The middle of the week has, once again been busy and productive.  It has included meetings and studies with an interesting combination of people, venues, and attitudes towards faith.  I’ll share a couple of highlights to illustrate the diversity of opportunities.  Tuesday included an intensive discussion with one of the young Christians, as per his request, about the relationship between grace and the client- patron system of the Greco-Roman world.  Other opportunities included use tech to work with folks over here I still don’t have personal access to.  At the other end of the spectrum, one three-hour study was conducted on a protracted walk. This is really a nice break from sitting in my flat or even a café to study. Topics ranged from fellowship, to how to teach young people, to addressing some personal issues. One opportunity even had me helping inspect a construction project.  

Sandwiched between all of this was putting the final, final touches on the details for the Kamenice Study as well as spending some time working on my presentations for that week.  

On a bit of a darkly humorous note, the impact of Covid is still being seen. At lunch one day in the outside seating area of a restaurant, I had a couple of the bread crumbs from the fried fillet “go down the wrong way.” I began quietly coughing.  It was in a village where the coke still comes in the 8 oz bottles, so I didn’t want to finish it off to try to wash it down. So, I continued to cough.  As I did so, my lunch companion began to glance around at the other tables. Trying not to laugh and cough is difficult, so I continued to do both- more loudly.  His looking around took on added intensity.  As it did so, my coughing and laughing kicked up a notch. Finally, he gave me his drink to finish off.  I had been eye-balling it anyway. As talked about it later, he said he wasn’t even consciously aware that he had been uneasily looking around. It’s interesting how patterns of behavior can develop without us being aware of them.  Let’s try to be introspective enough to recognize and evaluate ours.