september update from Lydia

Hello to you from Hungary! I hope that you all are well and enjoying the first few weeks of a new season. With the changing colors outside and the new beginnings we are experiencing here, it seems like the right time to send out an update. My summer has been officially over now for a few weeks and even before Fall semester started the weather was changing. I love the crisp feeling of autumn, so it was a welcome change for me. The month of serving at "the castle" during conferences this summer was a time of rest and transition that I rather needed after a two-month outreach. After being able to process what I saw and learned this summer, I am excited to be in the second semester of the missions program at the college - and yes, I found rest even in the middle of cleaning bathrooms and stairwells for a month. :-) The Lord is good and has many ways to recharge us and draw us closer to Him. This semester I'm enjoying greater discipleship and fellowship with the people here. Having spent a semester and part of a summer here already has made friendships here much deeper and sharing life and struggles and joys that much easier. Also this semester, I'm putting more of a focus for my own growth on reaching out and taking part in weekend outreaches and ministry learning. The first one is this weekend, so please be praying for us to keep the focus on Jesus, showing His love and reflecting Him to the people we will meet. We are doing a hands-on ministry project in a very impoverished community and some of our group will be running the service to give the local church leaders a restful Sunday.  My classes this semester (it is still college, after all) are Biblical Missions, Missionary Leadership, the book of Acts, Inductive Bible Study through the Gospel of Mark, the Life of Paul, and language study in Romanian. It seems to me that after getting a taste of missions practice over the summer, I'm more able to understand the issues brought up in missions classes now - and more able to ask the questions that will help my learning. Today we were blessed to have a visiting speaker, who spoke in two classes and our evening service - John Dekker, who was a missionary from 1960-1981 to the Dani in Papua New Guinea, a people that he describes as being still from the stone age. It was fascinating and challenging and encouraging to hear how many of the Dani people received the gospel in its simplicity and depth, without the complications that "modern" people try to put on it - the simplicity that we are made in the image of God, to reflect his glory, but our sin broke our relationship with God and so Jesus (the Son of God) became one of us to live as a human but still fully God and with the power of God to not sin, and even more amazing, he then took all our sin upon him at his death so that we could be restored to a right relationship with God. But death couldn't keep him, because he is still God and it is the same power that brought him back from death is the power that works in our lives if we allow him to work in our lives. We make it so complicated... but it doesn't have to be.     So, that's what I'm up to lately.... I haven't updated the blog in about a month, but I plan to write another one sometime next week with details about this weekend's outreach. Thank you for all of your prayers and encouragement! God is working. Please keep praying for the work that he is doing here. In His grace, Lydia www.glo-worm.blogspot.com