The Journey...not a band, or a Steven Curtis Chapman song...

Over the last few years I've really come to realize how much I need to be involved in a loving Christian community, and how essential it is for spiritual growth. Our home church in Idaho was a huge blessing to us in this way, as was the time we were able to spend ministering with the great folks of West Treasure Valley YoungLife. Of course, now we feel humbled and blessed to be a part of the VCS community here in Austria. There's just something empowering and uplifting about fellowship with other believers, isn't there? It's through this fellowship that we're able to learn and grow--through the questioning, discussing, and praying with one another. I'm reminded of the words of David as found in Psalm 133: "How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity!"

It's with this idea of fellowship in mind that I want to tell you about an exciting development in the ministry here at VCS. A group of staff have come together and started a youth church. We're calling it The Journey. Here's a quick recap of how this thing got started...

The idea spawned out of a perceived need in our student body. Over the last few years, many kids who have made decisions to follow Christ while at VCS have been unable to connect with local churches. One obstacle is that there just isn't a huge supply of evangelical churches or other youth organizations in Vienna. Another obstacle is that these kids come from a wide range of cultural and religious backgrounds--some have families that are apathetic about the idea of church, while others have families that are outright hostile towards the idea of Christianity. Whatever the cause, many of these kids haven't had support for their newfound faith outside the walls of the school and so have struggled to grow. While there are opportunities for discipleship with VCS staff members, establishing a connection with a church is also important for these kids (for accountability, encouragement, fellowship, etc.). After all, we're all part of the Church (the big 'C' kind of church).

The Journey is intended for, but not limited to, these types of students. We want The Journey to be another way for kids to come learn more about Christ, and to experience that within a Christian community that can support and encourage them. Having The Journey be connected with the school provides an atmosphere of familiarity for both the students and the parents. A couple weeks ago we announced the idea of The Journey to the students and we have had an amazing response. One girl said that she had come to know the Lord during her first year at VCS but has never been involved in a local church. She said that she was so excited about this because it was a church that she would feel comfortable being a part of.

With the goal of reaching our kids in the context of their world, we decided to start a facebook group and a website as well. We already have 50 or so kids who have joined the facebook group and kids are leaving encouraging comments about the idea.

Tonight was the church's first ever meeting. We didn't know what to expect, but there were about 15 kids there! I'm really excited to see how the Lord uses this! Please be in prayer for the VCS staff members who are helping organize/lead this thing, as well as for the students who will be attending. Our next meeting is planned for Thursday, December 18th!

Here is the front page of the brochure-thingy for The Journey.

Here is the back page as well.

Adventures in German II

This summer a friend of ours came to visit for a few weeks. It was great to have her here, and to share a bit of our life in Vienna with her. Like so many of us, however, she unwittingly found herself in a rather hilarious situation resulting from a run-in with the language barrier. I now present to you the highly anticipated second installment of Adventures in German.

On one morning during our pal’s visit, Beth and I took her with us to school (we were taking a month-long intensive German course at a local language school). By late morning it was getting pretty warm, especially considering that most buildings in Vienna do NOT have air conditioning (VCS included, sadly). Anyway, we were in the school’s office when our friend, who speaks basically no German, struck up a bit of a conversation (in English) with the woman in charge of the school’s office. During the conversation the two of them started talking about how hot it was outside, which led to our brave guest trying her hand at German. Emphatically, she stated “Ich bin heiss,” which literally means “I am hot.” In German, however, this phrase has a little different connotation. Basically, it’s the equivalent of saying something like “I’m so hot right now,” where “hot” means something other than body temperature or physical appearance. For equivalent meanings, think of classic phrases like “hot to trot” or “hot and bothered,” etc. I’ll leave you to figure out the rest…

Upon hearing this, the office director just kind of looked at her in stunned silence, unsure of how to proceed with the conversation, her face the picture of befuddlement and social awkwardness. After a few more agonizing moments, we finished up our business and left the office, which gave me a good chance to explain to our friend what she had just said. Naturally, she was pretty horrified, which made it all the more comical. Sometimes I really do love this language!

Halloween, Take 2

Every year on Halloween VCS has an event called "Fall Festival," where we invite students and their friends/families to the school in the evening for food, games, and a small program put on by the music department (the elementary, middle, and high school choirs all perform). It's a pretty fun event.

Each year the night's festivities culminate in the beloved "pie in the face" contest, a tradition that truly seems to transcend cultures. The way it works is "willing" teachers are selected and put into several groups, 3 teachers per group. During the festival, folks can stop by the pie in the face booth and cast their "vote" for the group they would most like to see get a pie in the face by buying a ticket. By voting, they also are automatically entered into the drawing to see who gets to toss the pies. In the end, the group that raises the most money is rewarded with pies to the face. All the proceeds go towards the school's development fund (we are trying to raise enough money to build a small gymnasium).

As luck would have it, this was my year. I narrowly escaped "winning" last year, and thus was able to enjoy the pie flinging from a safe distance. Not so much this time around. I tried to add a video file to this blog for your viewing pleasure, but I couldn't get it to upload. Instead, I'm posting a few pictures of the carnage (before, during, and after):

Halloween

Sorry we've been a little MIA from the blogging world for the past few weeks. Things have been borderline ridiculously busy here between Spiritual Emphasis Week, the end of the first academic quarter, sports games/practices, and preparations for the Association of Christian Schools International Accreditation review (VCS is going through the re-accreditation process with ACSI).

But, I knew we had to at least get ONE post in during October, so what better day to do it than Halloween? Strangely, Halloween isn't really all that big of a deal here. In fact, when I asked one of our Austrians about it I was told that the holiday wasn't really celebrated at all 20+ years ago. This is one of many cultural differences we experience this time of year. The weirdest is not having Thanksgiving, which is arguably my favorite holiday of the year.

Anyway, instead of celebrating Halloween, Austrians celebrate tomorrow's "All Saints Day," which is recognized as a national holiday. I remember getting caught off guard by this holiday last year, as all the stores were closed and we needed to get groceries. We're marginally wiser this year, and will make sure we have enough rations stored to sustain ourselves over the weekend since stores are all closed on Sundays here as well.

So, from what I know of "All Saints Day," folks here celebrate by lighting candles and visiting the graves of deceased relatives. Personally, I think I prefer Halloween's take on celebrating (eating loads of candy and caramel apples), but maybe that's me being "culturally insensitive," which, by the way, just might be one of my areas of giftedness. I'll have to read back through Paul's writings to see if I can catch a reference to that one somewhere...

That's all for now. Happy Halloween!

The Basketball Catalyst

Beth and I, as many of you know, love playing Ultimate Frisbee. We started playing during our time at NNU and then became pretty active in the Boise City League. We also traveled frequently to different tournaments around the Northwest with a bunch of our pals from the Boise area. The people were (are) awesome, the game is extremely fun, and it was something active we could do together. We loved it, and we miss it.

Sadly, the Ultimate Frisbee scene in Vienna hasn't really panned out for us. We've made a few contacts over the past year, but near as we can tell there is no organized "pick-up games" or city league one can simply join. Instead, it is organized more like a club sport in the U.S., where you need to join an official team to really participate. This makes getting plugged in a bit more difficult since you can't just show up with your boots on and expect to be taken in right away. The language barrier is also a bit of an obstacle.

The long and short of it is that we've been here for over a year and still haven't really been able to play much Ultimate, except with our high school kids on weekends. This has been great, of course, but doesn't really satisfy the competitive itch.

As an alternative, I've started playing quite a bit of basketball. Since about age 9, I've almost never been known as the quickest guy on the court, but I've seldom been considered the slowest either. Unfortunately for me, times have changed a bit, and I now feel more like a land mass than I do a human being. I've gone so far as to dub myself "The Big Glacier" in honor of Shaquille O'Neal and our mutual decline.

Anyway, a couple of the newly arrived staff guys are big basketball buffs, and the three of us have actually found/joined a local basketball club through a contact at our local bank (just so happens that the guy who helped set up the bank accounts for our new staff members is the President of a basketball club). We've been practicing once a week with the team for the past month or so, and it's actually been extremely fun. It feels good to be a part of an organized, committed team again.

While playing basketball is great, it's really not the thing that sold me on the idea of joining the team. The bigger piece of the puzzle is the opportunity to get more connected with some Austrian folks. We live in a pretty American bubble here, and we both feel that it's important for us to develop a life and ministry outside the walls of VCS. I think this became much more critical for us when we decided to stay for at least the next four years.

I've already had one pretty incredible conversation with a couple of guys from the team about what Beth and I are doing here. After practice one night, Randy, the team's coach, asked why I am not able to come to practices more than once a week. I told him that on Thursdays I'm involved in a Bible study with Beth and a few friends of ours from the school. Immediately, he asked me to explain more about what this was, and said he was curious to know more about what we were doing here. So, I shared with him the history and ministry of VCS, as well as a little of my personal testimony of how we ended up at VCS. This led to a full-on discussion about his beliefs, his family background, my beliefs, my background, my testimony, etc. It was really an amazing time! His basic beliefs are that living a good life is all he can do, and that this is enough for any man. He believes in God, but isn't at the point where he feels he needs him.

It's important to understand more about the context of this discussion to really appreciate its significance. Unlike Americans, Austrians aren't typically open to discussing these types of topics until they get to know you extremely well; getting to this level of comfort with an Austrian can literally take years. To give you an example, there are some VCS staff members who still don't even know their neighbor's first names after having lived next door to them for several years! They still refer to their neighbors as "Herr" or "Frau" (the equivalent of Mister or Miss), and their neighbors do the same with them. It's just a much different mentality and approach to relationships here than what we're used to in the U.S.

So, considering that this conversation with Randy happened within just a few weeks of first meeting him, I was extremely shocked. It was the first time I've really been able to share my faith and beliefs with an Austrian outside of the VCS context, and I'm super excited to see how things progress.

Oh, I should mention one other thing that helped spawn this conversation with Randy. As we started talking he said he had noticed that none of us Americans ever cursed on the court, and he wanted to know why. This cracked me up, that something as small as not swearing was a trigger for a much more meaningful conversation. I guess the lesson I took away from this is that living out our faith creates a very real and tangible platform from which we can share the good news of Christ. Would Randy have been interested in hearing what we believe in if he hadn't noticed that our behavior was different? Maybe. Regardless, though, it's extremely humbling for me to be reminded about the importance of self-control.

Please be in prayer for Randy if you think of him, and for the rest of the guys on the team. Also, please be in prayer that we can continue to find opportunities to share Christ with them, not only through what we say (or don't say), but more importantly through the way we live our lives.

Coach(es) Stockett

Since I'm not a teacher, I have to be pretty intentional about finding ways to spend time with kids here. Fortunately, it's the interaction with the kids and the opportunities we have to share our lives with them that really drives what we're doing, so being intentional isn't really a struggle. In fact, despite my absolute incompetence and ignorance, this Fall I agreed to be the assistant coach for High School Boys Soccer (feel free to chuckle, because it's definitely funny). Beth is also assistant coaching High School Girls Volleyball, which she is really enjoying. Fortunately for her athletes, she actually knows a fair amount about volleyball...I know just north of nothing about soccer.

While I certainly don't have much to offer in terms of teaching elite soccer strategy, it's already shaping up to be a great way to build deeper relationships with more of our high school guys, so I'm pretty excited. My role is basically to be another (somewhat) responsible adult to have around to help run drills, keep things organized, etc. In many respects, I'm like an adult version of a team manager; not exactly a high profile coaching position, but I'll take whatever I can get.

So far it's been a neat experience. We had our first game tonight against Vienna International School's Junior Varsity team, which we won 5 to 3. Our guys looked pretty good overall, especially for their first game together as a team. We have a fairly young and inexperienced team, so it's going to be a blast to see how they improve over the course of the season. This was definitley a solid start!

The Presence of Pooky

I woke up at 7:00am this Saturday morning to the pleasant sound of whimpering. I carefully opened one eye to get a quick analysis of the scene. After determining that the sound was not coming from either my wife or my faithful steed, my worst fears were realized. It was coming from the dreaded Pooky, a 12 year old miniature long-haired daschund that my wife and I have been dogsitting for the past 2 weeks.

I quickly shut my eye, hoping I hadn't caught the attention of the beast, but Pooky's clairvoyance was not to be denied. Almost immediatley, I heard the distinct sound of tiny clawed feet scurrying clumsily across a wooden floor; Pooky was coming, and she was coming fast. She was on me in a flash, yipping and bouncing and whining and clawing and licking, insisting that the day was to be started. Begrudgingly, I got out of bed and prepared to take her outside.

As I stumbled into the hallway from our bedroom, I caught a glimmer of misplaced light coming from across the hall. Intrigued, I stopped to investigate. It took my mind several seconds to process what I was seeing. On the floor of the kitchen, like little golden lily pads, lay four shimmering puddles. Pooky had struck again. Four times, actually. Shocked, I tried to get my foggy mind to do the math. Pooky must have peed every two hours! As much as I like cleaning up dog urine, this may be the last time we agree to dogsit precious little Pooky.

Friday Ramblings

Hello reader (this is singular because I'm pretty sure only my sister reads this). Tonight is what's known as "Back to School Night" here at VCS, where we invite all the parents to come to school and meet/greet the staff and teachers. It's a pretty cool opportunity for us to connect with parents, and another way the school focuses on welcoming everyone in for another exciting school year. Parents are given their child's daily schedule, and over the span of a couple hours they more or less speed date their way through each class on their kid's schedule. I'm not a teacher, so I don't get to experience this, which is kind of a bummer. I think it would be a blast to meet everyone's parents face to face, and to slap the parents whose kids are kind of annoying. Just kidding, of course. But not really.

So while all the "teacher folk" are hanging with the parents, I came to my office to get some work done. So far I've checked my e-mail and started writing this. Clearly my work week finished several hours ago. Since I'm here, though, I'll throw down some more info about today.

Friday at VCS is chapel day. This is the time that all our secondary students (grades 6-12) get together corporately for some games, praise/worship, and general tomfoolery. It's kind of the Christian school version of a public school assembly, except quite a bit cooler. The last portion of the chapel time is set aside for someone to teach from the Bible, and today I tag-teamed this with Thomas, the school's Chaplain.

Now, I should mention at this point that public speaking really isn't my gig. In most situations I'm not a shy fellow, but when it comes to formal "presentations" in front of crowds I get nerves like Kramer gets gas: bad. I usually try to combat this by over-preparing, and leading up to today's chapel I spent quite a bit of time thinking about what to say, and how to say it. The theme was the "message of reconciliation," as Paul calls it, and we were specifically talking about how the guilt and shame we carry is something God wants to remove from us. Thomas asked me to speak some about my personal testimony, and about how I'm a changed person through what Christ has done in me.

Quick tangent: Like everyone else's, my testimony is cool. I say that because there's no such thing as a boring or pointless testimony. Ironically, it seems like every Christian I know wishes they had a different story of how they found themselves believing and following Jesus--either one more "miraculous" or one more simple that would have left fewer regrets. My opinion? They're all inredible. Any time you're talking about the Lord redeeming someone there's no choice but to be joyful. End tangent.

Anyway, I did my best to plot out my attack plan, even going so far as to lock myself in a bathroom stall today to nail down what I would say. I don't know why I try so hard to prepare like this, as experience has shown me time and again that what I plan to say is never what actually comes out. I chalk this up to either my lack of giftedness in this area or the Holy Spirit doing his thing. I suppose it's a bit of both. I also think it's the Lord's way of keeping me humble. After all, it's hard to think too highly of yourself when you're a nervous wreck and can't even keep your well-planned outline on track.

I was happy to contribute in a small way today. Like always my delivery was far from perfect, and while I'm certainly no expert on the subject, I have screwed up enough times that I'm very familiar with the Lord's grace; I find rest knowing that it's by his wounds I'm healed. There's no place for guilt or shame in my life, or in yours for that matter. That yoke is something we no longer have to bear, and I hope the kids today heard the hope that's offered to them in that.

Adventures in German

We've all fallen prey to situations of unintentional but unavoidable social awkwardness. My grandparents, for example, used to have what they referred to as "Adventures in Hearing," where an innocent question like “would you like some tea?” was morphed into a whopper like “would you like to pee?” Good times.

Naturally, living in a foreign-speaking land results in a fair amount of similar experiences for Beth and me given our limited German proficiencies. In honor of my grandparents, I have dubbed these moments “Adventures in German.” Here's a quick example:

Back in the Spring I entered a 3-on-3 outdoor basketball tournament with some of the VCS high school guys. With great glee, I submitted our team name at the registration table and awaited our first game. My joy quickly soured, however, when our team name was posted and announced before the start of our game. Instead of the cleverly quipped “Hoosier Daddy,” our team was to be known as “Whose Is Your Daddy?” for the duration of the tournament (and yes, the registration table actually added a question mark to the end of our team's name--I'm not sure if that was to indicate that they were confused or because they thought our team's name was a literal question). I guess U.S. college basketball isn’t so popular here, eh? Lesson learned, I suppose. Maybe next time I'll go with something more culturally identifiable like "Falco" or "The Hasselhoffs." Surely nothing can be as bad as "Whose Is Your Daddy?"

adjusting to Austrian life

One of the first things I noticed when I arrived in Vienna is that the fashions here are quite different--I decided the only way to go was to try and fit in. So far it seems to be working.