The past two weeks have been VERY intense, topped by celebrating Thanksgiving last Saturday with about 40 European friends at the home of an American couple who work with Campus Crusade. We were able to help by baking 4 of the small turkeys in the student ovens and making a fruit salad. (Thanksgiving, of course, isn’t a holiday here; so we usually have to organize something either the weekend before or the weekend afterward! It’s a great opportunity to talk with Europeans about living for the Gospel. We’ll also be celebrating again this coming weekend!)

We had some deep conversations with different folk–a student from Uganda who is doing genetic research at the university in Potsdam, a couple from Belgium who want to reach their nation for Christ and a married couple who do professional translation work in the medical and legal fields.

- Thanks for your prayers for us and the Haus Nazareth team. Our times of prayer and planning with Matthias and Sieglinde (the physician and his wife who are our partners in the project), as well as with Michael, a German university professor whom we met through Bob Caldwell have been breaking new ground.

We have two big prayer requests:

- There is an annual meeting of “Philosophia Europa” this coming Sunday; would you please pray that all the key people will be able to come and that God will continue to bring just the right men and women together as part of the future leadership team.

- I’ve managed to do major injury to a muscle in my lower back and leg; it’s been pretty much constant pain (sciatica, partial paralysis, etc.) in one form or another for almost two weeks. Please pray that the irritation will subside and I can get back to full capacity in the next couple of days. I would really like to take off some weight, too!

November 9th is a fateful day in German history: on November 9th, 1918, following the conclusion of the “Great War”, the ill-fated Weimar Republic was born; on November 9th, 1923, Adolf Hitler tried to carry out his putsch in Munich - in spite of its failure, it ominously catapulted him to national prominence; on November 9th, 1938, the Nazi SA and SS stormtroopers ransacked and destroyed Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues in a violent pogrom - the prelude to the Nazi’s “final solution” that would end the lives of 6,000,000 Jewish people in the gas chambers of the death camps and the execution trenches on the military front. Finally, on November 9th, 1989, the Berlin wall fell and the East-German communist regime ended up on the trash pile of history.
Last Saturday evening, there was a commemoration of the tragic events of 1938 here at Haus Nazareth. It was part of a memorial march that began at the site where the local synagogue had been and ended in a service at the Baptist church.

Memorial service on the steps of Haus Nazareth

From the steps of the Haus, a saxophone player wailed out a “Kletzmer” melody mourning the loss of the Jewish villages in Eastern Europe and a speaker reviewed briefly the life and death of one of the former residents, a blind Jewish poet.
Appropriately, talking about the Shoah is serious business here in Germany. Nothing touching the subject is taken lightly. I remember a discussion by a panel of “experts” following the showing of the American mini-series “Holocaust” on German T.V. in the late 1970s. On the final evening, the group was discussing, “How can we prevent something like this ever happening again?” One of them, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, is the most influential literary critic in post-war Germany and himself Jewish. After several minutes of discussion, he slammed his hand on the table and said: “I’ll tell you how you can prevent this every happening again! You Christians need to take your religion more seriously. If Christians had taken their religion seriously, the Holocaust would never have happened!” Amen.

It’s hard to believe that we’ve been in Berlin for 3 weeks… it was like jumping into a flowing river from the moment Sieglinde met us at the airport and we packed our luggage into her car (we then took the bus and metro); that was a HUGE help, since we were carrying more than we usually would, of course.
This past week, a team of workers came from a small church northwest of Frankfurt (the village is called Gusternhain; you won’t find it on a map very easily). They were all skilled in the building trade and put in the paving stones for the back of “Haus Nazareth”. What a neat group of people… we’re so thankful for their help.

The team in action!

The finished pavement

We’ve been meeting with the students in the Haus… and trying to get settled: unpacking, fixing up the little place we’re staying in.
This morning we continued our planning time with Matthias and Sieglinde, trying together to get an overview of all that is involved in Haus Nazareth’s role as an outreach and mission center. We’ve defined 7 major areas of responsibility: student work, seminars & outreach, guests, house management, remodeling coordination, ministry finances and “Philosophia Europa”.
We’re so grateful for your continued prayers.