Schwieger's together!

Schwieger's aligned! My cousin Meri and I have currently gone around Belgium, shopping, sight-seeing, and eating Belgium chocolate and waffles. It has been a ton of fun! She is studying acting (you'll some day see her name on the big screen) and is doing a study abroad semester in London, which gave us the perfect opportunity to explore some of Belgium together.

We not only gave tours (well I gave the tours, she took them) but we had some good time talking and sharing what has been happening in our lives. Here we are in Antwerp, where a Dutchman saved the city by cutting off the head and the hand of a giant. Paint's a pretty picture doesn't it? You can tell what we think of the story... ;)

The only sad part of the time is that it came to an end. Meri boarded a 6am train and I had to go off to school. Next stop... tomorrow I go to a retreat for all the workers of different fields of service in Western Europe, located only 2 1/2 hours away in quaint little Luxembourg. I'm sure it'll be fun and encouraging, but in the mean time, I need to get something done that I didn't do much of while Meri was here--sleep. Goodnight!

They showed off their talents!!

What do dancing, singing, rapping, making human pyramids, and country line dancing all have in common? These are elements in the Soirée Talent (Talent Show) that we recently had at SFC. It was awesome! Everyone got together to participate in one way or another. There were 46 people who came!!

There were a lot of students from the Free University of Brussels who not only attended but also participated. Anthony was one of our stars who sang four of the songs that he wrote and composed whereas Guy did some great rapping of his own lyrics. My roommates and I did the human pyramid. It was a blast. Our challenge was to do it with a sugar cube on a spoon and the top person had to climb up without letting the sugar cube drop. It was a lot of fun--but I'll tell you all a secret, we cheated. We put some sticky gum in between the sugar and the spoon and told everyone about it later.
All in all, it was a lot of fun with a lot of laughter, awe, and food. At the end we closed it up with some country line dancing (not my idea--wish it were though!), as you can see, it was a lot of fun, look closely at the picture to see my smile about a mile long. It reminded me of my Montana days and how I would love to do a quick two-step or jitterbug!

It was Party Central!

Party Central is what I have now named our house after my Birthday party this pas Friday. We all ate a lot of cake (amongst other things) and we laughed, hung out, and had fun. (There might have been a little bit of dancing too, just a little bit.) I felt super loved by my roommates who surprized me by decorating the room for me and all.

It was a lot of fun, there were people from school, from SFC (mainly from SFC), and there were people that I knew from Comines who were there. For me it was fun to see teh mélange (mix) of people from different areas that I know them and from different
time periods coming together, the only people who weren't there were all my friends from the States. That would be my dream one day to gather EVERYONE together in the same place.

Party Central for now, next week I'm back to school taking Art History at 8am and French five hours a week. Until then, "I could have danced all night..."

Back to Business (school business)!

Apparently, after hanging up over 500 posters, people here in Brussels (SFC that is) don't like the word "poster." Here in Brussels, our welcome week was packed with activities. A lot of the activities we did were pre-activities making way for other activities. So I'll run you though welcome week (weeks)...

Wednesday: Hanging up posters over two campuses here, the Free University of Brussels (ULB): a la Plein and Vrijden. Then back home to prepare the distribution sacs that we are going to give out on Friday. Afterwards a planning meeting, finishing the day out around 7:30.
Thursday: Hanging more posters, this time just at ULB.
Friday: Distribution of sack that we prepared on Wednesday, over 400 people received something from us.
Saturday: Operation Move-In! Here is where we go to the campus and offer our help (and muscles...) to those who are moving in. We were well received by those whom we were helping, but we were kicked off campus by the security guard. Why? Because on the back of our shirt it said "Not to be served but to serve" with an SFC logo, and since the campus is atheistic, it decided that they didn't want us there.
Tuesday: (me: cooking for the meeting, 3 cakes were made!) SFC start-up meeting.
Wednesday: Distribution for the Meal and Movie Night we were going to have on Thursday.
Thursday: (me: grocery shopping and cooking a meal for 50) Meal and Movie Night.
Friday - Saturday: SFC Belgium Leaders Retreat--which went well!
Monday: Distribution for our Cafe SFC for Tuesday.
Tuesday: Cafe SFC.

This may not look like a lot, but we have been busy here in Brussels!!! And today, I am giving a guided tour of Brussels! It has been good, we have had over 18 new people come to SFC and sevral have returned. So, everyone welcome back to the business of SFC!

Hit the Mark

The mark has been hit, I am currently a few hours over a quarter of a century. And... it feels good. I don't think I imagined my life as it is now when I was 15, ten years ago, but I know that I wouldn't change it for anything!! I am living in Belgium, in the best job around, facilitating others to establish life long communion with God, in other words, I am helping to mentor others about Christ who will in turn mentor others, and in turn we will see Belgium changed for the Lord.

I am the big 2-5. In five more years, I will be the bigger 2-9 and one year in holding, as I've heard it referred to. ;) But yeah, my birthday went very well. For all wondering what I did, honestly, I didn't do much for it, but I am going to have the Celebration on Friday the 29th of September. My activities: I woke up, spent some good time with roommates, received some presents (yay!), then went grocery shopping and started cooking for our Students For Christ meeting. After I finished cooking, we had the meeting (which went well!). Afterwards, I helped clean up and then a friend and I hung out some. But it was a great day, special in many ways!

Escorted off Campus

Whoa! I knew I've seen that security guard before! He was the person who kicked me off campus the first time when we were giving out flyers for the DaVinci Code, and now he is once again escorting us off campus. Our crime: being Christian at an atheistic campus where to believe in God, he needs to be proven and the Bible cannot be used as proof.

Today we were "caught" on campus helping people move into their dorm rooms as we have done many years in a row, yet this year, someone saw our bright red shirts that said "Not to be served but to serve" and our SFC logo, and recognized that we were a part of a Christian group and filled a complaint against us saying that "They shouldn't be here!" So, a man came over who was in charge of the dormitories and kindly explained that "this is private property and you all are required to leave now." So our team of eight had to leave. And the security guard, my new friend (although I don't think he recognized me and I didn't want to open my mouth to remind him of the girl with the strong American accent), escorted us off the premises.

I was indeed "Escorted off Campus" (isn't that a fun headline?). Yet our team of 9 people there were resilient and we knew that it really wasn't a matter of the bright red shirt we were wearing, it was a matter of God and this campus' rejection of Him. So we prayed for Him to break through and one day for Him to be accepted there.

The Start-up

Back-to-School. It no longer consists of getting the supplies, and making sure that I am first in line for the best copies of used text books. Right now it consists of: organizing people to help others move-in, figuring out how we are going to attract the attention of new students on campus, and planning events for people to come to. In everything, we already have a fairly good base set up of all that we're going to do, yet at the same time, working on getting all the details together is sometimes more difficult.

An example of a new "detail": Sunday in a planning meeting when I was stating when we are going to put posters up, someone asked me "Diane, do we have any posters to put up?" At that point I gasped, realizing that we only had a few posters left, not sufficient for 3+ campuses. So now, the detail has become one of my projects... design a 15" x 21" posters and have them printed before the week is over. It'll come out well though, and I hope to get it done this Wednesday or Thursday to send to the printers.

Back-to-School is starting to look a lot different. I think that it is that the work curve has changed. For a student, more work is in the middle to last bit of the semester, yet for me, I am discovering that the climax of activities is in the beginning. Then the group starts to form and things go back to normal with occasional big activities, and no longer 5-big-activities-per-week time periods. But, when all is said and done, I am learning a lot and I love what I am doing (and all the work that everyone is doing together).