Marching straight through Spring

I haven't updated everyone in a while.  I forget that while I get to talk with many people through Facebook, there are those who aren't on there.

It has been a busy Spring.  We have taken a few trips to visit places such as a Monkey Mountain and a reconstructed prehistoric village built on the Bodensehe (a lake).  The Monkey Mountain was interesting, but kind of weird.  All these little monkey's were wandering around, as they aren't caged up.  You could feed them, but I had a difficult time doing that.  When you're so close to these animals, you really see the human-like features and it seems strange to be treating something that looks so human as an animal.  I can see how evolutionists think we evolved from monkeys.  

The village was also quite interesting.  Those who had rebuilt it decided to do somewhat of a reality television series, putting several families and a few single men together to live in this village for a certain period of time.  They were required to live as they were in the time period these villages were found to be in.  I watched a little bit of the show, and I found it interesting that what the children enjoyed most about the experiment was having everyone sleeping together in one big room.  I know as a child I loved to have sleep overs with my cousins, or even just have my brothers and sisters all in one room.  The highlight of being at my grandparents cabin is having all the cousins sleep in the loft together.  Children desire unity.  They don't want to be alone.   And yet we think it's the end of the world when we aren't able to give each child their own bedroom.  

This last week we went to visit the Flossenburg concentration camp which, among other things, was the camp where Deitrich Bonhoeffer was hung.  This camp memorial is hardly as difficult to see as the larger ones, such as Auschwitz, but it was still an intense experience.  To see the area where it's at, you would never think that something so horrific could happen in such a beautiful area.  There are trees and hills all over, looking very similar to the scenery in the third Harry Potter movie.  When the war was over, people immediately started tearing down the camp and building over it so there are very few original buildings.  However, the place they called "Death Valley" was intact enough to be sickening.  There was a mound where bones and ashes were and part of the wall where scores of people were executed.  The most chilling part of this area was the crematorium with the original oven and dissection table still in the building.  Walking on the ground where so much hatred and suffering happened felt nearly surreal at times.  

Over the last month or so, a few families including our own have been discussing starting a church.  We would use my home since it's so large.  It has been really exciting to get this started from the ground up.  My family church planted for years as I was a child and we had experience doing home church as well.  We have a pastor now as of about two weeks ago and will hopefully get started with services in the next month.  The pastor lives three hours away and will be bringing some people from his other church to help get things going, so the logistics of how they will regularly be getting here will take a little bit of time to work out.  But we are all excited to see what God does!