Today, catnapping as Cal drove through the Schwarzward in our rental Peugeot, I finally felt some (not all, but some) of my accumulated stress melt away. We have been feeling both blessed and stressed at the same time; yes, I think that is a real thing.
Yesterday we presented our second marriage workshop. The first was two weekends earlier in Kaiserslautern, at an English-speaking Calvary Chapel. English because it is near the largest American military community outside of the United States. The same area where Calvin was headquartered back in the late 1990s as a consultant doing healthcare research for the US Air Force in Europe. So that was a weekend of meeting new friends, sharing our marriage story with a few couples, and reminiscing a little.
It also taught us another cultural tidbit: over here, tire shops don’t carry a lot of tires. On our drive from the church Saturday night to our host couple’s home, we got a flat tire on the Autobahn in a construction zone. Fortunately, we were near our exit and limped off the freeway, only to find a commuter parking lot right there—as if God was saying, “I knew you’d need a safe place to park.” After navigating dubious calls with our French rental company and a German tow truck driver, the car was towed to a tire shop Sunday morning. Our hosts graciously let us stay another night with them, and Monday their neighbors (who spoke both good German and good English) helpfully explained that because regulations are so strict about using only exactly the correct replacement tire, shops don’t carry much inventory. It was going to take three to five days to replace our flat tire. Back to the French rental guy, who assured us he’d get us a temporary rental car…which took until Monday afternoon.
We got back to our apartment Monday night, stopping on the way for the Bible school weekly prayer/small group meeting where it was spontaneously decided to do a team retreat starting that Thursday through Saturday. So Thursday morning we got up early, drove three hours back to Kaiserslautern (incorporating a family history stop at a couple of cemeteries), traded rental cars, and joined the Breisach team at the Bible school hotel for a series of brainstorming and team building sessions. The first thing was to share what was distracting each of us and lay it before God in prayer. As we went around the table, every single person was dealing with a life-altering concern either personally or in their immediate family. It confirmed what we were already feeling—that the stress we are under is more than just the everyday garden variety. One outcome of the retreat was some improved clarity about the near future of the school—albeit with plenty of details still feeling a little loose at best. The strongest accomplishment was simply getting to know each other better, face to face, sharing and listening and eating and laughing together.
After the retreat, focus shifted to finalizing the workshop slides and scripts for Stuttgart. We left the apartment on Friday, driving to a village in the Black Forest where Calvin has traced his Sayler ancestry. We found one shop in town still owned by a “Sailer”—the spelling changed when they arrived in the US—and the daughter kindly showed us a village history book that indeed had references to likely Sailer ancestors. A local history museum had even more, including photos of young Sailer men from the Dornstetten area who died in wars throughout the area’s long history.
Stuttgart
Saturday morning we arrived at Café Luv in Bad Cannstatt, the oldest borough of Stuttgart. As we parked, I discovered a text from my son alerting me that my Facebook Messenger account was hacked and sending other people fake messages with my profile picture. It felt like another small attack aimed at distracting us from ministry. It would take me over an hour, which I didn’t have until that evening, to successfully change my Facebook password, so I may never know how much damage that hack may cause to anyone who naively accepts the request.
But God is good. We were welcomed to the Café by Nate, who hosted us last year, and the warm hugs were real. A few technical hurdles and a couple of cappuccinos later, we presented some marriage stories and learnings to a lovely group of younger couples who engaged deeply with the practice exercises and seemed genuinely encouraged for having invested the day with us. We simply love this little church community, and the people they are touching with their coffee shop, their special events, and their every-other-Sunday services. Our German hosts that evening cooked us a delicious Indian meal of butter chicken (which I love!) and we discovered they met each other even younger than we did! The climb up four flights of stairs with our overnight bags was well worth the effort to spend the evening and next morning with their beautiful family.
Finally, to round out the adventure, we looked up the church associated to Urban Life Worship and attended their Sunday service just north of Stuttgart in Kornwestheim, a town in the district of Ludwigsburg. We have been practicing our German from Minnesota by singing along with their worship music on YouTube, so it was a treat to be there in person. After church we headed back towards Neuenburg…and I finally began to relax a bit.
The lovely village of Gegenbach on the way home from Stuttgart
In two more weeks we present our workshop in Calvary Chapel Heidelberg. Given all the distractions we’ve felt, your prayers for this and our remaining workshops are greatly appreciated. Prayers for the Theologisches Seminar Breisach are also important, more on that in another post soon. Tschüss for now!