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.”