Carol Services, Coming Soon!

Check back soon - I'll be posting photos and maybe some videos from our Christmas Carol Services in Nice and Saint Paul de Vence!

Jack-o-Lanterns

Amy and I, along with our house guest Pauline, had lots of fun carving pumpkins for Halloween! We decided to try some new things, and I think they turned out really nicely. Thanks, Karina and Marie, for finding pumpkins for us!!!

Amy's Cat

Pauline's Jack-o-lantern

Jill's Haunted House

Car Accident

So, I had my first foreign car accident this week. The bus driver left the scene without giving me his information, but other than that, everything is fine. Well, except for the car.

I'll post photos soon - I especially want everyone to see how well the new bumper I put on held up!

Avignon

Here are some photos from our recent day trip to Avignon. It was a really cold and windy day, but we really enjoyed visiting the old Papal Palace and the Pont du Gard!

Emilio imitating the elephant statue outside the Palace!

Here is the entrance to the palace, where French popes lived and worked for 70 years.

A statue on top of the Palace at sunset.

The inside of the Palace was incredible!

A shot of Nacho by the window. It was cold!

This was the dining room of the Pope. The inside of the fireplace is the size of my bedroom!

The courtyard of the Papal Palace.

I just thought this old door looked cool.

Daniel and Marie celebrated 19 years of marriage. Congratulations!!!

The Pont du Gard, a 2000-year old aqueduct near Avignon. It was still in use until about 100 years ago.

You can still walk across this bridge, and the water still flows smoothly through. Amazing!

Half Day of Prayer

Every three months our church hosts a Half-Day of Prayer, where we get together and pray for one another, for our church, and for the world. This time we all met at James and Jen's house on a sunny Saturday to pray, and then had a barbecue to celebrate Independence Day. The prayer time was great: we modeled our prayer time after the Lord's Prayer. Here are a few photos from our day together:

The Arnold's have a great yard for gatherings like this one!

We used every corner of their property to pray and visit.

The kids had a program too, and Amy and Jen did a great job with them.

Can you imagine a better place to pray?

Daniel and Francois during small-group prayer.

Another prayer group...

What Independence Day celebration is complete without a flag cake?!

Our New Home

After 3 months of searching, we finally moved into our new home on June 21st! Here just a few photos of our place:

We have many fruit trees and flowering plants in the yard, including 2 palm trees!

Our living room has lots of windows, making it very light and open.

Here is a view of the living room. It's been a great gathering place for us. (We're going to re-cover the sofas!)

Our kitchen is very big, especially by European standards.

I found a desk I really love at a secondhand furniture store, and here it is in my bedroom. It's important to have a desk I like, because I'll be spending a lot of time studying there!

Baptism!

This Saturday five members of our church family were baptized in the Mediterranean. It was truly an international event, as those baptized come from France, the USA, the Ukraine, and India. Each one gave a short profession of their faith before getting in the water. They were all very moving, though perhaps most moving of all was our own teammate, 9-year old Rebekah, who was baptized by her dad.

Marie Durant

While we were at the castle last month, we visited a museum dedicated to the Huguenots, the French Protestants of the early 18th century who were persecuted for their beliefs. I was especially touched by the story of a woman named Marie.

Below is an excerpt from an article called "The Ultimate Meaning of True Womanhood" by John Piper (full article here, who tells her story.

The opposite of a wimpy woman is a girl named Marie Durant. In the late Seventeenth Century in . . . southern France, she was brought before the authorities, charged with the Huguenot heresy. She was fourteen years old, bright, attractive, marriageable. She was asked to abjure the Huguenot faith. She was not asked to commit an immoral act, to become a criminal, or even change the day-to-day quality of her behavior. She was only asked to say, “J’abjure.” No more, no less. She did not comply. Together with thirty other Huguenot women she was put into a tower by the sea. . . . For thirty-eight years she continued. . . . And instead of the hated word J’abjure she, together with her fellow martyrs, scratched on the wall of the prison tower the single word Resistez, resist! The word is still seen and gaped at by tourists on the stone wall at Aigues-Mortes. . . . We do not understand the terrifying simplicity of a religious commitment which asks nothing of time and gets nothing from time. We can understand a religion that enhances time. . . . But we cannot understand a faith which is not nourished by the temporal hope that tomorrow things will be better. To sit in a prison room with thirty others and to see the day change into night and summer into autumn, to feel the slow systemic changes within one’s flesh; the drying and wrinkling of the skin, the loss of muscle tone, the stiffening of the joints, the slow stupefaction of the senses - to feel all this and still persevere seems almost idiotic to a generation which has no capacity to wait and to endure.

A painting of Marie Durant and her fellow inmates at the tower of Aiges-Mortes.

The stone from the tower wall where the women etched "Resistez".

A Week in a Castle!

Here are a few more pictures of our week in the Cevennes, near La Salle. We stayed in a Chateau on a hill, and the trees and flowers were really getting ready for spring! These are pictures of the grounds of the castle. Later on I'll post some photos of the surrounding area, including a story from the Musee du Desert, a museum we visited which commemorates the Huguenots of the early 1700s. The Huguenots were the French Protestants who were persecuted heavily for their faith and lived mainly in the hills of the Cevennes, where they could hide from the French troops. It was a really moving and inspirational museum - I'll tell you more about it soon!

The chapel on the chateau grounds.

There were many beautiful doors!

This was the view from our bedroom! The pot you see in the foreground is from the nearby village of Anduze. These pots are very famous and expensive, and can even be found decorating the palace in Versailles!

There were beautiful flowers everywhere!

House Guests

I've been out of touch for about a week as the entire team, along with our visiting guests Dr. and Mrs. Young, traveled to a International Church Conference at a castle in the Cevennes. It was such a beautiful region, the Cote d'Azur almost pales in comparison! (At least, for those like me who prefer mountains and rivers to the blue of the Med.) We had a great week of teaching and meeting together with church leaders from all over Europe, and I realized my childhood dream of sleeping in an actual castle for a week!

Now that we are back, we have a couple more house-guests to add to the party, as the volcano in Iceland has prevented Dr. Young and his wife from flying home for a few more days. Never a dull moment here!

I will write soon and post more pictures of our lovely week in the Cevennes!

A Great Birthday

I had a really fun birthday last week! I tried to take a few pictures to remember the day.

Donna and Amy woke up early and fixed fresh cinnamon rolls for all of us! Donna assures me that she loves waking up early, though to me it seems like the ultimate sacrifice!

After our French lesson, a few ladies from church took me to lunch in a nearby village in the mountains called Tourrette-sur-Loup. The weather was a little overcast, but the village was still very charming.


We ate at a place called Chez Grand-mere, a favorite of everyone who has been there! It only has about 10 tables in the whole place, but the food is amazing, and I'm sure they could fill a room many times larger!


The family who owns the restaurant is French, but they spent many years in North Africa, and I enjoyed the best couscous I've ever tasted!


After dinner I had some Moroccan Mint Tea, which may have been the best part of the meal! The owners also came out to sing for me, which I'm told is very rare here. I definitely felt special!


After our big lunch, Amy, Donna, and I took a stroll through the old city of Saint Paul. There is a cemetery in the city where the artist Chagall is buried.


The view of the city and the surrounding countryside from the cemetery is magnificent!


Here you can see the Medieval wall that still surrounds the old city of Saint Paul.


We decided to try and hike from Saint Paul across the valley to the Arnold's house, where we are staying until we find a place of our own. We had quite an adventure! At different times we were in danger of snakes, large dogs, briers and thorny vines, raging rivers (okay, it was just a small creek we had to cross)... but it felt really good to take a hike in the woods, and when we emerged on the other side of the valley, we were rewarded with this view of Saint Paul:


As we walked up to the road, we were thrilled to discover we had come up less than a city block from the Arnold's house! We couldn't believe our good fortune!


The girls, the Arnolds, and the church all made my birthday a really special and memorable one. We ended the evening with a rousing game of Phase 10 (which Donna did not let me win). There's always next year.