Church Christmas Party and heading home!

We had a great Christmas party this weekend at our church! Everyone brought a dish to share, we had our annual gift exchange, and everyone was very surprised when we had Pastor Gary call via Skype. He spoke a quick but beautiful message about how the world may see us as nothing but God sees as us perfect. It was so quiet in the chapel while Pastor Gary was on skype, about 50 people just sitting there, with their gifts and food and desserts and coffee, but completely silent. We were blessed to have a good number of visitors and see some faces that we have missed in the past couple of weeks. It's always a great time for us to see everyone's faces before going home for Christmas. We are so grateful and excited to be one our way back to the States for a few weeks to celebrate Christmas and New Years. So we apologize in advance for not posting in the next couple of weeks. We will be happily home with our families and church and celebrating Christmas together.

God bless you all who faithfully read our blog and we are so thankful for your continued support.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Matt & Emily

My contribution to the Christmas party. Baking is always a small feat over here when your dealing with trying to track down all the right ingredients.

We had a special visitor who was a trained opera singer and sang some beautiful Christmas songs for us.

Most of the wonderful ladies in our church.

My dear friend from Iran

Serious present opening during the gift exchange.

Little Benjamin got his hands on a makeup kit that was gifted and unveiled his hidden talent as a makeup artist.

Christmas Outreach

Two years ago we decided as a church to give out Christmas gifts in the local area on the streets. We wrapped a pocket sized Gospel of John with an insert about how to get saved and an invitation to church and candlelight service. We also attached a candle on the books with a ribbon to make it a really nice thing to give and receive. We had such a great response that we decided to do it again this year. After days and days of volunteers in the church working hard to get hundreds of gifts ready to give out we finally got a chance to hit the streets with them. It was so fun to give people a wrapped present and see their faces light up. To some it's the only gift they're going to receive this Christmas season. And it's also a great opportunity to share the gospel, because it's a perfect example of how easy it is to receive a free gift when you have done nothing to merit it.

Berlin Teens- Going Forward with God!

Just a quick update from the Berlin youth group. We had a great night with our teens last week during a visit from Mat Laflame (http://matlaflamme.blogspot.com/). He spoke with our teens about our lives being a mystery, how we cannot always explain our lives and our faith to our friends, because their understanding is limited. It is so encouraging to us to see them respond to the gospel and to teaching. Our group is small but we are so thankful for the few that we have. Please continue to keep our youth group in prayer. For more teens to come out, for fresh ideas, for a hunger in their hearts. We love our YOUTH!

We played a game that was a mix of musical chairs and charades. When the music stopped you had to jump into groups and make yourselves into the object that the leader called out.