March News from Mike and Roberta in Germany

Inside the front cover of Dr. Seuss's legendary book, Fox in Socks, there is a graphic that warns the reader to "Take it slowly. This book is DANGEROUS!" The beginning of the book starts with simple rhymes that increase in their tongue-twisting complexity. Our girls love this book. "Fox, Socks, Box, Knox" turns into "a tweetle-beetle puddle paddle battle in a bottle on a noodle eating poodle." Of course it's all in English. When one has multi-cultural kids who have grown up hearing one language at home and another on the street, they tend to come home and talk about their day using whatever words come to mind quicker. An example. I know not everyone will appreciate the mix of German, but one day Anika came home after an outing at the vegetable market with one of our youth from our program. Bird asked her where she was and what she did. Anika replied, "We were on the markt und haben cherries gebuyd". Which means of course, "We were at the market and bought cherries." I assume most of you didn't understand the first sentence, and were thankful for the second. This is our life. We live in a world affectionately called "Denglisch" (Deutsch + English). It's a bit like living in a Dr. Seuss book. Roberta and I don't seem to notice the mix any more and only notice when we have monolingual guests from across the Pond. Phone calls from grandma and grandpa are slower with our girls because they know they have to use English words exclusively. A while ago Anika tried to assuage my wonderful wife's frustration with a sign for the table.

It doesn't always work like we'd like, but we still want to try and preserve a little English at the table. What an interesting life we have.

In other news. Anika was accepted to the school she wanted to get into for this fall. That was a huge relief. She'll be going to a Catholic girls school not far from our home. I think she'll really like it. We were all impressed when we went for a visit in November.

Maddie just had a birthday last week. She's 5 now and is letting everyone know. Naomi will be 7 next week too. They're all growing up so fast. We were roughhousing last night and I was almost a bit worried if we might end up hurting each other. We'll figure it out. 

We had a church get-away the last weekend in February. 95% of the fellowship was there. We had a great time and an awesome teaching on the last days. It was interesting and engaging. Plus we had plenty of time to chill with friends. 

The FSJ (Discipleship group) team is also doing really well. We had a cool thing happen recently where the team prayed for one of their own for healing in her voice. She had been sick and lost her voice for about 3-4 days. Thursday last week she came and couldn't speak louder than a whisper. During prayer she noticed something had happened. When we asked her to try it out, she could speak normally. A minute later she was singing her heart out in thanks to Jesus for his grace and healing. We serve an amazing God!

Thanks for reading right up to the end. Only those really interested keep it up this long. Thank you. We appreciate all of our family, friends and supporters that make it possible to keep us here in Europe. Good things are happening and you are to thank for it. Dankeschön!

Peace and Love,

Mike