The End of the Sandbox Years

When we moved into Koinonia Community back in the summer of 2015, a key reason for our decision was that the house was awash in young school-age children. They would make ready playmates and, we hoped, friends for our daughter. She had just left her home, friends, and family behind for who knew how long. We all had. But Susan and I had decades of experience dealing with relocation and other disruptions to our establish patterns of life, our habits, likes, and loves. She was eight at the time. So, having that kind of cushion, others her age or close to it who could befriend her, seemed invaluable to us.

We were proved right, over the long term. The relationships did develop, and the Christian community house in the country outside of Augsburg became, even with the difficulties and struggles we have endured in the last eight (going on) nine years, a real refuge. The call to continue here in mission after the completion of the ministry that initially brought us here, the Wittenberg 2017 Initiative, has meant that our daughter and we have grown out of her childhood and into the late teenage years here in Germany, and that has brought us through challenges as individuals, as a family, and for Susan and me, in our ministries. But walking around the house this past week, I was reminded that time has really passed and things have really changed. When we moved in, there was a small children’s play-yard with a sandbox, swing, and small treehouse over on the southwest corner of the property. At the last house meeting, we faced the reality that none of the children still living in the Koinonia House were of an age where the play-yard had much attraction left to them. So, we decided to remove it, and… far sooner than I expected, the swing, the treehouse, and the sandbox have all been removed.

Not only had I known the event was coming, I had approved of the decision behind it and realized it was sensible. Nevertheless, the impact of seeing the hole in the ground where the sandbox had been was to hit me with a wave of unexpected sadness and loss. There are many poems and songs lamenting the passage of childhood- one’s own, or that of one’s children- and they range from the profound to the merely maudlin, but what that gap in the earth means in this case is that our ministry is changing along with that of the community we’ve lived in for eight years. We are doing child and youth work still in the house, though Susan and I are not involved at this time, and the house has been a refuge for a small group of Ukrainians who had fled the war in their country. What the future shape of ministry will be for Koinonia will be is a question for prayer. As are the changes in our own ministries.

Ministry Continuity, Growth and Changes

We continue in the morning shift of the Gebetshaus Augsburg Mondays through Thursdays in the 8 to 10 AM session, with different foci of intercession each day, and we are in Israel Prayer every Friday afternoon. Our calling to pray for Israel and the Jewish people abroad are also expressed in our work for Toward Jerusalem Council II, Germany… you could pray about that, too. One of my tasks is to maintain the website and it is not going well right now. I have spent hours trying to correct the problems and bring it back online, to no avail as yet. Right now because I have other pressing responsibilities with CrossExamined.org.

If you are unfamiliar with that ministry, you can read about it here. It is one of two apologetics-focused ministries in which I am engaged as a translator and, in the near future, will be working as a „content creator“ (current internet argot for „writer“, I’ve been told). The other ministry is the California-based Reasons to Believe. You can follow this link to the ministry’s English page and this one to RTB’s German page.  The translations in the latter are mine. It is worth noting a healthy development in apologetics I’ve seen in the last five years, too. These ministry organizations and others- Reasonable Faith, Stands to Reason, and The Discovery Institute for Science and Culture just to name a few- are collaborating more frequently and to a greater degree than has been seen often in the past. Please pray that the work of all these ministries be empowered through the Holy Spirit to demolish arguments that set themselves up against the knowledge of God (2 Corinthians 10:5).

Recommended Reading

First Things has an excellent issue this month: https://www.firstthings.com/

And our friends at Salvo have produced another stellar issue: https://salvomag.com/ . I especially recommend the articles by Witt, Gonzalez, and Kennedy in that one.

My own work? Well, the most recent short story accepted was published in Volume 3 of the Pin-Up Noir series from Raconteur Press. The Story? „Jared Thorne and the Tech Smuggler’s Son.“

The second-most recent can be found in Space Cowboys 404: Cow Not Found, and it is a continuation of the Patel family’s story set on the colony world of Herschel III which appeared in Moggies in Space .

I am also doing a final round of editing on Charis Colony: The Battle for McGuire Point. It will be published on Kindle yet this summer, God willing.

That’s all for now. The Lord bless and protect you.