The Holla From Halle

Valerie Roth
January 6, 2007
Germany YES Team
Letter #8

Hello again Family and Friends! I hope all of you had a wonderful Christmas and New Year's! We had a good time enjoying the holidays in a different culture and with each other.

This past week was full of ups and downs. The most exciting up was that Loren Rice (Outreach Director for Discipleship Ministries) and his cousin Eric Rice came to visit. We were able to spend a couple days with them before they moved on to Central Asia. They arrived on Tuesday and spent some time just talking with Eric and I. In the evening they took our whole team out for dinner. It was Brent's 19th birthday as well, so that made it extra special. On Wednesday, the team planned a short city tour for them. We went to some of the highlights here in Halle. One of our first stops was to the Marktkirche on Marktplatz. Marktkirche is the big church right in the center of town. We were looking around in there and Loren asked if the death mask of Martin Luther was in the church because they had a postcard of it there. The death mask was made of Martin Luther right after he died, and it's a mold of his face and hands. Anyway, the man there told us that it is in the church but it costs money to go in and see it. We started to leave, but then the man came after us and told us that he would let us in to see it for free. We went into the small room, and there he was. At first it was kinda creepy, but the more I remembered who Martin Luther was and what he stood for, the more amazing it was. They had some history on the wall (in English and German) about him and his death. Martin Luther had preached at Marktkirche 3 different times, and they also had summaries from those, along with the pulpit he preached from. The thing that hit me the most was from his sermon on January 26, 1546. In his sermon, Luther prayed that God would maintain Halle in the love of His Word. It's pretty amazing to think that God has been calling people to Halle and to pray for Halle even since 1546. Crazy--to think that our team could still be an answer to Martin Luther's prayer.

Our team is all moved in to the apartment now and trying to get finally settled in. I think we'll all be happy when there is nothing in our suitcases and we have everything where we want it to be. Our outreach coordinators have been on vacation for the past 10 days, but are home again. Hopefully in this next week we can define some more of what exactly we want to do in the next 7 months.

Praises:
-that we're all living in the apartment!
-that we weren't too homesick over the holidays

Requests:
-health: some of us have had colds, and Janae's back has been hurting her the past few days
-some of us have hit the stage of outreach where we just feel "blah" and don't really feel a passion to be here. Pray for renewed vision and strength as we push though the down days
-learning the language: we like spending time with people, but when we can't communicate it makes us very frustrated
-for more mail : ) some have been feeling disconnected from our friends and families

With love,
Valerie (for the rest of the team)