We're starving... going back for thirds

Our annual summer mission trip is coming up! We will be in Hungary July 13-21. For the third summer in a row, we will partner with Good Sports International to help with a morning English camp and an afternoon sports camp for students in the community. I'm excited!! We've got a great group of students (18) and staff (6) on our team this year. For many of them, this will be their first mission trip. They are pretty excited to step out and serve others. We'll be spending time each evening as a team looking through some of Paul's letters. We'll be looking at what it means to be unified and how we are called to treat one another. We will spend Friday afternoon packing and loading our vans, then we'll set out early on Saturday morning.

Would you pray for...
1. Team unity - pray that we'd be encouraging to one another (even when we're tired!), and that the Hungarians we interact with would see Jesus through our love for one another.
2. Safety - as we drive the 12+ hours to our destination and as we serve and play hard with the campers for the week.
3. Teaching opportunities - as students process their experiences throughout the week, pray for our staff as we lean in and encourage and challenge students in their faith.
4. Encouragement for the Hungarian Christians and American missionaries we'll be serving alongside - due to years of communist rule, Hungary is a very godless country and they often labor without seeing a lot of fruit. Pray that spending time with our team during our worship times would be refreshing for their souls.

I look forward to updating you after our mission trip on the work the Lord will do both in and through our team... so stay tuned for stories and pictures!

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In other summer news... 

Our summer teaching series is on prayer in the Psalms. We've spent the first four weeks looking at what it means to PRAY (praise, repent, ask and yield) and we will spend the final four weeks looking at different prayer postures (hands, heads, singing, kneeling). It's been a good study so far and students are engaging well. Last night I taught on what it means to yield to God. We dove into Psalm 1 and compared the way of the righteous with the way of the wicked - and then spent time considering what path we're on and who/what we're yielding (giving way) to.

Summer brings a lot of unknowns to our group. Many families travel to America for the summer to visit their families and others take some time for family vacations around Europe. At the beginning of the summer we said goodbye to a number of students. We've finally begun seeing a few new families move into community. This past week we had 3 new students who are brand new to Ramstein. It's been fun welcoming new faces! In addition to saying goodbye to some students, we've also said goodbye to some key volunteers. A major prayer request we have as we move into the fall, is for more volunteer staff. We've been blessed to have a few new ladies joining our volunteer team, but we are in need of some men to invest in our students - particularly in our middle school group.