Dear Friends and Family,
Today completes our second full week in Miskolc, Hungary with Let’s Start Talking. God has brought us over 30 Readers to form relationships with and share meaningful conversations. In fact, we actually have more than we can handle so we’ve started a waiting list which the follow up team coming after us will be able to take on.
You might be interested in the kinds of people we are working with. It’s not possible here to go into detail about all our Readers (what we call the people with whom we are practicing conversational English), but perhaps knowing about a few of them will encourage you.
One interesting dynamic is that Craig is working with his own youth group! Seven high school teenagers all signed up to read. Because of the lack of additional space in our schedule four of these girls come together and conduct a small group with Craig. Joshua is working with the sister of one of these teens. Most of them have some kind of Christian faith but are at various levels of maturity where their relationship with Jesus is concerned.
On the other end of the spectrum, Leslee has a number of retired people who love coming as early as possible. For this reason, she begins her first Reading session at 9:00 a.m. and works non-stop until 1 p.m. each day.
Between these two ends of the spectrum we are sharing meaningful conversations with people in university, young professionals, moms who are juggling full time work and family, teens from a local orphanage, and other hard working Hungarians just trying to improve their lives.
While this is not entirely work related, we do have to report that our boys are thrilled about living within 5 minutes of a 14th century castle! We see the castle out our living room window every day. It fulfills all kinds of fantasies about knighthood and royal battles!
We continue to hear great news from other teams around the world as well. The president of Rwanda is aware of what our LST team is doing in the capital city of Kigali. He spent a few moments with one of our LST workers in a local coffee shop last week! Those hosting our project in Kigali are LST alum and are known by name to national government officials.
One of the Peruvian hosts in Lima wrote recently, “Our Readers are learning every class with their teachers. They told me they enjoy speaking English and talking about the word of God. Some readers said God is speaking through [the] LST team.”
What a great prayer; that every Reader would have a sense that God is speaking to them through Scripture and through their LST worker!
More to come next week!!
With care,
Craig, Leslee, Joshua, Matthew, and Andrew
(p.s. The pictures above and in clockwise order are of Leslee with one of her Readers, Craig with some of his Readers, a Sunday morning gathering of the church here, and the boys and their castle!).