Waking to a world of white

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It was much lighter this morning when we woke than other mornings. It became apparent why when we peeked out our venition blinds and saw that about half an inch of snow had fallen during the night. I knew no wind had blown during the night as the snow lay on and outlined every branch of every tree within sight from our window.

We are in room F009. The “F” stands for building F and 009 is our room on the ground floor. The 100’s are on what we in the States call the 2nd floor, the 200’s are on the third floor and the top or 4th floor is where the rooms with numbers in the 300’s are located.

The Sunday worship service at IBTS begins at 10:45 and the word “international truely applies here. Individuals from such diverse countries as Armenia
, Israel, and the United States helped lead the service and in the congregation there were people from Poland, Estonia, Armenia, Israel, England, Canada, Hungary, Bulgaria and the United States. There may have been people from other countries, the ones listed are the ones I was aware of this morning. It was refreshing to realize that so many diverse cultures were present and all were happy to be there for a single reason, the worshiping of our God.

I was most interested in hearing the testimony of “D” the Arab Chistian who is a pastor of a Christian church in Hefei, Israel and how many Arab countries and communities, feeling it is an anti-Israeli movie, have sponsored the showing of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion.” He said that literally, “thousands of Arabs have seen this movie in Arab movie houses in numerous countries in the Mid-East”

I looked out the chapel window when the service was over and saw that large flakes of beautiful snow was falling. Children came into the chapel from their Sunday School classes smiling and laughing with snow covering their coats and their hair. No one enjoys snow more than children. Last year the first snows of winter fell here in January and continued until the end of March. Will this be repeated this year? If so we are going to see many snows before spring arrives.

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