A Warm Welcome.

I don't think I'll need to eat again for a few months after I get home. Seriously. Vicki is doing all of our cooking, and she's incredible. Yesterday we had tyropita and baklava for lunch and chicken and rice for dinner. Today she and a couple of other women from the church cooked stuffed green peppers and stuffed tomatoes. Oh my goodness. So tasty. We paired those with feta and tsaziki. We have bread at every meal. At church this morning one of the women (they call her the "church mama") gave us chocolates with hazelnut that she made for us when she woke up. Yum. For breakfast we are on our own, but our kitchen is stocked with anything we might want. We've been eating cereal, toast with honey and jam (and now nutella. We bought some.), ham and cheese, and leftovers (such as the tyropita with artichoke). We are very well cared for that's for sure.

It's obvious that God specifically put our team together. Rachel's family is from Mexico so she speaks Spanish. I wouldn't have said that would really be much of a help here in Greece but Vicki, her sister, and some of the other women in the church are from the Dominican Republic. Vicki has been here almost 30 years and is completely fluent in Greek, but since we aren't (yet), we speaks to Rachel in Spanish. I think it's a blessing for Vicki as well. She has to spend so much time with so because she does the cooking. I think she'd be very bored if she couldn't talk to us. And because we can communicate, she took us down to the harbor yesterday and the market today. Many of the Spanish speakers in the church joined us today for lunch. Camille said, "I'm so thankful that even though we speak three different languages we can still fellowship." What a God thing!

We have been reading questions from a book Rachel brought called If. One of them was, "If you had to nominate one person you've known personally in your life for sainthood, who would it be?" At the time, I couldn't really come up with anyone. Since the past few days, we've all agreed that we would nominate Vicki. She's a blessing to us, for sure. We are hoping to cook for her one night this week before we leave for Volos. We won't be staying at this church after Volos, but Vicki said that she'd like to invite us to her house one evening for dinner after we return. I'm serious, this woman is incredible.

At church this morning, Popi translated for us in the pew. It was a real challenge for her because there were seven of us and she was trying not to speak too loud. I didn't catch most of the sermon because of that. But I didn't even expect to have translation, so anything was awesome. I recognized some of the hymns we sang! The Koine Greek is coming most in handy in church. That's the vocabulary I know. I could translate quite a bit of the hymns, but I got lost when I tried to use my Greek New Testament. I'm excited to improve and learn more. Tyler got up and said a few words on behalf of the rest of us. He did a wonderful job with his phrasing so that it could be translated. He also wrote out one sentence in Greek that he could say as well as our theme verse (Philippians 2:13). The congregation clapped. He did an incredible job with pronunciation and everything! I would have frozen up.

Tonight we are going into town to Second Evangelical Church to hear the choir from Moody Bible College. We are all excited for that!

Tomorrow we are going to be working here at the church doing some organization and anything Pavlos needs for us to do.

I'm amazed. We've been here for two days. We haven't done any work per se and we are still infants in the language. Yet God is at work. His hand is in everything we do. We feel him. We're learning. He's directing our plans. We may not know much about what we'll be doing, but God does. It's a comforting thought.

καλησπερα, everyone!
In Him,
Kelsey