Thursday

Early on Thursday morning we packed up our provisions, fueled up the car and made the two and one-half hour drive to our distant friends in a fairly remote edge of the country. As each kilometer ticked off it seemed as if the snow got deeper and the temperature lower. By early afternoon we were parked between two walls of snow in the backyard of a church building that was constructed just fifty years after Columbus first stepped on to that American shore. In no time at all, we were hard at work with the local young pastor reviewing the budget for a two week campaign we will be conducting next summer, laying out a schedule for the present weekend and looking ahead several months as we planned our partnership for the coming season. One of the principal projects for this weekend was to lay the groundwork in inviting local youth to participate in a summer English Camp sponsored by two small Czech churches, pairing with another church from North Carolina. It was our intent this week to visit the local schools and leave information packets and flyers with the Directors and English language teachers. We visited a local printer and got our flyers printed and delivered several of them to two housing facilities where high schoolers live during the weekdays. It was no small feat to negotiate the frozen sidewalks that criss-crossed the town.

Well after sundown, when the temperatures plummeted, we set out over forty kilometers of extremely icy and hazardous mountain roads to reach and speak to a home group in a distant small town. The group has a vision to see a pioneer church planted there and it was our assignment to begin the process of instructing them of the many elements that are woven into a church plant. Our theme for that night was examining the motives, counting the costs and making sure that indeed the group's heart had been broken for their neighbor's need. A slippery road led us back to our awaiting lodging just at midnight.