We cannot believe how fast the past few months have flown by! We do stay busy with life and have recently begun to realize we need to do a better job with our work-life balance. On a monthly basis, we put out a ministry calendar so our folks know what studies and activities are going on at the Hospitality House.
We enjoy leading four studies, on 3 different nights. Lou leads a men's study on Tuesday nights and is faciliating The Truth Project. On Friday night, we are studying the spiritual disciplines (prayer, fasting, meditation, etc.) and enjoy a combined group of singles, young married and families. Every other Sunday night, we host a study for young couples and we are studying John 15, unpacking the idea of being "in the vine and becoming a fruit bearer". Finally, on the other Sunday nights, we host an adult study and we are going through Philip Yancey's book on Prayer.
Well, this week we had a young man that asked to get together with us. Since he works during the day, evenings are the best time for us to connect with most people. We do meet with some people one-on-one in mentoring relationships during the day either over coffee or lunch. But, our evenings become quite full. He was so sweet as he looked at our calendar and wanted to know if we could meet Wednesday or Thursday, since those "appeared" to be free. Yes, on our ministry calendar those evenings were open. Unfortunately, we had other commitments. So, we found a night that will work in a few weeks.
But, it caused us to chat again about the busyness of life here in Germany. We realized that we hadn't had a night open to ourselves for almost 40 days. We love doing life with people and coming along side them so it is hard for us to say "no" to folks. This isn't too brag either...it is not about how many people we are meeting with or how many are coming through our ministry. Our hearts desire is to do life with people, hear what's going on in their lives, support them in whatever way we can and love them as Jesus would love them.
We are realizing that we need to make sure we have a little balance in our life so we can not grow weary. We love our ministry, we love our lives and we are in this for the long haul. We are running a marathon and not a sprint. God willing, we want this to be the last "job" before we are called to our heavenly home. We love what we do and our privileged to be serving God and our military. We are taking a few days off in two weeks and will be going back to the drawing board on this issues. We are grateful that we serve a God who is patient with us - despite the fact that we have to relearn lessons over and over again!
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