Sunday Morning

Today we'll be headed to church at First Riga. But fist, here's what happened on Saturday...

Yesterday was the Apple Festival! We went out to the Wesley Camp, where about 50 children, youth and adults from the Latvian churches gathered for the apple harvest.

We picked apples by the bucket, while the older ladies sat in the dining hall peeling and coring them. Some people were tasked with pulling weeds in the flower beds, some with picking up the apples that had already fallen and couldn't be eaten to put in the compost pile. Some of the older men were gathered around a campfire cooking apples in a big pot (presumably for apple preserves). Others helped prepare the camp for winter by covering wooden platforms with tarp… and, sadly, the sign at the entrance to the camp was stored in the hay barn before we could get a picture of it.

Some of our team gathered near the kitchen to make batches of apple crisp from the recipe that Rachel Bell donated to the UMW cookbook. This was our contribution to the feast. It turned out great!
At some point, the work came to an end and we gathered upstairs for worship and fellowship. We got to know each other a little better by playing a game where everyone gathered in a corner of the room with others they had something in common with… age, music preference, dessert preference, etc.
We sang a couple of songs, and then people shared testimonies of how God had worked in their lives. Then we gathered in small groups for prayer.
We ended with rolling apples down the ramp. You roll your apple and then stand by it. When everyone was at the bottom of the ramp, they took a picture.
Then, it was time to eat! We gathered in the dining hall with the pastors from all the churches and listened while they shared their joys, challenges and dreams for ministry. This is a passionate group. They are excited about their ministries and hopeful for the future, but they do face great challenges, both in the communities they serve and in the church itself. I believe that they feel the same generation gaps we do, but they are amplified because of the small numbers. They also struggle to overcome the problems related to alcoholism and drug addiction in their communities. And, of course, there are the personal struggles with balancing home life and pastoring a church.
It was a great time of fellowship and sharing. The Latvian church is blessed to have such committed leadership.
After wrapping up things at the Apple Festival, we loaded up the bus and our two vans and started the 3-hour drive back to Riga. Conner and Madeline rode with the youth on the bus, and had a wonderful time of fellowship, singing, and learning more Latvian words!
Judy summed up the day in three words: “I was blessed.” 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

London, Too

Image
Thursday was our day of touring London with a guide on our bus. I've been to many of the key places in London, so I was glad to get a tour that told more about the different areas of the city and how they are changing. The area where our hotel is located is known as the "Silicon Valley" area of London... so you can imagine the people we've seen commuting by foot to work around here. All young(ish). I won't go over all of the places we drove through... if you've been to London you know and if you haven't you can imagine. We stopped at the Methodist Central Hall across from Westminster Abbey for a toilet break and hoping to see the inside. Unfortunately, the hall was booked for a conference and so all we did was have a coffee in the Wesley Cafe and use the toilet. This was one place I didn't get to go the last time I was in London, so I was happy to read a little more about it and go inside, even just for a minute. Central Hall was built ...
Read more

Epworth

Image
The first stop on our Wesleyan Tour was the small town of Epworth, where John Wesley was raised, baptized and became the man he was. I'm not sure how this town would be if it hadn't been for the Wesleys... it's almost as if they loved to hate Samuel Wesley and his family when they were living, but when they died or went away and became "famous" they became hometown heroes. I guess this would just be any-old little town if it weren't known for the Wesleys. We visited the rectory that was John Wesley's home (rebuit in 1709 after being destroyed by a fire that John himself barely survived). Among the displays there was a listing of what Susannah Wesley's day typically looked like... That's a lot more time for spiritual reflection than I would have thought. I wonder how many mothers of 10 children have a schedule that looks like this? A simpler time perhaps. So far, what I've learned of John Wesley makes me wonder whether I would ha...
Read more

Curiouser and Curiouser

Image
We slept in a little bit this morning and had brunch at the appropriately named Curiosity Coffee Bar, a highly-rated little place just a couple of blocks from the White Rabbit (our Alice-in-Wonderland-themed bnb). Curiouser and curiouser, we spent the rest of the day at the South Carolina State Library.  The library staff were quite accommodating of our multiple requests from the stacks (I don't have a pic of the big pile of books we left behind at the end of the day).  The things we're curious about make some people (Kef and Dad specifically) shake their heads. Today's finds included a listing of early settlers to South Carolina, among which was my 5 greats grandfather Samuel McGill, described among the "poor protestants lately arrived from Ireland on the encouragement of the Bounty given by this Province." His age was listed as 23, and he was granted that bounty of 100 acres. Although we knew he was born in Ireland, we didn't know what year. So this 1766 lis...
Read more