Maxime

This is Sebastian and his wife. He conducts our Watchtower in English even though they're from Sweden.
It could have been the language barrier.  Or we could blame the tile induced echos of our sound system.
But one thing's for sure, he didn't hear my name correctly when I said it. The result was, I got a new name.
Maxime. The whole meeting. I liked it. It's like my alter ego. Thanks Sebastian!

 Love, Maxime

The Non-Crisp 

This is from our pioneer meeting. We had three languages meeting at once! Then we all had coffee and dessert together. The Russians were very happy to get their meeting in their own language, since there are no meetings in Russian here. The meeting was lovely. Joe, from England, reassured us that there was no way to look "crisp" here. Just look as nice as we can. He also explained why the meetings for the Thai language class would be so early (they start at 7:30 in the morning). The classes are an hour and a half long and then we go out in service after. I asked why we couldn't do it later in the day. He said they didn't want to meet with a room full of smelly people. 

A point we really liked from the meeting was made by Glenn from Australia. He said to imagine how Jehovah feels when he looks down and sees a world full of selfish people motivated by greed. Then, he sees us, right in the middle of it, being self sacrificing and giving what little we have out of love for his name. What we do might seem small but it sticks out like a sore thumb in this world. 

Also the Bible reading this week made me think about  what happens when we put our trust in Jehovah. When Peter stepped out on the water, I usually picture him sinking and the subsequent rebuke by Jesus. But this time it struck me that he walked on water. What were fishermen more scared of than storms? The sea was a formidable enemy and he got to look it straight in face and triumph over it. He stepped out on the water and lived, without any way of knowing how it was happening. And he wasn't alone, he got to walk with God's son. He took a walk with Jesus across a raging sea. That is an unbelievably extraordinary experience. His willingness to get his feet wet led him to one of the most memorable experiences of his life and really, one of the most unique had by any human. 

So for me the lesson is, when we trust in Jehovah to support us, we will have a memorable experience. We won't know how Jehovah makes us successful, but it will be clear that he is the one doing it. We too can walk with Jesus into the most memorable experience of our lives...if we step out of the boat.

One final pic of all the pioneers! Jehovah gives us a big beautiful family. Tonight Eungin (the half of a   head to the left of mine) and Natasha (the redhead with sunglasses in the middle) came over to learn English. I gave my first lesson! We acted and sang and I tried to answer questions like, why do we say "in front of" but not "in behind of"? The answer is simple really. Because I said so. BUT WHY? Because it's english. So I need to look into to learning my own grammar while i'm here so that I can teach it online. NOT as easy as I thought. Good to practice on friends though.