“You’d better stand back

The flames are high

Better get help

Can’t stop the fire

Bell’s going to ring

Hear the alarms

Better tell the fire chief

To quit playing cards”

- The Rolling Stones

Well. Sparks did fly. The theme of our fall retreat was “iskra v tme” which means “a spark in the dark. We had a lot of fun. Around 40 students total showed up, lots of new faces, about 12 non-believers. (thats over 1/4th) Our students brought their non-believing friends, I think this is amazing. During the conference we had a speaker from the Eastern European national office speak. His name is Greg Pitts and he is the National Campus Director for Belarus. He has a really cool story, his visa was annulled while his wife and kids were still in country. The life of an overseas missionary is adventure. He brought a guy that works in the Eastern European headquarters, a Romanian named Cosmin. It was contagious being around them as they led a “ministry to movement” time. We invited our students personally to come to this talk, and in my unbelieving heart I didn’t think anyone would show up, but almost all of our students did. It was so awesome to me, and one of the first times I saw what a movement could look like. Cosmin has a great way of explaining what a movement is, something that I really thing think the US campus ministry could take cues from.

Anyway fall retreat was great and I’m very thankful for your prayers. Even before fall retreat I was thinking about the hundreds of people who were praying for us during that time. We really saw God work out a lot of details, things that could have potentially been disastrous, just weren’t. For instance, there were a lot of transportation details to work out, getting the bus to pick up people in different locations, picking up the bratislava people from a certain train station, Greg driving in to a remote part of Slovakia in the snow, and basically there were no issues. This to me is a testimony of God working things out. So we’re really thankful for how He worked. Thanks for your prayers. I really believe He was the one who did it.

Oh, and it snowed! It was beautiful. Here is a photo of what it looked like.