The Rest of Outreach… The Rest After Outreach

So I guess I left off in Magdeburg. Which is interesting because while we were in Magdeburg we hit our halfway point in outreach. This is the rest of outreach.

Like I said in the previous post, we did a lot of different things in Magdeburg. We had one-on-one visits with different member of the church, we had a “kinder party”, we played in the worship band, and we lead prayer and worship times. That was just inside of the church. We also, like in all the cities we went to, did street ministry and invited a group of kids we met to come hang out with us at the church. We also got the privilege of going to some schools and talking to the student. At one of the schools, we joined the ethnics and religion class and they outright asked us how we were saved. Another one of my favorite stories from outreach is a story about a little girl named Paula. I first met her when we were leading morning prayer times. She started following me as a paced back and forth. It was soo cute, but I didn’t want to acknowledge her because I didn’t want her to make noise. Eventually, after she answered my prayers for food, I started paying attention to her and started babysitting her in the next room so we wouldn’t interrupt prayer. After that I really got attached to her. I got to play with her a few more times. The one Sunday when we shared our stories with the church she even came up front with me. To put this simply the first time I met her she told me “nitch komm” as she went to tell her mom that she needed to use the toilet and on the last day I saw her she insisted on me taking her to the toilet. I think that falls under the category of true love. Yes, that is my German Baby. So from Magdeburg we went to Berlin, the most famous and touristy of all Germany cities. I really can’t say much about this city because I was sick the first day we were there and while we were there everything climaxed with my grandma back home and I flew back to the States. All I can say is that outreach flew past after this point. I was home for about a week and when I came back my team was in Chemnitz. Where I had my birthday. But more importantly where we got to serve at a youth club run by the salvation army, speak at a campus crusades meeting, and spoil some preteen girls with a lady’s night at the youth club. After Chemnitz we decided to go back to Stuttgart for the weekend because we didn’t feel that we finished our work there the first time. While in Stuttgart this second time we built relationships with some of the contacts we met the first trip. Like I said we did only stay in Stuttgart for the weekend. We were thinking about going to a new city, but then decided to go back to Dresden. Which was nice because we got to see the Stoff-wechsel café open and filled with life. We spent about three days in Dresden and half a day in Lobau, where we saw Alex and the youth club again and we also met a new guy named Markus. Then we went back to Herrnhut and ended our outreach. I’m sorry, It’ s really hard to say what all happened the last weeks of outreach when it took me five weeks to figure out the first half.

Now that we are back from outreach the base has been full and busy. Everyone is staying in different places than we were before outreach, but it has been good. We are working on putting together another ATOM magazine and also preparing for the tour (Mini-outreach for all you YWAMers). These next few weeks are going to go bye soo fast!

~Bethany Graybill