Greetings from 2007!

Frohes Neues Jahr!

As I write this, it's a little after 3:00 AM on January 1, 2007, in Bremen, so for most of you out there it's still 2006. So far, 2007 has been a good year. :-)

I spent New Year's Eve at Stefanie's house with Ingrid and Stefanie's friends, Ute and Clara. Ute attends the congregation in Braunschweig and Clara lives in a Mennonite community in Ireland. The five of us ate dinner together and spent quite a while singing songs. Stefanie had borrowed copies of Songs of Faith and Praise from Jim and Elsa, so we sang English songs from those.

When we sing in German I feel like I have three choices as to what I can do: 1) I can concentrate on singing the right notes, 2) I can try to pronounce the words correctly, or 3) I can attempt to understand the meaning of the words. I've found time and time again that it's extremely difficult to do more than one of these at a time! Tonight we sang songs in a language I understand, and most of them were ones I know by heart after years of singing them in church, but tonight these songs meant so much more to me than they ever have in the U.S. It was so wonderful to sing something I knew and could understand, and it gave me a chance to really concentrate more on the words we were singing. I guess not being able to understand most of the songs for so long made me hungry for something I could digest and take to heart. Those songs were soul food for me.

We counted down the last seconds to midnight and stood outside Stefanie's house to watch the fireworks shot off by her neighbors. People here buy tons of fireworks at New Year's, and they spend the evening setting them off in the streets. Some of them rival the professional shows on July 4th in the U.S. While I don't have a problem with the fireworks themselves, all the trash left behind in the streets and sidewalks afterwards gets annoying.

All in all, it was a good way to finish off 2006 and to ring in 2007. I feel very blessed to have had the year that I did. It was filled with transitions of all sorts, from changes in employees at work and moving out of my aparment, to leaving my job and adjusting to life in Bremen, but God has seen me through those changes and has used them to bring me closer to Him and to make me a better person.

My prayer for the New Year is that all of us can grow closer to the Lord this year and that we can see Him working in our lives and will let Him make His work complete in us.

May 2007 be your best year yet.