New Prayer Card

Summer Break- See you in August!

Dear Readers,

Please excuse our break from blogging for these couple of summer months. We look forward every year to spending the summer in the States with our families and friends.

We will return to Berlin & continue to update our blog again in the middle of August.

Thank you for your continued prayers and support!

God is good. All the time.

Matt & Emily May

Missionary Bloggers

Dear Readers,

We are happy to be connected with a great blog site Missionary Bloggers. They do an amazing job at collecting and promoting missionary blogs from around the world.

Please check out their site, and we hope that you are as encouraged as we were to see all of the missionary stories from around the world right at your desktop.

Thank you Missionary Bloggers for featuring The Mays in Berlin!

Greater Grace is alive and well in Heidelberg

We just returned from a 3 day trip to Heidelberg. 6 of us from Berlin piled in a rented van and drove down to Heidelberg to visit the Greater Grace church there. The drive takes about 6-7 hours, Heidelberg is about an hour and a half outside of Frankfurt.

The church in Heidelberg is led by Pastor Tahir who recently moved from Azerbijan with his family of 5 to pastor the church there. You can really keep them in your prayers as they are still adjusting to living in Germany, and starting to learn the language. The church group in Heidelberg is about 20 people and ALOT of young children. They are going to have a power house youth group in about 10 years. We were so encouraged by their love, their hospitality and their desire to gather together around the Word, they are a great group full of life and joy.

Thursday evening home Bible study

The Heidelberg church (minus a few)

Pastor Tahir, his wife Ina and their children Nathan, Caleb & Rebecca

We did outreach on Friday afternoon on the main walking street. Matt played the guitar and the group sang some worship songs for about an hour while a few handed out gospels of John to anyone who stopped to listen. Nathan, below with Matt, is holding some of the gospels of John's, he was fearless!

This boy below was our biggest fan. He sat and watched with a few other kids for most of the time we played. At the end he came up and just held his hand on Matt's guitar until his mom came to collect him.

This walking street is one of the longest walking streets in Europe.

Despite all the shops around people were not so much in a rush and were willing to stop and talk and listen to the worship music. MUCH different then the atmosphere in Berlin.

Below is Emily & Juliana. Juliana's sister Nikolai lives in Baltimore with her family (some of you may know her). Back when the two sisters were in college in Berlin they prayed for missionaries to come to Germany. They later met the original team that came to Berlin 13 years ago and have been part of Greater Grace, in Germany & Baltimore ever since.

Hungarian Visitors

Did you know it takes 11 hours to drive from Budapest to Berlin? These 5 Hungarians drove 22 hours to spend 2 days with us. Pastor Bendeguz and Andras (pictured below on left) came for the men's retreat and Timea, Hajnal, and Ancsika (right) jumped in the car and traveled all that way just to visit our church here in Berlin!

More photos coming about the men's retreat. But we just wanted to thank these 5 for taking the time to visit us in Berlin. If you are ever thinking about visiting a small church or team, DO IT! You have no idea how much that means to people.

Köszönöm szépen to our Hungarian friends!

The "Original" May's in Berlin

The first generation May's hit the ground in Berlin this past week! After years of prayer & anticipation Matt's parents finally got the chance to stay with us in Berlin. We thoroughly enjoyed the visit & the opportunity to show our parents/in-laws our city & our home. The same weekend they were here we also had a visit from Pastor Morley, the Pastor of the Greater Grace church in London, England. The church & team were really built up by his visit and to find out how much his church in London has been keeping Berlin on their hearts & in their prayers.

There's not much in the city of Berlin that the May's did not see.

Here they are in front of a few remnants of the Berlin wall.

They were hardcore troopers and did a 6km bike ride with us into the city of Potsdam.

While the May's happened to be here so did one of our best friends Matt Grady, who was working in Berlin for a few weeks.

Saturday morning outreach with the May's is highly recommended.

Pastor Morley is a serious soul winner.

We loved the opportunity to watch him speak to young people on the streets.

Pastor Morley preaching Sunday morning on being "Graced Out"

The guys after church were getting pumped about their men's retreat next weekend.

The May's and the Simseks, an awesome Turkish/Finnish couple in our church.

Pastor Stephan, Matt, Matt's dad Bruce & Pastor Morley... along with many other of the awesome men in our church

Some of the mom's, including Matt's! Celebrating Mother's Day together.

The amazing Wollenberg family. To know them is to love them.

He is Risen! Jesus ist auferstanden!

Easter Weekend in Europe is a huge holiday. They celebrate Good Friday, Sunday and Easter Monday. Which means no one has work, nothing is opened, the whole city is practically shutdown for about 4 days. It's a great opportunity to get together with people in the church that normally would have little free time. We had a picnic on Good Friday with about 25 people, an amazing time on outreach Saturday and our first "Sunrise Service" with a great group of about 20 of us. I put Sunrise Service in quotes because we met about 30 min. after the sun actually rose, when planning around train schedules we all agreed that 7:00 was early enough for everyone!

Just to share really quickly about outreach, we went on Saturday thinking that it would be an easy opportunity to share with people about Christ since everyone is very aware that it was Easter Weekend. We were out for about an hour with not so much response when one man from China walked up to us, and said "What is the difference between God and Jesus?" And we got the opportunity to share with him the entire gospel, the finished work, and the importance of the shed blood of Christ. He told us that his grandmother had just passed away about a month ago and she had become a Christian right before she died. He was raised a Buddhist and was so intrigued by what made his grandmother change right before she passed. He said, "I can't believe that I met you guys, I have been looking for answers to my questions and not knowing where to go." It was amazing to get the opportunity to really share the gospel message this weekend for us and have it fall on open ears. In Germany that is not a conversation that happens on a regular basis, and it was really a gift from God that encouraged us hopefully as much as it encouraged him.

Here's a video of our weekend as a church.

Of course any holiday reminds us just how far away from home we are. We love and miss our family, friends and home church and are looking forward to seeing everyone in about a month and a half!

Matt & Emily