Hello everyone! Greetings from Szolnok, Hungary! This is an exciting update for us to write and we hope it will be one for you to read. It’s a major time of change and new beginnings, in both our ministry and our family. Over all, the foundation of the church plant in Szolnok is slowing being laid, our family is settling into our flat in Szolnok, and our faith is growing day by day. Praise God for His faithfulness and His amazing ways.Our time in Eger might have come to an end, but not the work. God is continuing to work through the body there and produce a lot of great fruit! Nick, the pastor, recently made a blog post sharing how the people in the church decided to start a fast for the Szolnok church planting. As Nick reports it, "One of the guys in our church, Peti, had it on his heart that we would pray and fast as a church, and he organized a prayer and fasting chain. I was glad to see his initiative and the church working organically - something I have been seeing more and more, and which I consider a good sign of maturity and a healthy church." This is an awesome growth report on their maturity and desire to serve the Lord individually!
Over the past few months, I worked with Dani to slowly transition all of my major responsibilities and things went amazingly well. Dani is now helping Nick with the first part of the planning for this summer’s English Camp and leading the worship team to an even tighter walk with the Lord. He even held a worship night last weekend which was a real blessing to the people in the church. Lastly, I was able to assist in purchasing an all new sound system for the church before I left. It is a simple set up with just two 250w speakers and a 12 channel board, but it is way more then we needed and is a huge blessing to set up and use.
Some hard things have happened in the fellowship these past few months however. Nick and Rosemary’s second child, Felicia, had a very hard birth and is still recovering. However, the Lord has truly done a miracle in restoring her to life and healing her almost completely, all while using Nick and Rosemary’s witness through the trial to reach many people with the power and grace of God. It’s been a hard time for the Cady family, to be sure, but the church has really rallied to their side and they are doing well now. If you are interested in reading more about the whole situation, you can check out their web blog at http://nickandrosemary.blogspot.com/Another hard thing, but much easier to deal with for sure, is we lost our online archive of teachings from the website. Somehow the code linking all our teachings was lost. In a way, it is a blessing because we were sorely in need of organizing and standardizing our files, but we are still working on restoring everything to it’s previous (or better) state. As of now, we have re-located and standardized most of the teachings from 2006 on and linked them back into the site with a simple code. It was a lot of work but the perfect time, in a way, for it to happen as I had a lot of time to devote to it. We hope to have everything completely set up again soon in addition to a cool new function for downloading the entire books.
As for things in Szolnok, we are doing well here so far. We did our big move on March 1st and God really blessed it. The weather was nice, which was a shock because we had snow before and right after! A friend of ours was able to lend us a large box-truck to move everything so it only took us one trip. Also, getting everything into the flat was hard, but we were able to get it done without too much trouble and nothing breaking! Truly it was a miracle and we are thankful for the prayers and help of everyone involved. Nick, Rosemary, Dani, Allert, and even little Nate helped a lot!
Now we are settling into the work here in Szolnok and making our flat a home. Marianna is nesting at full steam and I am doing my best to keep up with her. I’ve been able to squeeze in time for things like designing a church website for Szolnok, meeting with some local people who are friends or family of people I know in Eger or Debrecen, and beginning to look for a possible place for our meetings. Also, God has blessed me with a new job as an English teacher for a primary school where I work four hours a week. It’s not much, but it’s enough to cover what we need for now.We’ve had the chance to speak with a few of the church leaders in the town and discovered there is an existing strong working relationship between the churches here, which is awesome to hear. Even the Catholic church here seems to be interested in working with the protestants, which is quite refreshing after the situation in Eger. We also had a really blessed meeting with a Methodist church in town which welcomed us with open arms and even offered their buildings for our meetings. This was far above and beyond what I had hoped or expected to be honest! I also learned of an American missionary who used to run Christian camps here in Szolnok and have been attempting to contact him.
Despite these blessings, we still feel there is a real lack of Bible teaching churches and outreaches in this town in relation to the population. I am praying for more opportunities to meet church leaders in the community, to establish solid relationships with the ones I have met, and that God would fashion a strong sense of fellowship between us rather then a spirit of competition. I really feel that it is critical for this area that the churches, few as we are, work together to reach out and minister to the community. There are some obstacles to this, to be sure, but our God is above them all and His love is what unites us.
As for me personally, I really enjoyed the settling time in Szolnok as I was able to find more quiet time to study my Bible and pray then before. After the business of our last few weeks in Eger, the slower pace has really been refreshing. Now, however, I can barely seem to keep myself from working all the time. I even started writing a daily devotional blog based on what I read in my devotional time each morning to get some of my ideas out of my head and down onto some "paper." If you are interested, you can check it out at http://dailyshanethoughts.blogspot.com/. I’m hoping this will help me to not only keep up with my devotional studies but produce something useful for the future work here.
Some other good news is we now know for sure that our little baby is a girl! We’ve already decided on a name and we are slowly adjusting to calling the baby by that name rather then saying "it" or just "baby." Emily, as we are calling her, is a really active baby already and loves to give me back massages while we sleep. The doctors are saying she is perfectly healthy and doing great, which is always great to hear. She still loves to dance a lot, which makes Marianna wince now, but we think we’ll still keep her. We can’t believe it will only be 5 more weeks and Emily will be out here with us! The baby clothes are already washed and waiting, but it’s still so hard to wrap you head around that change! We are super excited though! Please be praying as the time draws closer for Marianna and Emily that they would be healthy and calm. Also, please pray for me as many people in the hospital don’t speak English and I might have a lot of trouble communicating.Our goals for the next few months:
- Focus on finishing up the preperations for the birth of Emily, then adjust to being first-time parents!
- Strengthen ties with existing Christian groups in town.
- Work with Eger and Debrecen English camps in advertising for them in the local schools and assist in their preperations.
- Possibly help with the planning and/or runing of the Szolnok christian English camp.
- Establish an English club to create relationships for evangelism opportunities.
- The Daniels Family
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