An American Team and Exploration...

 I realise that it's been a while since I last wrote so I apologise for that. For those of you who get my prayer letter, you will have hopefully realised that I sent out a new one yesterday. The last couple of weeks have been pretty busy but good. Last week was a holiday here. Usually the school calendar lines up with the British one for the Autumn half term but because Slovenia has national holidays on both 31st October and 1st November, the school holidays were a week later than usual. The week before the holidays some of my American friends had another team come over from Alabama. When the last team came over in the summer I had a lot more free time to help out. This time I obviously had my own work to focus on. I still managed to spend a bit of time with them. I'm not sure how much I did but I think it was an encouragement to have another person around who knew the language, the country and the church situation here. On the Friday, 4 of the group came to Ljubljana to lead the youth group for me. I tried to make it an American themed social and so we had hot dogs and brownies and played games together. I think it was a good opportunity for the Americans to meet some of our teenagers and learn a bit more about what life is like here. It was also a good chance for the teenagers to get to meet the team and maybe learn a little bit more about them.

Last week was also busy but in a completely different way. As it was the holidays, my parents came out for a visit. It was lovely to see them and spend time with them. Due to my residency application, I'm not expecting to be allowed to leave the country at Christmas (although you can be praying that I receive it before then so I can go back) and so this was a lovely chance to be with them when I don't think I'll be able to see them again in person until April. Whenever people come to visit me, it's a great chance to explore new parts of the country or at least to revisit my favourite parts. This time I had to do all the driving so it was more tiring than I'd expected it to be. We also went to see some caves which were a bit more strenuous than I'd been expecting (500 steps down into the cave, a walk of a few km and then 500 steps back up out). We were very fortunate with the weather, only one day was rainy and so we worked around that. I think my favourite place we found was Divje Jezero (picture at the top) which was truly beautiful.

It's taken a few days since they left on Monday to get back into my routine which has been difficult for me, especially since I've had quite a busy week with lots of meetings. Please be praying for me and the work I'm doing here as we start to think about Christmas and the activities and teachings we'll be doing for that.

Please do also pray for my residency situation as I am a little bit anxious about it!