German Days of Summer

Hallo! Meg and I are wrapping up another summer here in Germany. Here are some of the highlights!

Family Life:

Sam continues to get bigger not just in size but also personality. He is smiling and laughing (mostly for Meg, Chase has a tendency to scare him…turns out that babies don’t have the same sense of humor as teenagers). He is approaching five months and has outgrown most things! He is still breaking the German percentile charts for length and weight. We just crossed over the 20lbs mark and we are beginning to think that Meg’s milk might contain steroids!

Meg and I say: “Sam is a really good baby… but he’s still a baby.” He cries, needs a diaper change, gets fussy, wakes us up in the middle of the night, and needs attention but these are things that all babies need. We feel lucky that Sam has fulfilled our wishes and is indeed a “go baby.” He likes to be out and about going places and seeing things. Some of our hardest days are the calm days in our apartment because it seems like Sam gets bored and starts squawking like a baby dinosaur! So we take him outside and he instantly beams with a big contented grin.

You might wonder, how was camp with a baby? It was awesome! Sam had endless stimulation and attention. It was sweet how many campers wanted to interact with him.

Oh, it's also necessary we mention what fun we had celebrating Chase's birthday! He requested a milkshake tasting at Five Guys, so we invited some friends and had an epic taste test with ALL the different milkshake flavors. The winner? Salted Caramel, straight up. Although Meg preferred it mixed with peanut butter.

Camp:

Chase was tasked with leading the program team (that means creating a group of characters that create energy and bring the fun, games, and laughter for the camp.) Our previous two years involved planning and implementing all of the events outside of the program team, this year involved the same plus the responsibility of leading everything that happens with the program team, including all the aspects of Club (the gathering filled with music, games, and a talk about the person and power of Jesus). The big twist however was that our characters didn’t speak any English and thus Chase had to use his German and body language to play a convincing pirate. If you're interested, Meg put together a silent film that we showed the camp to highlight the climax of our character's story arc. You can watch it on Youtube!

Because of our last three years at camp, we have a pretty good idea of how to plan a camp ourselves!

Coming up:

Fall is fast approaching! Chase will continue to drive down to the Garmisch US military base to help the youth group. Chase recently went down to hang out at the base’s gym with two high schoolers and played basketball (Chase lost but said he was going easy on them). There is an overlap between kids from the base who also attend Munich International School. One of the kids, Nate is a senior looking forward to Young Life this year and wants to help jump-start the program. It was great talking about the potential service options and getting others involved.

Besides ministry activities, we have Meg’s parents visiting and the day after they leave we have Chase’s dad and partner visiting! It will be nice to hand off the baby to someone!

One of Meg’s roles is to be the Prayer Coordinator for our region. She and a team of people around Europe pray for Young Life every week via Zoom. Later in September, the prayer team was invited to Hungary to pray for the local Young Life ministry. So that will be a great opportunity! We will get to stay for the Eastern Europe division leadership weekend. Meg and I are excited to see what the Lord is doing there and finally meet staff in person!

Thank you for partnering with us as we launch into another year of Young Life. This has been our longest stretch of time of not visiting the PNW since moving to Germany (going on a year!), and boy are we craving some teriyaki chicken, chips and salsa, and time with those we love. We are excited for family to visit us here soon and we are grateful that with your generosity, home doesn’t feel too far away. You all remind us that our community is here for us no matter where we sleep at night. Thank you.