Hello again!

It’s been almost halfway through my stay here in the United States. It took me about a day or two to start thinking in English, but now I’m even starting to think in the imperial units rather than metric. I guess it’s a good thing, since with most stuff I don’t need to pull out my phone and use the converter app anymore. By the way, this week was the first time I went to McDonald’s here. It’s just about a mile down the road from the church, but I really had no desire to go there for lunch or dinner. However, I kind of like their breakfast menu, so one morning we stopped by with pastor. Ok, their breakfast menu is slightly different here than back home. Not that it wasn’t good, but we got it better.

But I should get to the more important things. Last Sunday I was asked to sing the Lord’s prayer in Slovak during the service. Years ago (in term of pastors, three or four pastors ago) there used to be a Slovak service in this church, so many people were delighted to hear it again. I was really glad to do it, it was an honor. Then, right after the service, I went to one of the churches in a nearby town. They have a pretty big Slovak population over there and they wanted to meet me. They had a series of questions for me and than, after we finished, I aggreed to pray the Lord’s prayer in Slovak with them. However, pastor pulled out a sheet of paper with a phonetic transcription of the old, biblical Czech version. Sorry, I’m not really familiar with that one. So I just prayed the one I had known all my life. In the evening me, pastor Eric and Leah went to have a dinner with Michnays, two sisters from the church. Their brother is a pastor, he’s coming for a visit the next week, but I will be already in Pittsburgh by the time he comes here. By the way, the pork roast was delicious.

We had the intern committee meeting last week, I got asked what the church can do better the next time they will have an intern. There wasn’t much to tell them, in fact I found it hard to find at least one thing. It’s just great here, I really learned a lot and experienced even more. All I can say is that I am incredibly grateful for being here.

The rest of the week was full of meetings and travels. I got invited for a dinner by Jeff, the church organist. He had traveled quite big part of the world and he has an actual organ at home! Then I had three big, all-day trips. One was with pastor Eric to Columbus. He showed me the seminary he studied at, it’s a beautiful place. We had a lunch with Dr. Powell, one of the professors from the seminary and we visited one of the local hipster third-wave coffee shops (yes, exatly the kind of coffee shop I like).

Other all day trip was the Cleveland’s world-wide famous Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Now this was quite an experience. If rock and roll was a religion, that place would probably contain more relics per a square foot than any other place on the earth. Fortunately those are just artifacts such as famous musician’s outfits, song manuscripts and instruments, no body parts. That day was finished with a great dinner at the Fat Head’s, one of the most famous local breweries.

The final all day trip was a bike ride with Mohlers in the Cuyahoga Valley. What I found most interesting was a beaver marsh. It used to be an old car junkyard, but beavers built a dam and made it a marsh. Good for them. Besides biking we took a historic train for a few miles, it actually reminded me of some of the old trains that we still use in Slovakia, except this one was air conditioned. But we are getting better. during the four years I travel almost every weekend to the college and back the old trains almost disappeared. Almost. By the way, during the rest of the day my knees felt like falling apart, but it was well worth it.

Today (Saturday) was a sermon writing day. I was thinking about the lessons all week and it was kind of hard to write a sermon about Jesus being a Bread of life when there’s no communion tomorrow, but with God’s help I somehow managed to write it. In the evening Kim and Ken took me to a steak house for a dinner, that was probably the best steak I ever had. By the way, I’m getting totally tired, so see you next week.

God bless you!