{meredith in paris in december}

Some really fantastic things happened in December:

I traveled to Étretat, FR with 5 awesome ladies.

I visited this friend and celebrated Jesus' birthday with her.

Floranie is my friend and incidentally my French language partner. She is kind, gracious, hospitable and grossly overestimates my technological capabilities. She has twice asked me to help her fix up her fancy new TV to her cable and a DVD consol. Neither time was I successful, woops.

I taught 5 full 1 1/2 hour French lessons to 20+ North African women. I'm sure I made numerous mistakes, but nothing too grave.

I continued working with my friend L on English lessons. She still struggled pronouncing the English "-th" and "h" sounds and I struggled figuring out how to teach that. We laughed a lot, drank lots of tea and she fed me many many apple pastries after I told her I love apples.

I met weekly with the ladies from my team for fellowship, prayer and time in the Word together. We are going through 1 Corinthians right now.

Our team had a Christmas party at my supervisor's house and I made THIS:

Brittany, Ruth Ann and I made 12 plates filled with home-made banana bread, chocolate covered pretzels, clementines and sweet candies and gave them to neighbors in our building, our local bakery owner, and our land-lord. We gave them the plates, wrapped up in green bows along with Christmas cards explaining the birth of Jesus in French. We prayed over these plates as we passed them out and it was a fun opportunity to meet some families we've only seen in passing and to let them know that we love them and want to be active in our community and in our building! I'm praying that in the following months, with warmer weather and warmer demeanors we will be able to spend time outside of our building meeting women and girls who are our neighbors.

I met with a small group of women each representing different "sending" organizations. We are all here doing similar work with the same people group and this was a time of sharing and encouragement as well as training for discipleship and ev work. It's such a blessing to be able to partner with other like-minded believers on this side of the world!

I went to England to see Jon. We bought Spongebob drum sticks for a 3 year old friend, drank beaucoup of tea, played games with English friends, played games with American friends, cooked foods that reminded us of home and took a fairly hectic trip back to Paris via boat via bus.

Lots of wonderful friends came to visit us and spend the beginning of the New Year in Paris. We reflected on God's faithfulness to us in our present countries and his faithfulness to us throughout the year. We spent Sunday studying Hebrews together and singing songs in English in my living room and we spent New Years Eve walking through the months of 2012 sharing happy and sad memories but all that reflected the goodness of God. It was a sweet time and I'm so thankful for this time with them.

December was full and draining, but ultimately left me Full.

The Father reminded me of and renewed my joy through the advent season reflecting on the gift of His Son to humanity. I learned about Peace, about joy, and a lot a lot about obedience.

Thank you for remembering me during this time, for sending sweet Christmas cards and tweets and emails and for supporting the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering. You are each a huge blessing to me.

summertime.

This weekend was packed full of fun things. Saturday we had a car wash to raise money for youth camp which is in a few weeks and immediately afterwards, we had a Spirit Night at Chick-fil-A. I'm talking about a total of 6 hours of fundraising. It was ridiculous and very VERY hot outside, but a good time with some of the youth.

The youth group I'm working with is really small compared to Shades. We have around 15 kids on an average night. There are 3 High Schoolers who attend regularly so that leaves us with a LOT of middle schoolers. It's cool to get to put into practice what I learned working at camp last summer. I worked at an 8th and 9th grade summer camp last year which taught me a lot about being intentional and building relationships with Middle Schoolers.

Sunday nights is when we have youth group and we meet in a big group and David (the youth leader) goes over what we will be discussing and looking at for the night. We then break up into MS girls, HS girls, MS boys, HS boys and me, Landon (other intern), David and Jen (David's wife) each take a group. I have had the Middle School girls and have been blown away the past few weeks with the discussion we have had. Last week we talked about pride and envy and the story of Moses, Aaron and Miriam and this week we centered in on greed and gluttony in relation to the manna that God provided for the Israelites. God has been so near in those discussion times and they have been really sweet moments for me and the girls. I'm really looking forward to getting to know them more as the summer goes on.

Here are some prayer requests for the summer:
1. Pray for Life Community Church. We have two more weeks in our current building (an old school house) and after that we have to move to a new location. Pray for wisdom and discernment for Jay the pastor and for the sustenance of the church body as a whole.
2. Pray for Student Life (the youth group). Please pray that the Lord would touch and move in these student's hearts in a way that would leave them thirsty for more of Him. Pray that their hearts would be guarded from the distractions and sins that summertime can bring.
3. Pray for me as I pray through leading a separate bible study with the High School girls and as I seek fellowship with the women in the church. Also pray that my heart would be guarded against Satan's attacks at my joy in Christ and my pride.