Got a sweet, hot little something for a rainy day in Tucker. Also, I got a latte.
Well, after four days touring and three nights sleeping in Europe’s premiere airports, I am back in Atlanta. It was a hard journey – harder on my poor passport, which now shows me entering and leaving Switzerland twice without ever entering another country. Such is the danger of traveling standby, I suppose. But sitting in Mighty Joe Espresso, Shalynn by my side, is worth the trip.
The last month at Unterwegs was nothing short of fantastic – thus the lack of blog updates recently. We had Thanksgiving dinner with 70 of our closest friends, and then two weeks later we had our first official Unterwegs Thursday night – a Christmas program with a skit, a band, and a video – and we had a crowd of 60 show up to that. Thus we begin our arrival from the dark, seething, ill-defined, chaotic sea of outreach to one of our first ports of call: Structure.
As a part of our new “Structure” feature, last Thursday I presented a two-minute talk on what Unterwegs is at the end of our program. It went something like this (only in German):
A lot of people are still trying to figure out what Unterwegs is. On the one hand, we are a Christian group, but we’re not a church. On the other hand, the atmosphere here is genuine and exciting – we have parties, activities, and games, but we’re not a disco, we’re not a dorm or a flat, and we’re not a bar. So what are we?
Well, first there is the Unterwegs house. The house is open for you – you can come here to do homework, to eat, to play guitar, to have coffee, to sleep, or to do nothing – it’s here for you. And, there is always one of us here at the house – which means there is always one of us here for you.
But Unterwegs is more than the house – it’s the group of people here. You can read the words we have on the wall downstairs, but the sum of it is: we are a group of students and young people bound by the love of Jesus, which means that every person is welcome here, every person is accepted, and every person is loved. It’s that simple.
And thus began the next step on our exciting journey :)
December 18th, 2009 at 10:43 am
Schön! Begrüße an Shalynn.
December 21st, 2009 at 8:33 am
Chandler, with school finally over for the semester I’m
taking time to catch up on several things – Globalscope
Germany included. Great words about unterwegs. It is
hard to believe you all have accomplished so much in
such a brief period. By the way, as a “southern to the
bone” boy – I liked your essay on that subject as
well. wh