Teaching, and other extreme sports

I have finally made it to training! I arrived last week early, and Elanor and I stayed with her grandmother for a couple days before training started on Saturday. Yesterday was my first day of teaching! Praise God! It was also the day in which I pulled every new-kid play in the book. I was teaching about daily activities, and for some reason in the lesson planning stage of the day I completely blanked out. My brain ceased to function at a level above 5-year-old. Luckily, my amazing teammates soared in and calmed me down, helped me get planned, and the whole thing went off without a hitch. The first time was not so bad after all!

Training is going very well. My teammates on the Central Europe team are all amazing, my roommate Zach and I are getting along famously, and God has been providing so much beyond what I thought or knew I needed.

Each day we get to know the rest of our team by breaking off into small "Disco" groups (cool-person speak for Discovery group). Disco groups provide us with the time and place to get to truly know ourselves, our teammates, and the reasons why we are going overseas. Yesterday was very interesting...we talked about the Essentials and Negotiables of the Christian faith, i.e., what things are essential to Christianity, and what things are culturally and preferentially decided? We came to realize that the majority of the things we "do" in the Christian faith, though important, are not essential to all Christians in all cultures in the world. We all have preferences, but they should not be points of division. In thinking about this, I researched a bit and found a great article about essentials.

The essence of the article was this quote from Augustine: "In Essentials, Unity; In Non-Essentials, Liberty; in everything, Charity."

That Augustine was a smart kid.