Our friend, Bryan Joyce called last night to get my sister’s telephone for one of their mutual friends. During our conversation it came up that an old friend of Bryan’s who is a member of our church had moved to the Prague in the Czech Republic with his wife to have an open home for our ministers working there. I mentioned that Kelly had been studying Russia over the last several weeks. One of her assignments was to write a one page report on one of the Soviet Russian satellite countries. When we talked about it, she decided she would write about the Czech Republic as I had been there on a business trip for about a week several years back. I had been impressed, stunned actually, with the beauty of Prague. After Kelly wrote her report she asked whether any of our ministers were over there. I had to tell her that at the time I was there, I believe there was only one pair of ministers with very few people attending their gospel meetings. So, when Bryan told me that his friends Jeff and Debbie Michaels had moved over there to teach English, I was quite excited.
This morning I found two emails waiting for me from Bryan. One of them was a photo of some people who had attended a special meeting in Prague with some of our ministers visting from Russia and other places. The other was a long account from the Michaels describing how that there were now more ministers working in Czech and that attendance at the gospel meetings had started to increase. It was a wonderful letter describing a little about how the Michaels live and some experiences they have had with their neighbors. We have asked Bryan to forward any of the emails he gets from over there with the idea of someday possibly visiting. I worked in the eastern Czech Republic close to both the Polish and Slovakian borders. It would be neat to back there some day with the idea taking the whole family along as a homeschool trip. It would even be a neater experience to spend a couple of semesters there with the idea of learning to speak Czech, Polish, or German.
What a privilege it must be for the Michaels to be able to help in the spread of the gospel at this point in their lives. Their kids are all grown and gone and they wanted to be useful. I spoke with Lorena about this and she agrees that it would be a super thing to be a help in the same way some place in the world. Maybe as the kids get older we can consider that more. Maybe under the right circumstances, we can consider that even sooner. Homeschooling is quite condusive to that sort of thing.