Sights of Plovdiv

I got a chance to tour the city of Plovdiv, one of the oldest cites in Europe. It had many, many beautiful sights, including a view of the sunset from one of the hills in the city center. The smells of Dönners and the bustle of 600,000 made it for a feast for all the senses, especially the eyes. Vast Roman ruins have been uncovered here and the city is taking measures to keep them well preserved. The ancient city wall has also been restored in many places and the homes of the "Bulgarian Renaissance" have been restored to give an idea of what they looked like in the late 1800s after Bulgaria gained independence from the Turks. Look for more photos as I have time.

Bulgaria bound

Monday morning, June 14, Brent heads to Bulgaria to train the CEF® Bulgarian and Greek multimedia teams to use graphic design software. This will help both Bulgaria and Greece better create and produce materials that will evangelize children and help saved children grow in the Word.

Please pray for safe travels, problem-free equipment and wisdom and strength for Brent as he teaches between 8-10 hours a day. Pray too, for the four students who will be taking the course in English, that what is taught can be done clearly and effectively and they would have good understanding of what is taught.

Please also pray for Jen and the children as they are at home during this time.

Brent hopes to have a few updates as the week goes on, but we're not sure how often he'll be able to be online.

Thanks!

Every Day with God

We're excited to be working withCEF® International Headquarters to produce a daily devotional for young readers. The project, called "Every Day with God" will be a 30-day devotional book aimed at 6-8 year olds and will include a Bible verse, application, narrative/interactive, activity and prayer. This project is especially close to Jen and my heart since Amy will start reading in the next few years. The first book centers around the books of Genesis and Exodus. If things go well with the first book, (Lord-willing) we'll be producing six books in all, to be used around the world!

We've been working on the designs, which has been a monumental task. Coming up with several different ideas on one project can take a long time, and this was no exception. The initial designs were submitted this week, but I thought I'd give you a sneak preview of all three designs. Now it's up to the children to pick which one they'd like! It's so far been tested here in Switzerland with children from three different nationalities, and has been sent to several other countries for input from children. This is such an important part of the design process, because oftentimes adults think they know what the children like, but the designs children choose are often opposite of what the adults thought they would be. If you have children between 6-8, please show them all three of these designs and let me know what they thought of them!

Balancing act

Just a couple of weeks ago Jen took off the training wheels to Amy's bike and started teaching Amy how to balance herself. The first day, Jen let go for just a second or two. The following day, I went out, and Amy started going four, five, six seconds without me holding on. The next day, 10-15 seconds. Finally, we went over to the school and Amy took off, riding around in circles and shocking her daddy by how quickly she learned how to balance.

Next up … learning how to stop.

A new era

After 16 years as the Regional Directors for CEF in Europe, Roy and Ruth Harrison have handed the reigns over to Gerd-Walter Buskies. The handover took place at the Conference, and it was an amazing, yet bittersweet event. Bittersweet because of how close we have gotten with Roy and Ruth during our seven years at Kilchzimmer. They've been tremendous encouragers to Jen and I over the years. Yet it was joyful as we're very excited to have Gerd-Walter leading us. His energy, wisdom and insight are gifts from God which will allow CEF to continue reaching Europe's children. Please pray for Gerd-Walter – that God would guide his steps every day.

Photo of Gerd-Walter, Ruth and Roy Harrison by Markus Malzner. Used with permission.

Conference time!

On Monday, May 10, I got a chance to walk Amy to school for one last "goodbye." It was such a bittersweet time … knowing it would be more than a week before I see the family again, but at the same time knowing I'll be reconnecting with CEF® family members.

We arrived nearly four hours later at Schwäbisch Gmünd, and started our time stuffing our faces at a Chinese Buffet! Not the Jade in Harrisburg, but close. I remember smiling as I watched one

person in our party eat only fries and sweet and sour chicken. Oh, the tastes he missed! After overeating, we made our way to the conference center, Schönblick. This place is much larger

than the conference center in Rehe, where we've had the last several conferences. The main auditorium seated more than 1,000 people and had a fully stocked sound, lighting and video camera system. Needless to say it was much more advanced than anything I've ever tackled! After an hour-long training session with Uli, the main technician in Schönblick, I was off and running, operating the faders like a pro!

The conference staff got started getting everything ready: name tags, conference and prayer guides (in English, German and Russian) water bottles, contest inserts, toys for the children, mugs and pens, all going inside a special cloth bag. We had rooms to set up and equipment to load, and had a video chat with Jen and the children to let them know we arrived safely. Homesickness set in.

What kept me from blogging during the entire conference? 16-20 hour work days. My typical day at the conference was:

• 7:30 prayer time and staff meeting.
• Getting song slides ready for the two morning sessions and evening session. (this included fixing most of the songs as we realized we created the song slides to be used on a smaller projection screen.
• Putting slides together for several of the speakers.
• Ran the lights and multimedia presentations for the main sessions. (Keynote was the software I used, and it ran great!)
• Make announcement slides for the information desk.
• Taking photos (which didn't happen much – major kudos to Andrea Weir and Markus Malzner, who stepped up to the plate in my stead).
• Create door signs, print them out and put them at the correct places.
• Accepted photos for a photography contest and categorized all of them. Tim Shirey and I also selected the winners for the contest, which was pretty hard to do!
• Guided folks to the correct seminar room and helped set up A/V equipment.
• Practice for my seminar on "Better Presentations" which I gave on Saturday morning. (I also held another seminar on the Adobe Creative Suite and how I did a few of the more difficult things in my layouts of materials.)
• Had many short meetings with conference attendees to discuss anything from layout difficulties to training sessions to camera types.
• and lots of tiny details which I did, but forgot about. Whew. My head hurts just looking back at the list!

So how can I sum up the conference? It was the absolute busiest conference I've worked at so far, but it was by far the best. There's nothing like getting between 350-450 people together who have one goal – evangelizing children with the unchanging gospel of Jesus Christ. I'll use a few other blogs to share more specifics, but I am so thankful and grateful to have taken part in such a huge undertaking. Thank you for praying for us all during this busy time. I can't thank you enough for bringing myself and the whole family before the throne of Almighty God.

Photos courtesy of Markus Malzner and Andrea Weir.

Many irons in the fire

It's been nearly a month since our last post. The snow is gone, the grass is greening and the flowers are starting to pop up. Last Saturday we went to the indoor swimming pool in the town of Liestal with Ruth, a volunteer at Kilchzimmer. We had a blast, playing in the kiddie pool, swimming in the children's pool, going down the water slide and going outside in the heated pool where there's fountains and whirlpools. Unknown to me, I somehow tore a tendon in my right forearm. It didn't start hurting until Sunday, when I thought it was just muscle pain. By Wednesday, the pain was pretty bad, so we made an appointment with the doctor. Since it's a torn tendon, I'm supposed to be off work for a week. Unfortunately, there's too many irons in the fire right now for me to leave.

One project I've had is for the new program, "Church to Children" (C2C). It seeks to help churches get more involved in the evangelism of children through distributing Meet the King books and starting a Bible correspondence course. I was given the task of designing a logo for C2C. Talk about difficult. After pages of thumbnails and several different ideas, it wasn't going anywhere. It's tough making a logo for a single language. It's another thing to make a logo that looks correct in multiple languages for different cultures. In instances like this, imagery might not work. What kind of church do you use since the architecture of churches vary greatly from country to country. I had to use the typeface "Impact" to match with the other materials in the pack, so instead I stuck with just the words, but I wanted to show movement. Here's the result in four languages. Can you guess what they are?

I'm also swamped with materials for the European Conference such as the conference guide, music slides, nametags and multimedia templates.

The Kilchzimmer Echo is another project, which has turned out to be quite a challenge as my role as designer has been expanded somewhat to editor and co-writer. These new roles are not my forte, so I would really appreciate your prayers.

The largest project by far is the Good News Club® Resource Pack. I'll write more later about this large and important project.

Thanks for praying!

Trying out her gifts

Amy got a set of roller skates, a new helmet and elbow and knee pads for her birthday and she decided to try them out today. She did much better than her daddy ever did at roller skating! In just a few years we might tackle going from Olten to Solothurn togther – Brent on the bike and Amy on her skates. For now, Holderbank will do nicely!

Amy turns five!

We can hardly believe our little girl turned five this past week! It feels like we were bringing her home yesterday from the hospital. Amy delayed her celebration, having her very first party at school on Friday. She was the student of the day and got a chance to choose which order the children could go to sit at their seats. The boys and girls sang several birthday songs to her, each one made a special wish for her (one boy wished her a star) and she was the center of several games. We brought in cake for all the children and Christopher had a blast too.

God has blessed us with such a beautiful and healthy little girl, and we give all glory to Him!