Hello

Hello all.  Hope life is going well wherever in the world you are.  Things in Germany are going really well.  Spring appears to be upon us, as the last few days have been in the high 50's and may even have reached 60, with lots of sunshine.  It feels good to go outside not bundled up.  The last couple weeks here have been good. Nothing too out of the ordinary. We had a lead training, which means our student leaders and us got together and did trainings, watched a movie, and had an overnighter. It was a lot of fun. Only got 45 minutes of sleep before getting up for church, but it was well worth it. Had some fantastic conversations. 

Last weekend was filled primarily with basketball watching.  I love the ncaa tournament.  It is tough here though, because so many of the games come on so late, or rather earlyin the morning.  I stayed up until 530 in the morning to watch Michigan State lose.  It was unfortunate. What was fun though was I was on skype w/ my sister, Cristina and Bethany, who are in Washington d.c. and Grand Rapids, and we were all watching the game "together". What was really funny, slash annoying, was that my video was 30 seconds behind theirs, so I would hear their reactions, and hen be waiting to see what the reactions were too. Mostly funny, sometimes annoying, but I really enjoyed being able to do that with them.

This weekend I have decided to take a quick little trip.  I am heading out in a couple hours to dive down to Vicenza, in Italy, with some club beyond staff people from other bases, and then we are going to go to Venice.  Just a relaxing trip spending time with friends. I am really looking forward to it. 

On the way down I think I am going to listen to Rob Bell's nw book. Even out here in Germany I have heard all about it. I want to hear it for myself before making any judgements. 

I will write again after I return and let you know about the very exciting next couple of months coming up, which are going to be crazy busy and challenging but should be amazing.     

Training for Afghanistan

This last Thursday I spent the day in Afghanistan. Well, not really, but let me explain.  I spent the day helping a group of chaplains train for deploying to Afghanistan.  They will be leaving in the next few months to head out for roughly a year. They were doing training for conducting field services (preaching out in the field to soldiers) and in meeting w/ religious and community leaders.  We went down to Hohenfels, which is a post that is technically a part of USAG Grafenwoehr, about an hour away. They have a big training area, where they have built up small villages that look as they do in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The training area is known as the box, which always makes me think of something like a sandbox and playing. But these are big kids, and instead of playing with toys, they play with things that go boom for real, guns and bombs. And instead of a cowboys and indians thing, it is for going to actual war.  They do a fair amount of role playing in the box, with people "playing" the role of terrorist who are hidden in towns and surrounding areas and they train how to go in and find them and what to do when they do find them. 

I was not playing the role of terrorist. Hopefully the chaplains won't get too close to any terrorists.  I was playing the role of a contractor (not hard to get into character since that is what I am to the Army) who was out in the field with soldiers, who had suffered KIA and WIA in the last few weeks (killed and wounded in action).  A group of soldiers were voluntold to help out as well and play the role of soldiers down range.  After the service (I listened to 4 different ones), I stayed back w/ the chaplain, chaplains assistant, and the chaplain in charge of training, and went over an AAR, after action report, and gave feedback to the chaplain and chaplain's assistant on what I thought went well and what could have been done differently.  The chaplain who was in charge of all the training had called me a few days before asking if I would come help out.  Growing up the son of a chaplain, I have heard my fair share of messages from chaplains, and being in ministry myself now he thought I might be able to give some good feedback to the training chaplains. 

It was definitely a different and unique experience. I enjoyed being able to help out, and to go to the box, where civilians are usually not allowed.  before we entered the box, we were being given instructions, and told a number of times in no uncertain terms that we must follow the direct path to the town to remain safe. The other towns were being used for NATO training purposes (well, that is what I gathered from different soldiers I saw), and there would be serious issues if we were to randomly show up in one of their towns. So different, and a good experience overall.