Side Trip

Being part of a cross-cultural ministry changes a person's perspective on a lot of things ... especially God, people of other cultures and themselves. For many people living in America, crossing cultures is often limited to going out to eat to an ethnic restaurant. This is not the case for those who participate in a cross cultural ministry, whether its to an inner city context in the United States, or on the other side of the world.

Yesterday (Friday) it was the privilege of Chris and I to join with Gergu, a 20 year-old Hungarian, and take a train to Slovakia to visit some of my dear friends in that country.

The train left Budapest Keleti at 6:00 AM, so it was an early morning "get-up-and-go" for us in order to catch a bus and take a 15 minute ride to the station. Gergu brought some "cookies" that is mom made (actually they were kind of like buttermilk bisquits) for our trip. 4 hours later we arrived in Kosice, Slovakia. Pastor Peter Pristiak met us and we continued on by van for another hour to our destination; Hermanovce, Slovakia.

We spent a wonderful afternoon renewing old friendships (actually, Chris and Gergu spent much of their time listenting to Dave trying to recall his 10-year-old, mostly dormant Czech language abilities!).


Our "outing" for the day was a short walk up to the the "camp area" which the Hermanovce church is developing with the help of Timberlee Christian Center in southern Wisconsin. Watch this blog and the NEXT International website: (www.nextinternational.org) for future updates.

The Hermanovce church is truly an amazing place. God is using this church to literally touch the world. It will be exciting to see what things will be in store for people to engage in the future.

Chris will be back in the US today (Saturday), and I will be staying in Amsterdam for 2 days to meet with some people with YWAM. Hopefully I will be able to make one more blog entry.