Guess what’s just beside the Brandenburg Gate in the center of Berlin?
(Think of it like the Washington Monument… )

Would you please pray for the “open house” that will be held in House Nazareth on Saturday?

The Ploners and Peddicords will be hosting about 150 friends and neighbors and showing them the remodeling taking place. (Sister Ursula and several of the other nuns are also planning to be there; it will be the first time for them to see the house after the start of remodeling.)

Specifically, please ask the Lord to open up further personal contact to the business, professional, and academic community through this time: it will be held from 10:00am – 2:00pm Berlin time. (Subtract 6 hours for Eastern Standard Time; 7 hours for Central; 8 hours for Mountain; 9 hours for Pacific).

Also, please pray for the visit of Pete Stewart and John Beery, key members of the Philosophia leadership team from today until Wednesday next week. They’ll be praying and planning with the Berlin team about the next stages of remodeling and also about how to best discover the necessary financing for the next stages of the Berlin project!

One final prayer request. On Friday, the German team will play against Argentina. Please PRAY that the upcoming match will be very fairly referreed. It may seem a bit odd to ask you to pray for a soccer match, but Germany has a unique history and the World Cup has grabbed the imagination of the country. There have been several games involving other countries in the past week that were won or lost through very bad referee decisions.

Why is this important enough to pray about? Historically, one of the strategies that the devil seems to use in Germany is betrayal and unfairness. These themes were manipulated and twisted by Hitler to created a deep sense of alienation and offense in the German people, emotions which the Nazis used to generate resentment and hatred against the “outside world” before World War II. Whether the German team wins or loses in the upcoming match(es), I think it is EXTREMELY important that the games be perceived as fair and even-handed.

God is not just the God of church services and stained-glass windows. He is also Lord of the soccer pitch! He wants us to pray about every aspect of life, especially when it can affect the future of a nation as strategically important as Germany. (The New York Times recently published an article on the captain of the German team; it gives some background on how complex the issue of sports is in modern Germany.)

Lisa (Daniel’s sister) and cousin Emily scraping wallpaper

I sometimes have to almost pinch myself: I am writing from the middle of a miracle! It’s shortly after midnight here in Berlin following Germany’s soccer win over Sweden early Saturday evening. The city is still celebrating. I woke up with a leg cramp after going to sleep a couple of hours ago. (Magnesium is a usually a good remedy for muscle cramps after exercise in heat, by the way.)

We had an intensive day of remodeling work. Daniel’s family drove up to Berlin yesterday to help us strip wallpaper and work in the garden (i.e. his extended family; there are 17 folk here for the weekend!). They came to help us get ready for the open house (literally: “open building site”) on next Saturday (July 1; we’ve invited a good many German friends and neighbors of “House Nazareth” to come and see what we’re doing). We sprayed water on walls, and scraped and scratched the old paper away all day. There was plenty of dust, too, as plaster and spachtel came off in chunks when the bonding was not strong enough with the underlying brick wall. “House Nazareth” has been well cared-for and has a great basic structure. However, there is some major remodeling work that needs to be done for it to be used for the ministry God has called Philosophia to here in Berlin.

In the past two weeks, I’ve often thought of the children of Israel after they emerged from the Red Sea. Like them, we made it by the smallest of margins as God brought in the gifts and interest-free loans necessary for the purchase to go through. Like them, we laughed and our spirits danced in joy. But the reality of a journey through the wilderness soon set in and they had to face the fact that God was putting them through a basic training program to get them ready for all that He had in store for them. It was not always pleasant.

I am immensely, inexpressibly grateful to God for bringing us through the “Red Sea”. We are now occupying “House Nazareth”. Legal transfer of the title to the property was initiated at the end of last week by the “Notar” (with, of course, the mortgage from the bank duly registered on it!). But we are not yet in the “Promised Land”. An immense journey of faith and practical work lies ahead.

Thanks for your continued prayers and support!

Still on the subject of “football” (soccer), I thought I’d translate part of an article by Gerd Appenzeller, “Wow! Is that us?”, that appeared on the front page of the Berlin newspaper, Der Tagesspiegel, yesterday.

“It’s a strange feeling. The Football World Cup began a week ago today…

“We look at ourselves as in a mirror, eyes filled with astonishment, and are beginning to grasp what we’re seeing. Either this World Cup is changing us or we’re a lot different than we thought we were: all of us that live in this country - whether we were born here or immigrated, whether our parents carried a German passport or one from another country. And that, naturally, has a lot to do with a team that twice has taken their fans on an emotional roller-coaster. But we’re all immensely proud of them.

“That is because they personify a couple of virtues that our fathers and grandfathers told us were the foundation of the respect given to German football: stay on the offensive until you drop… play hard, but fair. And then there’s this coach, Jürgen Klinsmann. His years in America clearly broadened his heart [he lives in the U.S. and is married to an American]… For instance, he took out two players on defense [at the end of the game against Croatia, which Germany won literally in the last minute 1:0], when ten years ago a German coach would have figured that maybe a 0:0 tie might be enough. Go for everything! Show everyone: We want to win! Let’s be honest: this is the kind of football that excites people!

“… International visitors are astonished about a Germany that is completely different than what many of them expected. But here’s something unusual and just a little crazy: not only our guests, but we ourselves are experiencing us completely different than we usually are - or at least we thought we were. This is a Germany that does not come across as hesitant or glum, but is a happy nation – excited and exciting…

“And the citizens: more than 20% of us have a so-called “immigrant” background; that stretches even into our team… Maybe this can help open our eyes that this country is much broader than we thought. We just mustn’t forget that when the World Cup is over.”

Thank you for praying for Daniel’s exam. It went very well! Your prayers were really needed, though. One of the professors was unable to get there because of car trouble, but at the last minute a speaker phone was rigged up so things could go ahead as planned. Now, he and Seanne are starting a very intensive summer that will take them to Israel/Palestine and Malawi (it’s in east Africa; I wasn’t completely sure, either). When your children are called to those kind of places, it can really intensify one’s prayer life! I’ll tell you a bit more about their mission in a future blog!

For most of the world… this is a football.
(Click here to find out why goalies are having troubles with the new ball, though!)

I mentioned in my last blog that Germany is going a little crazy about the soccer world championship. That really took off last night as we joined the whole nation (at least via TV) in celebrating the victory of the German team over Poland. The win almost insures that the team will go through to the next round.

Last night in Berlin, a crowd of 500,000 people gathered from the Brandenburg Gate down the “Fan Mile” along the famous shopping street Unter den Linden to watch the game with Poland on a huge projection screen set up in front of the Gate.

Germany has, understandably, a fairly cautious attitude toward “patriotism”. But football (as the rest of the world outside the U.S. calls it) presents the opportunity to express pride and spirit in being German.

Significantly, God’s plan for humanity explicitly recognizes national and ethnic roots.

The Apostle Paul, in his address to the Greek philosophers in Athens explained that God:

made every nation of people… and He determined the times set for them and the exact places they should live. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us. ‘For in Him we live and move and have our being’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are His offspring.’” Acts 17:26-27

Just as significantly, Jesus’ Great Commission to His followers aims directly at the nations or peoples: “Go and make disciples (= “learners; students”) of all nations (= “ethne”; the root Greek word of our term “ethnic”)” (Matthew 28:19).

It’s refreshing to see the German people express this side of life in such a positive way. Please pray that God will use this help many reconsider who they are, where they come from and, as the Apostle put it, “seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him.”

Berlin is going completely crazy with “World Cup fever”. This crowd was gathered at the opening of the new Central Station, finished just in time for the soccer festival!

The sound of hammers (in this case, sledge hammers!) is echoing through “House Nazareth”! Since the approval of the mortgage application, work has begun on the remodeling. The building itself is in good condition, but some major remodeling is necessary for the rental area on the ground floor and the living areas above - this is important because the rental area will provide the financial foundation for the project’s regular costs, such as mortgage payments and upkeep and the living areas will be the framework and place of ministry for the entire community.

Thank you for your prayers for Ann - she arrived safely on Saturday and we’re now together (after way too long a delay!) It is SO good to have her here!

As I mentioned before, we feel a lot like the children of Israel must have felt after their passage through the Red Sea: we’re ecstatically thankful to the Lord for “delivering us”, for your generosity and that of other friends of Philosophia who made the purchase of “House Nazareth” possible through gifts and interest-free loans. But we realize that a major journey still lies ahead!

Right now, a big prayer request is that God will now provide the funds for the remodeling to go forward. (We’ll give details soon in a regular letter with a full financial report on the project.)

Thank you for praying about the resolution of the confusion surrounding our visas. God again did a wonderful miracle: both the local registry and the “Foreigner Office” were more helpful and friendly than we’ve ever experienced in Germany! Everything is straightened out and by the end of next week we’ll all have our full status restored. (Charissa’s visa needed to be transferred to her new passport, so that’s what is taking a bit of time.) THANK YOU for praying!

I’d like to include a special family prayer request, too: Daniel, our son-in-law, will face 5 professors next week. They will test his work and background knowledge in a 3-4 hour oral comprehensive exam. This will determine if he can immediately begin writing his doctoral thesis or whether he’ll have to do another year of lecturing and assistantship at University of California - Irvine. The exam is from 10:00am-1:00pm on next Monday, June 12.

Would you please join us in prayer that he will have wisdom, knowledge and huge recall both as he prepares and as he faces this board of professors. Thanks!

At 12:35pm (Berlin time) the phone call came from the bank: the mortgage for “House Nazareth” has been approved! (If you’d been awake at the time you could probably have heard our shout of joy all the way to the States!)

I mentioned a couple of months ago that Christians in the German-speaking world often read the “Losungen” (Watchwords) each day: short, pithy Bible verses that were originally chosen by Count Zinzendorf and the Moravian Brethren at the birth of the modern missionary movement in the early-to-mid 1700s. (Moravians were - from the human side of things - responsible for the conversion of John and Charles Wesley and thus also are the true spiritual “grandparents” of the Methodist awakening that transformed the English-speaking world, too.)

Today’s “Losung” is from Psalm 119:147: “I rise before dawn and cry for help; I have put my hope in your word.” That is a pretty exact description of what we’ve all gone through the past weeks as we waited
for the bank’s decision on our mortgage application.

Thanks for your faithful prayers and friendship. More very soon!