My Refuge & Strength

Days 3 & 4 

So the internet has been a huge pain here, so I’ve been writing out each day. So the following was written last Friday, just so you know…

The past two days, our team (& by that, I mean us five Americans, four American interns from Josiah Venture, & five Czech natives) has joined four other teams at the training camp in Malenovice – which sounds nothing like it’s spelt, by the way. We’ve gotten the opportunity to build relationships with the people on our team that we’ve just met, as well as the other team members too, which has been a total blast. The atmosphere reminds me a lot of a Christian leadership camp. There are probably only seventy of us, but our worship is definitely louder than that of an entire church; we clown around & play silly games like Ninja (the try-to-hit-another-person’s-hand-in-one-fell-swoop game) & Signs (the make-up-your-own-sign-and-pass-it-around-without-having-the-person-in-the-middle-figure-out-it’s-you game); but we can share our stories of how we came to Christ & ask others without it being weird.

We’ve gotten to hear from a bunch of incredible speakers, like Dave Patty (which always makes me laugh cause that’s my friend’s dad’s name), the president & founder of Josiah Venture, as well as the leaders of the training camp: Rob & Nate.

Now, Dave’s story is quite the story. I so wish I could do it some form of justice, but I can’t, so I’ll just paraphrase. He and his wife were living in Czech when a local school offered his wife a job as an English teacher. However, she wasn’t at all prepared – what with having to take care of their young children – but she still felt that God wanted them to do it, so Dave took the job instead. Having never been any kind of teacher before, he started off with what he knew: simple idioms, different car brands, and the gospel. Surprisingly, the principal allowed him to use God’s Word to improve the students’ English. They’ve only just come out of communism, and they have more freedom within their school districts than America does; go figure. Anywho, once summer began to creep up, the kids in Dave’s class were complaining about having nothing to do over the break, and one of them suggested that Dave open up some kind of summer camp where he could teach English and teach the gospel and just provide some sort of escape for their summer boredom. Wouldn’t you know it that a little over twenty years later, Josiah Venture now has 600 + English camps, hundreds of sports camps, and recently started music camps.

And that’s all for now! Hopefully I’ll be able to update more tomorrow. Love you all!