November-December 2014

Merry Christmas everyone!

It's Christmas time here in Budapest. I don't know why, but they are really good at lighting things here, even more so now that Christmas is coming.

We just had Thanksgiving at the house of an American family that lives here. It was a great time to be with them as well as some staff members from GGIS and even some Hungarians who were able to celebrate Thanksgiving for the first time. They were amazed by how much we eat.

We will have a Christmas concert at church, it's a great time to invite people to come. Pastor Kende, the head pastor in Hungary, said people in his neighborhood already started asking him if we were going to have another concert. It seems that people are more receptive to the gospel this time of year. If you stop someone to talk to, they will take time to listen.

GGIS also hosted a Christmas concert this past week. We had a food drive and collected what looks like half of a grocery store. We invite a group from church called the Silver Club, which is the elderly and needy in the community, to come to the concert and afterwards we distribute the food we collected.

I have started teaching a new class at GGIS. It's an English language learner history class for the seventh graders. I have six students and we go at a slower pace than their other classmates who are already fluent. It's an interesting group- four Chinese and two Hungarians. Their linguistic abilities differ greatly though they are quite happy to have their own class I think.

I asked my Bible Class the other week which is more important, the day Jesus was born or the day He died. The way I worded the question, they knew that I wanted them to say the day He died. It's interesting that many people only want to think about when Christ was born. People all over the world who don't have a thought about God 364 days a year love to go to church on Christmas Eve and set up a manger scene in their house and even read the Christmas story from their Bibles but they give no thought to why Christ was born. People always quote "peace on earth, goodwill toward men" but was that the result? Was Christ born so we could get a nice, warm, fuzzy feeling on Christmas Eve as we read the Christmas story? Was He born to make everything wonderful and lovely and to make life painless? (if so, He didn't do a very good job). Or was His birth the physical beginning of a life lived with the purpose of dying? I know this sounds a bit morbid, especially at this time of year, but think about it, the Baby grew up. The Baby, whose birth was fairly ordinary, lived a life that no ordinary person could possibly live and then freely gave that life up for us. He was born to die. Let's think of Christmas not as a time to decorate a tree and pass out presents but as a time to praise God that that Baby who lay in a manger died on a cross and was laid in a tomb. The greatest gift we can receive is salvation. It's free and it was given to us by the One whose namesake is Christmas, though it wasn't on Christmas that the gift was given. This gift cost a lot. We can never match the price that was paid but God doesn't ask us to. The result of receiving God's gift to us at Christmas is what I quoted above, peace. Not encompassing the earth but in us. Peace was on earth in Christ and can be in you too if you accept it.

Merry Christmas! Love, Jon