Hello everyone! I apologize that it has been so long since my last update. So we are getting towards the end of City Project, which is the summer discipleship program we have through the college ministry at the Summit. We are currently in our international portion of the program. Each student goes to one of three locations including: Nairobi, Kenya; Taipei, Taiwan; and Belgrade, Serbia. I am in Belgrade with a team of 9 students and two other staff. We have been here for about a week and have been on the go since we hit the ground. This past week we spent much of each day running a VBS for the children of a Roma gypsy village in Belgrade. We had about 50 students that we got the privilege of loving, getting to know and sharing the gospel with daily. We saw the Lord work through some very difficult language barriers with the kids. Most of them couldn't speak one word of english, and by the end of the week they were singing our english songs! They were so awesome and it was such a blessing and encouragement to see how the church in that village is growing and even now looking for a bigger space to meet on Sunday evenings! Today we had a more relaxed day to rest up for next week which will consist of teaching english classes every day. We will teach two classes for kids and one for college students.
We are staying in a place called Studenski Grad which means "Student City." This is basically a bunch of dorms where all the most intelligent students in Belgrade stay. The students that stay at studenski grad actually attend 1 of 4 different universities. So there are students from several universities staying in the same dorms. Imagine students from Duke and Carolina staying in the same dorms! lol. Anyway, there is an area in the middle of the dorms like an outdoor amphitheater. Every night the students congregate on those benches and just hang out. For the past several nights we have been going out and just meeting students and getting to know them. It has gone very well and I believe God has given us much favor with them. We have had some interesting conversations with them on the many differences between our culture and theirs. Many of the students we have met have even come to the movies with us to see spider-man 3d!
Over the past week, our team has definitely developed a deeper unity with each other in the midst of many difficulties (language barriers, no ac, heat). God has been very gracious to us and has been faithful in drawing us together even in moments when we have been selfish and not kingdom-minded. Pray for us that we would continue to exercise showing grace often to each other. Pray we would continue to serve and sacrifice for each other in order to preach the gospel to each other daily. With half of the trip gone, it's easy to start to check out of what we are doing, pray we would fight that desire.
Because this will probably be my last post before we return to the states, I want to ask you to pray that the Lord would give our team a heart for the nations and even specifically a call for some students to pursue full-time overseas missions. Thank you for all your prayers so far, they are greatly appreciated and it is encouraging to know we have people supporting us back at home. We will be flying out at 6am on the 21st local time. Pray for safety.
In Christ,
Donovan
p.s. the title of this post means "Hello from Belgrade! How are you?"
We are staying in a place called Studenski Grad which means "Student City." This is basically a bunch of dorms where all the most intelligent students in Belgrade stay. The students that stay at studenski grad actually attend 1 of 4 different universities. So there are students from several universities staying in the same dorms. Imagine students from Duke and Carolina staying in the same dorms! lol. Anyway, there is an area in the middle of the dorms like an outdoor amphitheater. Every night the students congregate on those benches and just hang out. For the past several nights we have been going out and just meeting students and getting to know them. It has gone very well and I believe God has given us much favor with them. We have had some interesting conversations with them on the many differences between our culture and theirs. Many of the students we have met have even come to the movies with us to see spider-man 3d!
Over the past week, our team has definitely developed a deeper unity with each other in the midst of many difficulties (language barriers, no ac, heat). God has been very gracious to us and has been faithful in drawing us together even in moments when we have been selfish and not kingdom-minded. Pray for us that we would continue to exercise showing grace often to each other. Pray we would continue to serve and sacrifice for each other in order to preach the gospel to each other daily. With half of the trip gone, it's easy to start to check out of what we are doing, pray we would fight that desire.
Because this will probably be my last post before we return to the states, I want to ask you to pray that the Lord would give our team a heart for the nations and even specifically a call for some students to pursue full-time overseas missions. Thank you for all your prayers so far, they are greatly appreciated and it is encouraging to know we have people supporting us back at home. We will be flying out at 6am on the 21st local time. Pray for safety.
In Christ,
Donovan
p.s. the title of this post means "Hello from Belgrade! How are you?"