May 2018

I just returned from a weekend retreat with the 9th-12th grades. This is something that I have wanted to do for a few years now and am so glad we decided to do this year. Every fall we have a retreat with the whole high school and usually we have class trips in the spring but this time we let the students vote and (with a little persuading) they chose to have a retreat.

Here is a picture from one of our worship times.



GGIS also just crossed the 200 student mark. Isn’t that amazing? That’s two hundred young people from all over the world who come to us and and hear the gospel. Incredible!

We are getting into the busy season as we start to wrap up school. I think every weekend for the next six weeks there is something happening. After that I will be back in America for five weeks.

It’s funny, usually I feel like I am dragging myself to the finish line at the end of the year, I can’t wait to go back to America and just get some rest and relax, but I honestly don’t feel that way this year. I am so excited, rejuvenated, by what God is doing. I am certainly excited to see family and friends in the States, but I also know that seeds which were planted here and in me are now starting to really bear fruit. It’s thrilling to be walking in God’s will.

I like to think of the verse I Corinthians 3:6- “I have planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase.” This is a great summary of both ministry and personal growth. I may plant, you may water, but God is the one who gives the result. In the same way, people have planted spiritual seeds in my life, others have watered them, but it’s always God who brings the fruit.

One thing I’ve noticed, and was talking to a friend about today, was there there is so much pollen in Budapest right now. I mean it’s everywhere, all over my laundry, every surface in my house is covered… I should probably clean more… but looking back, we determined that it was because we had such a hard Winter and the plants are all producing more pollen to stimulate exponential growth. Isn’t that just like that verse? I may have a spiritual Winter, it can be tough, I see no growth in my life, but in time (and I don’t know how long it will take) God produces something incredible in my life.

Perhaps you are going through a spiritual Winter, things may look bleak, there may not seem to be any fruit, but don’t worry, Spring is coming. Everything here is blooming and it seemed like it happened over night, but it didn’t, it took a long, hard Winter. In the same way, I see things blooming in my life, but it took a Winter to bring it about.

God bless you!

April 2018

Hi Everyone,

This past month, spring has finally come to Budapest. In a recent teachers’ meeting, it was mentioned that sometimes the winters here, which are pretty dark and gloomy, can wear you down. You can start to wonder why you’re here or what is going on, but then, boom, before you know it, the sun is back, the kids are normal again, and you remember why you live. This is very true, but it actually didn’t happen to me this year. I have seen God working so mightily in different ways, I feel like every day something new and incredible is going to happen.

I went to Eurocon in Warsaw, Poland at the beginning of the month. It was a great time to be with people I don’t often get to spend time with. It was also neat because ever since I moved here, Eurocon has been in Budapest, but for me, living here, there can be a lot of distractions. Now that it was in Poland, I had nothing to do except go to the conference and spend time with the people there. I didn’t think about that until afterwards, but it was an interesting side note.

I asked my friend, Pastor Love, if I could video him speaking for a minute about his work in the chaplain program in the NBA to show to the basketball team at GGIS. Here is a picture of them listening to him.

It was really neat to see them paying such close attention and they asked a lot of questions afterwards.

As you may know, I have been talking individually to the high school students in GGIS and have now spoken to 57 of them. Please pray that I keep having these opportunities as they are very special. Last week, the day before our Easter break, three students prayed with me to receive Christ, two of which were boys who you see in that picture, listening to Pastor Love. Amazing!

I have been talking about Camp Life with my students because it is now happening in Europe as well as the US. I will be coming back to Hungary a bit earlier this summer so that I can attend and the kids I have talked to about it are very interested. This is a fantastic program and for me, both as a camper, and a counsellor, it was life changing.

I wanted to show you another picture that I took recently at the Korean church I attend. This is in the chapel at GGIS. During Eurocon, I was able to speak to P. Dunbar, who is a missionary in South Korea. It’s cool to me to have a connection about a love for people. I can’t wait to someday go to Korea and visit him!

 

March 2018

I have been working with a Korean church in Budapest as a youth leader for about a year and a half now. Generally what happens is after the main service, we all get together, sing, talk, and discuss the message. We also do events and had a two day retreat last year. It's been really great, but I also see that most of the kids only have a very basic Biblical understanding. (The couple students who also attend GGIS are like spiritual giants, though.) Anyway, a couple weeks ago, the two ladies who also help with the youth group were both sick so it was just me. We had about 15 kids and we divided up into groups. I had two students lead groups to discuss questions that I wrote down and I led another group. I realized there might be some confusion with one of my questions so I regrouped everyone and asked if they had questions.

Then!

It happened!

The moment I've been waiting for a year and a half!

They had questions!

We spent the next hour talking about some really big, theological questions they had. It was awesome. I won't say all of them were in tune, but most were.

Question after question.

It was incredible. "How does God measure faith", "can you explain eternal security", "what are some verses that go with that", "what do I do when I'm slumping spiritually", "what is hell like and who goes there"?

These questions were so good! I was ecstatic as I left. Please pray this continues! These kids are amazing and are longing to have these deep questions answered. It takes time, I've realized, for teenagers to open up. It reminds me of Proverbs 20:5. There has to be a drawing out of the questions and thoughts, but it takes time, you have to build trust before it can happen. I have built that trust at GGIS to the point where every free block I have in my day I have a student in my room talking to me, and now I am so happy that I am starting to build that trust with the Korean church!

Since I have this Korean connection, I am the go to guy when we divide our high school by language (I don’t speak Korean, but I can read it!) for Bible class on Fridays about once a month. I look forward to these times that I can spend with the small group of Koreans that we have in the high school. This past Friday I had one of the students lead us in worship and then I spoke about our value. I have found that this is such an important topic in the Asian community. So often identity can be tied into what you do- grades, work, extracurricular activities, but people can forget that we are valuable because God says we are. We looked at Micah 6:8 which asks the question, “What does the Lord require of you?” There are three things listed there, but the last one is the one I focused on- walk with God. If I walk with God, it doesn’t matter what I “become” in life. I could end up with the least desirable job ever, but if I walk with God in it, it’s the most valuable thing I could be doing. I think that the students understood what I was saying. God’s will is so much greater than my plans. He wants me to have the best, but His best may not be what I have mapped out for my future.

As I write this, I am looking forward to Eurocon, a conference of many Greater Grace churches in Europe, in a couple days. This is the first time since I’ve lived here that it hasn’t been in Budapest. I think it will be good. Having it in Budapest is a bit distracting for me since it’s my home and I always find something to do here. Now that it’s in Poland and I know nothing about Poland, I think it will help direct my focus a bit more if that makes sense. I feel a little like I did when I first came to Eurocon in 2012. I am excited and looking forward to what God is going to do!

Hopefully I will see some of you there!

February 2018

I don't know where to begin.

Let me rewind to last week.

I was able to sit down and talk with one of my ninth grade students for a while last Wednesday. She is a Chinese girl who was born and raised in Europe in a Christian home. Most of our conversation consisted of her talking and me just listening. She talked about her life, GGIS, going to church, "American Christianity" vs. "Chinese Christianity" and also how she feels that sometimes God is leading her to do and say things but she feels intimidated because she is so young.

I think that often times as a teacher I talk down to students. I view them as probably every other school teacher in the world views their students. I am here to teach them. I am here to instruct them. Discipline them when necessary. I am here to bless them. I am here to minister to them.

But in that meeting, I realized that this girl is my sister in the body of Christ.

Yes, I am her English teacher, and she is a fantastic student, but more than that we are Christians. I was so blessed by what she was saying that I almost had tears in my eyes. Some of our students have a remarkable amount of doctrine hidden away in their hearts.

My purpose was to minister to her but ultimately she blessed me far more than I could have imagined.

Another Chinese student I spoke to told me that because she is a Christian but comes from a Buddhist family, she has to think of new lies every week to tell her mom so she can go to church on Sunday. If her mom found out she was going to church she would be disowned, kicked out of the house. Yet she said her only prayer is that one day her family would become Christians.

I don’t know about you, but I haven’t sacrificed much in my Christian life. I come from a Christian home in a Christian country with Christian relatives. I was born and a week later I was in church. I never had to lie to my family so I could go to church. In fact, I got in trouble for not going.

I have been having a sort of renaissance year at GGIS. For a while, and especially the previous year and a half, it was tough being here. I felt sort of out of place. I knew I was called here but I wasn’t necessarily operating in that call. Perhaps I was distracted by outward circumstances rather than trusting God that He would take care of those things so I could focus on His call on my life in GGIS.

The reason I’ve been meeting with these students is, as I said in a previous newsletter, because I felt compelled to. God made it so clear to me that I needed to do this that I pretty much couldn’t say no with a clear conscience. I have now spoken to over a third of the high schoolers individually. (Three of them have prayed with me to receive Christ!) I have a running list on my computer and it turns out that around 60 percent of the high schoolers at GGIS have at one time or another accepted Christ. I am shocked to read that number (I just double checked it as I was writing this). I thought the number was much lower. Do you remember the verse in I Kings where Elijah is praying and asking God why he is the only person in the whole country who still follows Him? I wonder how many of my students feel that way. I know I have before. But what was God’s answer? “I have 7,000 who haven’t bowed their knees to Baal.” Don’t get me wrong, that’s a small number relatively. 50 Christian students is a small number (even though it’s the majority). But with God that doesn’t matter. My goal for the rest of this year is to get those kids together. Fridays during the last period I have started gathering a group of students for a prayer and fellowship time. I showed them that list I keep and they were shocked as well. There wasn’t a dry eye. They had no idea. It seems that due to an influence of a small number of students, the Christian population was shut up. Pray that this doesn’t happen anymore.

I am also keeping a running list of prayer requests. Here are a few from students: Genuine friendships, knowing God’s will for the future, boosting of self-esteem, and finally for their unsaved family members to become Christians.

Please keep these things in prayer.

Lastly, people often ask me when I am moving back to America. I honestly don’t know the answer to that. In September I was thinking that this was it. My last year. I begged God, pleaded with Him to change my circumstances, get me through the year so I could move back. I think that prayer was answered to a certain degree, circumstances have changed, but more than that He changed me. I am not (as of now) planning on moving back to America. This is not a spur of the moment decision either. As I said before I am having a renaissance year here. I have felt God working and moving in fantastic ways. Since about November I have been praying about my future in Hungary. If I had left at this time, I would have been defeated. The impact that I am seeing in GGIS may not be happening. This change in my life may not have taken place. My eyes are opened to the 7,000. God is moving and I know that this is where I am supposed to be. There have been hard times here, times when I have wanted to give up. Times where to even write a newsletter I had to wrack my brain for something encouraging to say. Through all of this God was working. How foolish I was to think that because of the attack I should give up. Now I am seeing the wall being built like in Nehemiah. My thoughts aren’t fixated on the attack but on the work.

Thank you for your prayers. We are about a great work. We will not come down.

January 2018

Happy New Year from Budapest!

I have been on Christmas vacation for two weeks now and am kind of over it at this point. Vacations are nice but being with students and teaching is where I should be.

During our break I spent time with some families here, helped a couple move, and I built a desk for a former student. On Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve I was with the Korean church. New Year’s day we got together for a service in the morning and had a lunch together. This is a bowl of soup that we ate. I couldn’t finish it it was so filling. The white stuff is like giant rice noodles. 

I was talking to another teacher and she was saying how she has realized over the break how important Body life is and how without it you kind of just drift off into your own little world. It’s so true. I like to think about the verse, “Without a vision, the people perish” from Proverbs 29:18. It’s not just a corporate vision, but also a personal one; however, the two are inseparable. Without the Body, I won’t be able to have a personal vision and without a personal vision, I can’t operate in a corporate vision. God truly designed us to be together. I find that when I am alone my viewpoint can become twisted. I start to think only about myself and I can even start to have a negative outlook about people or things happening in God’s work. I start to look inward and forget who I am in relationship to God and His people. When I am where I am supposed to be, in the Body, in my call, that’s the place where I find that my view point becomes outward and my personal vision extends to and connects with the corporate vision. In fact, doesn’t Psalm 73 say just that? Before the Psalmist went to church he was jealous of the wicked, he saw that they had everything his flesh wanted, and they didn’t have any problem using other people to obtain all they could from life. He lost the corporate vision he had because his personal vision was inward. Once he went to church, however, that personal vision became rightly related to God and his corporate vision was restored because he could see the end result. That didn’t come from looking inward but outward.

I have been thinking about this more and more recently and it’s really remarkable. Please don’t stop being around God’s people. Get to a place where there is a corporate vision and where your personal vision is encouraged and cultivated. That’s where we see the result of our walk of faith and that’s what encourages us to keep going.

Please pray for the second half of this school year that will quickly come and go. Pray for my students to have an outward vision, and pray that we encourage each other to keep going to that place where the corporate vision is manifested.

December 2017

As I write this, it’s snowing. That statement is completely irrelevant but it’s ok. I think this newsletter will jump around a bit.

GGIS normally has a chaplain but since our last one moved we haven’t had anyone to fill that role. I decided (secretly) that I would take on the job of speaking to every student in the high school. So far I have spoken to about ten percent of the high school students. It’s been incredible. Two of those students have accepted Christ and another one I have to follow up with this week. He is a Chinese boy in 11th grade who has really been questioning his family’s religion of Buddhism since he entered GGIS. When we spoke on Friday we talked about karma and how God doesn’t see us in terms of good and bad. It’s actually really good that I am speaking to him now because he is in my Bible class and we were talking about how God views our self-righteousness. I said that in Buddhism every one is kind of neutral, but then can choose to be good or bad. In Christianity, without Christ, we are just bad and the only way to produce good is to first accept Christ. It’s a heart change. I think a lot of Chinese people can feel stuck, I know you and I can, and think that everything good that we try to do always just turns out bad. In fact, isn’t that what Paul said in Romans 7? The things I want to do I can’t but the things I hate doing I find myself doing over and over and over? We don’t need to chase after perfection, just accept that God sees us as perfect in Him. After this time together, he thanked me and said that it was the most convincing thing he has heard yet as to why he should become a Christian. Please be praying for him.

Last week I spent Thanksgiving with my friends, Tim and Myriah who also invited about 20 other Americans over. We had two turkeys and a ton of other food. It was a wonderful time of fellowship. God is really doing things here in the life of the GGIS team. I think there are ebbs and flows in team life where people can go into hibernation and then come out again. It seems we are coming out again. I am so thankful for Tim and Myriah and all that they do here. On Friday nights they faithfully open their home to all of the GGIS staff who want to come over. We eat and play games and talk about the things God is doing. It’s so necessary.

I recently preached a message about negativity with our teen group. Studying for that message was amazing. The more I studied, the more I realized what an impact negativity and positivity can have on our lives. God never called us to be pessimistic and negative. He called us to declare His works. Is that what I am doing? I hope so. I need to focus on Him and His life and then that negativity fades away. The other thing I was thinking about was that negativity is just a manifestation of me not getting my way. Think about Jonah. He saw the works of God but instead of realizing how awesome what happened in Nineveh was, he simply pouted because he didn’t get what he wanted. Hebrews 12:15 says “see to it that no one fails the grace of God and by it a root of bitterness springs up in your soul.” If you recall, Jonah sat under his root of bitterness because in his eyes, the people of Nineveh, and God for that matter, had failed him. When my expectation for people isn’t met, I can become negative, but when I have God’s mind, people don’t need to meet my expectation. I can actually “see to it” that people aren’t put in a place in my brain to fail the grace of God. This allows me to live in positivity about things, rather than negativity.

I am so stirred up about this. God is doing mighty things. I am so proud to be a part of this.

November 2017

Have you ever been angry? Like really angry? You feel your blood pressure rise, your head starts pounding, your scalp starts to burn. It happens to everyone once in a while. It happened to me this past month. I was mad about a situation that I had no way to fix. I tried to calm down, I went for a walk, I thought my situation over and over and over with different scenarios, but there was nothing that I could do about it. Honestly, I simmered like this for a couple days before I realized that God had a plan in it. I don’t think this is a great epiphany or anything. We know that God works all things together for good, that He has a plan for every situation, but still, in that moment, in my anger, God comforted me. My perspective changed. I readjusted to God’s mindset and my outlook in the face of this problem changed.

I have been thinking more and more recently about God’s plan and the way He directs and shapes circumstances in life to draw us to Himself. We always have a choice to accept His leading or reject it, but God wants to use everything that happens to me as a way to get to know Him in different ways. My situation that angered me so much was one of those ways.

Also, this past month I celebrated my birthday. My students all know my birthday (I tell them weeks in advance… I’m an only child), and I had lots of cards and classes sang to me, but I also had one very special surprise. At lunch time, I had a feeling that people were trying to get me out of my classroom. I usually work through lunch because I teach before and after and those thirty minutes are a nice time to prepare. Anyway, the middle school science teacher came into my room and asked if I would go downstairs with him. Ok, I see what’s going on. My 8th grade girls are all standing in the lobby, not in the cafeteria where they should be, whispering and suddenly becoming quiet as I walk by. Ya, something is up.

We sat awkwardly in the teacher’s lounge for a few minutes before I asked if I could go back up to my room. We both figured that enough time had passed that it wouldn’t appear like I knew what was going on.

The bell rang and as I walked down the hall toward my room I could see that the lights were off and there were banners and balloons hanging from the walls. I could see the tops of a dozen heads behind the desks. As I walked in they all popped up and yelled surprise. It was the best surprise party I have ever had. 

I don’t know how to describe what I feel for my students. I feel like their parent, their sibling, and their friend all at the same time. I didn’t get a picture of it, but on one of my white boards the wrote, “We Love You, Mr. Cook”. I love them too.

This is why I need my perspective to line up with God’s mind. God loves these kids more than I do and He is using me to help them get to know Him.