Dear praying friends!

When we moved to Berlin in 2012, I knew that Thanksgiving was a holiday we celebrated in the United States to remember the harvest feast in 1621 between the Wampanoag people and English colonists in Plymouth, Massachusetts. It has always been one of my favorite holidays - with memories of the family gathering, often with people at the table who could not be with their family, Macy's Day Parade, Dad cooking in the kitchen, and us going around the table saying what we were thankful for.

So, even though I knew it was not an international holiday, I was surprised to find how challenging it can be to celebrate it in Berlin. It is not a national holiday, our ovens are rediculously small, Turkeys are crazy expensive, and it is almost impossible to find some ingredients - like canned cranberries (in a local Envision Berlin poll picked to be the best...)

We have always tried to celebrate it anyway, often on the actual day of Thanksgiving (as inconvenient as that can be) and then sometimes also on the weekend following in some way. So, tomorrow I am taking the day off so I can cook a giant feast, we will be gathering with our boys and their girlfriends and some friends, including some German neighbors in our building. As I am cooking and remembering all the things I am thankful for, I will also be thinking of you, and how grateful I am for your constant prayer support.

A couple of other BIG things for the coming week! Please be praying for the closing of our art sale on Friday night. 25 artists, more than 80 works - and a lot of them still need to be sold!

If you would like to give to support our building project, or know someone who would be interested in supporting using the arts to build relationships that draw people to the most important relationship with Jesus, you can always give through this link at the Alliance. You can also give here - through a service we use to process donations in Germany in a way to show special support for the art sale. This QR code will also take you there.

And - finally, we asked once again to be a part of our community's Living Advent Calendar. A local church that used to have the first open door on December 1st closed last year, so the organizer asked us if we would host on December 1st. We were incredibly honored, and on Monday night we will be welcoming people outside the window of our ground floor apartment as several friends and I play music from inside with our windows wide open as Elissa and another friend join from outside, serve our guests homemade cookies and hot beverages and we talk about "Hope", the theme for the first week of advent. Please pray for this event (and for my nerves - it is a lot of pressure being the first open door for an event that will run for 23 days in our community!)

Some other prayer requests:

1. Pray for the visa situation as we continue to try to find a way forward.
2. Pray for our son Caleb, as he writes the thesis for his Bachelor's degree.
3. Pray for all of the conversations we will have with artists in the next week.
4. Pray for the neighbors who will be gathering outside of our window on December 1st!

Thank you for praying!!

mike