Friday, October 21, 2011

Golden October

The past week has been quite eventful to say the least. I've been extremely blessed.

Last Friday, I took the train to my home city passing through Cologne. There, I had over an hour lay over, so I decided to stroll a bit through the city center. It was such a lovely sunny day after all. I really like the Cologne station, as they have a nice shopping area there. It's also great to have the famous dome right besides the station. Well, the dome itself looks ugly from outside. The acid rain (and I'm sure other environmental influnces) have taken much of the beauty of this impressive building. In front of the dome, interesting things usually go on, especially on a day like this.

A knight in shining armour

Who is that?
Mr. King

The angels played their role really well
But the Knight in Shining Armour, Charly Chaplin,
and even the angels need some rest every once in a while

So I enjoyed my time there. In the evening, I arrived at my parent's house. It was my mother's 65th birthday, and she had invited family and friends for dinner. We had a nice time, but I went to bed early. On Sabbath, I attended my home church. It was good to see the brothers and sisters, although something sad happened in the meantime. My friend Paul lost his father last month and I had not known about it. Just a few days before I came did I learn that he had had a kind of a bloody embolus in his brain, collapsed, and was found only hours later. One week later, he passed away. Of course this was a very difficult and stressful situation for Paul, as well as his mother and sister. My friend Tanja (who also lives quite far away now) only learned about it very recently and informed me about it a couple days before I left for Germany. She was also upset that Paul didn't pass on the news. We were always good friends after all. He said to me that he had been so busy with everything. Ok, I said, but you could at least have written a short email or something. Even though Tanja and I couldn't have helped much, we could at least have prayed. Well, some people are not very good communicators!

On Sabbath afternoon, I had to continue my journey further south to our yearly business meeting of the German ministry. We had a very blessed time together at the Fickenscher's home. Our meeting was very fruitful. Marius' wife Stefanie took over the office of the treasurer. Now the board is complete again - and even gender-balanced! Fred and Alberto, and Steffi and myself.

Sonja, the wife of our late Thomas, also came - with her father-in-law and the two little ones. Katharina is such a sweet baby. Too bad that she will never meet her dad.

Katharina looks so much like her dad in this picture

Sonja is showing her little one to Kai, who is watching via Skype from Bolivia

On Monday morning, I went back to Brussels. At the station in  Cologne, I took a little video of the high speed train rolling in, and I managed to upload it on YouTube. This is especially for my American friends, since most of them might have never seen this. Click here to watch it.



On my way from Cologne to Brussels (which doesn't take much longer than 2 hours in these kind of trains), I had a divine appointment. I got to talk to a young mother who was also on her way to Brussels. We didn't talk only about health, but also about spiritual things. It was so blessed. I gave her my card, and I hope she will get in touch with me.

Now I'm so glad it's Friday again. The work week has been very exhausting, since I not only had to deal with ongoing things in our unit, but I also assisted our Director. He doesn't have a secretary right now, and the one who normally replaces in the front office went on vacation this week. So the Sabbath is drawing near and it will be sunny all weekend. I can't wait to be able to rest without a bad conscience!

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