Fright and Fun

Guten Tag!

This has been quite an eventful day for me. This morning we went to a worship service at the Berliner Dome, which was absolutely beautiful. However, I have never been more scared in my life than I was this morning. I assumed that before we went anywhere off site, they would do some kind of roll call or name check. By the time I realized that they were not going to do this, I was on the bus, moving. Upon arrival at the church, I went in, took some pictures, and started looking for Katie as the buses finished arriving. Katie is the 14 year old girl who came to Germany with me and will be staying in the hostel with me and traveling with me after the Global Convo is over. I walked around looking at the people and started to get worried, as I was not finding her. I started asking some people who she generally spends time with if they had seen here, then I started asking everybody else who knew her. Nobody had seen her all day. By this time, I was in full blown panic. This was at the time of greeting when I kept looking around and another lady went back to call the hotel. The hotel said that they would call back. We then sat through hymns, prayers, and the sermon before we finally heard from a staff member that the hotel called and Katie had slept through the wake-up call and would come in a cab with one of the other Convo staff. It was such a relief to finally here this! I never knew that you could be so scared. I was terrified of what might have happened to her. After I found out, we were in our prayer time. We were told that we could go to various types of prayer stations. I went to the candles that we could light for blessings and lit one. Then I went up o the bishops to be prayed for. The bishop that I went to asked if I had any prayers, and I told him that I had a praise, and told him how she was lost then found. By the end of his prayer I was in tears. Through it all, I almost couldn’t believe that she was coming and didn’t completely calm down until I saw her walk in the door at the end of the worship service. How can somebody be as scared as I was today? I don’t know, but it was so scary.

(After I calmed down I started thinking about sermon applications since that is where my brain likes to go. I began to wonder why we don’t get that scared when one of God’s children are lost and we are supposed to be helping them.)

I am so glad that she was safe and will definitely be keeping a closer eye on her and not expecting the conference staff to do so. I can’t believe that they have no checklist when they are dealing with minors! You can do this with adults, not with young teens.

This afternoon, I went on the first excursion. I had signed up to go to Potsdam. It was a lot of fun. We saw the Castle called Sonnasee, the Potsdam Brandenburg Gate, and the general area of Potsdam. We ended the evening in the Methodist Church in Potsdam. This church is the Ecumenical Center and so is shared by the UMC and Lutherans, but most of the Sunday services are UM. We had dinner with them and evening prayer, which was in both German and English. I made a good friend with a pastor from Congo, named Jose, and will look forward to seeing him in the future at the conference and then on Facebook. On the way back, we had an hour of train rides. On the last train, we passed the time by singing children’s songs and children’s Christian songs (believe it or not, this was not initiated by the Americans but by the Austrian). We had a lot of fun, though I think the Germans thought we were slightly crazy or were enjoying it. I was embarrassed at first, but eventually just loosed up and joined in.

That’s all for tonight, see you tomorrow!
Auf Wiedershein!