January/February have been full of very cold temperatures and lovely, gentle, perfect-for-snowballs snow. My Idahoan hubby is reveling in this no-nonsense kind of winter--the kind he grew up in-- and has thrown more than one snowball of late! I'll let you figure out his most common target!
I'm told that snowfalls typically can continue here until April, so I'm not putting away the snow boots yet.
Larry, however, continues to slosh through the snow in his tennies and has remained incredibly warm and dry.
One snowy Sunday afternoon in early January Zdena Králová and her husband Jozef, from the University, invited Larry and me to lunch in Žilina . What a delightful experience. Jozef (at left) was the chef, and we enjoyed delicious food and good conversation. Their two boys decorated each adult with the animal stickers we had given them, but we were all clueless until, as I stood up, Zdena ever so gently and with apologies told me I had a monkey on my back. As she stood to remove my decoration, her husband not-so-quietly pointed out the giraffe on her (ahem) "back." Meanwhile the giggles from upstairs told all!
Our friend Mary Hamilton had the big five-o birthday last month, and we assisted in honoring her with a lovely party here at the Bible School. Mary has been a member of the church choir here, and they surprised her by serenading her with the traditional Slovak birthday song as well as singing one of her favorite choir songs that we sang for the Choir Christmas Concert.
Valentine's celebrating was a very personal time for us this month since it is not the commercialized event here that it is in the States. I love these kinds of cookies--they are available most any season of the year and are typically a honey cookie, one of Larry's favorites from childhood (his German Grandmom used to make them, but they were simple round cookies.) I THINK the words say something like "From My Heart to Yours."
We're discovering how very differently the colleges/universities here handle holidays and finals. For example, only just this week have college classes resumed for the second semester. Students have not been around since Christmas break, which began Dec. 17 because exams typically do not begin until the second week of January and are administered on a much more individual (and often oral) basis. Thus, students came and went during Jan/Feb. It does make for a lengthy holiday--and a VERY quiet campus! It is good to see their faces again.
Larry will be adding to his schedule two Bible School EFL classes this semester (each class meets twice a week). Together with his ongoing Thursday student classes in Zilina, and his Friday conversational classes with Zilina faculty/staff, his teaching is expanding!!!! Like all of us Learn-as-You-Go EFL teachers, he's feeling stretched! Please pray! But, the larger picture is what opportunities he is having to speak into the lives of a highly academic community who are somewhere on their Seeker-of-His-Heart journey. Please pray!
Remember that an additional opportunity Larry had at Zilina University this past semester was to proof English articles, written by English as their Second Language authors, for a new journal that the Department of Interdisciplinary Philology published recently? His responsibility was to help the English to flow as authentically as possible. It was challenging, but he did an excellent job. Yesterday he received a letter of commendation and official recognition as a member of the Editorial Board of this journal from the Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University. The seed-planting opportunities are exciting. Again, please pray.
OK, so my broken-arm experience would not have been my choice for this time in my life. It's inconvenient, time-consuming, disruptive (esp. the rehab portion), and just plain not fun! In fact, last week I became so overwhelmed trying to squeeze rehab appts into a very full schedule, that I cancelled most of my teaching obligations and concentrated just on all the exercises and massages I need. That was a wise call.
But this amazing God we love never wastes a thing--period! See, this rehab center has rarely, if ever, had American patients, so they are full of questions--all in Slovak, of course, with a little German thrown in for good measure! Do I speak Slovak? NOPE! But they are so eager to communicate that they began helping me learn Slovak with my Slovak vocab flashcards so that they could learn the English equivalent at the same time! Suddenly rehab becomes a language class for all concerned. Even the doctor entered our Slovak-English-German Babel recently and concluded, "See, I am pu-PIL now, too!" Please pray that the Light will shine into these conversations.
Conversations--and conversations lead to relationship. That is where we find ourselves. Please pray that the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts will be acceptable in His sight and winsome to the listeners.
Emmanuel--LaBrFast
