Thanksgiving

It is hard to believe our Thanksgiving feast was almost 2 weeks ago! It was a great success, so thank you all for praying.

We have 25 people come to our apartment for the feast, which was a great turnout! We had spend the days prior cooking and baking all home-made goodies for the event: apple sauce, stuffing, potatoes and gravy, pumpkin pie... It was sooo good.

We had lots of neighbors come, including Grandma! She said she had a wonderful time and was thankful for kind neighbors. I think this feast helped our neighbors get to know each other as well!

One of the activities we had them do was the classic "trace you hand, because it looks like a Turkey [???] and write what your are thankful for". It was so fun to watch all our French friends participate in this childhood activity. We then cut them out and taped them to the wall. The funny part is, while instructing the activity, my roommate forgot to explain how the hand looks like a Turkey... so I just wonder what they thought..

Thank you all for praying! I apologize for not blogging more often. I promise I will be better about it!

Tea with "Grandma"

Thank you everyone for praying! Tea with "Grandma" went well. She is a sweet old lady who was very happy to get together with us!

She arrived bringing a gift of a special kind of French candies-- Calissons.

To be quite, honest, I didn't really like them -- I am a choco-holic. But I was very appreciative of her gift!

Anyways, as we drank our tea, Madame Peigne also brought with her pictures of her family, a map of France and Europe and a pad of paper to "play" pictionary as needed [which is a great form of communication!]. As she told us about her family, we learned she is a great-grandma to Lucy, a cute little 1 year old. Unfortunately, both her son and daughter and grandchildren live far away in the south of France as well as in Germany. When she told us her husband passed away, it almost looked like she was going to cry. She called him "the love of her life."

Beth, Chelsea and I all want to have her over more often to show her some love. Then, she was interested to see pictures of our families, which we shared with her as well. It was great because we just happened to learn 'family' vocabulary in French class recently!

Once we had exhausted the topic of family members, I pulled out our French books and we went through some exercise together. I think she enjoyed helping us learn her native language, as she was very patient and helped us pronounce words.

Somehow, we transitioned into showing her our Knowing God Personally booklet in French. We had not be able to read through exactly what the French version says, so we asked her to read it through for us. Kinda strategic, eh? :)

As she read to us the gospel presentation, she communicated to us that she was a Christian and asked if we were too. It was really cool to meet a French-believer! Now a days, it is hard to find because the people of my generation don't have an opinion of faith, God or Christianity.

Thank you all again for praying before, during or even now, for Madame Peigne. As our French improves, it would be great to verbally encourage her in her walk with Christ!

Some prayer requests:

- Continued relationship development with Madame Peigne

- That God would use our time tonight to deepen His relationship with Madame Peigne

- For our French learning capabilities: that it would improve tremendously so we can have deeper conversations with Madame Peigne and other French people we meet

Love,

Hanah