simply we allow ourselves to live, the more room we make for other people in our lives. I really liked that thought.

In the simplicity of a decision to just live like and with other people in order to gain their trust and their friendship we can begin to speak the truth of the Lord into their lives and to learn the truth of the Lord from their lives.

How beautiful is that?