Daniel – Shay Thomason

Today marks five months in Czech. The sad thing is, from the time we got here we’ve been trying to have Daniel over for dinner. Daniel and I work closely in the Creative Communications team and he specializes in the video work we do and does an incredible job. It only took five months, but tonight we had the pleasure of having him over for dinner and Bethany cooked my favorite, lasagna. Daniel even brought gifts for the kids, which was really nice and they were having fun spending time with him too.

Later after dinner we had some time just to play worship songs together. There have only been a few other times for me to spend time playing guitar and singing with someone else so I really count it as a special time. That’s probably something I miss from the States.

Daniel was here during Bible reading tonight and caught this little photo of me and the kids.

Bethany was saying later after Daniel left that it’s just nice to talk and process with someone who came on the field around the same time as us. Daniel got here a little more than a month ahead of us, so in many ways we feel like we’ve all been here about the same amount of time. One thing that is consistent between us, I think, is that there truly is a process to this transition. Nothing feels normal. In fact, I’ve kind of lost sight of what exactly normal is anymore. Even as we talked tonight Daniel was talking about the grocery store and how he’s starting to feel like that’s not as hard as it was in the beginning. But even without saying it, we can all agree it’s still pretty hard!

At the end of the day, I’m thankful to be transitioning alongside other missionaries like Daniel. His experiences are different that ours, but it’s nice to be able to talk and just think through it together. Just like the Christian life in general, we’re doing this alongside others with the same focus: to see others come to Christ. Praise God for that!

One of the great pleasures of being part of Josiah Venture is serving with a team that not only loves Jesus a whole, but are a pleasure to work with and are great at what they do. Two of those teammates, John and Daniel, are who I spent the day with today. I spend a lot of days with these guys, but today was just different. Instead of meeting at the Josiah Venture office, we decided to hang out at another house where Daniel is house sitting (Mel and Amy’s house) and we had a lot of fun just being together and being creative. We had a fire going in the house, fresh coffee, and Daniel brought in some fresh croissants for us to munch on.

Our plan today was to really work through some final design work for next year’s camps. The camp design is something that will be seen and used by literally thousands of people, especially young people on flyers, t-shirts, and banners. Camps are such a big part of what Josiah Venture does and every year many young people hear the gospel for the first time and begin to follow Christ. Local churches in 14 countries will use the material that we create to go and invite students to camp where they learn music, English, sports, and always hear the Good News. It’s a joy for our team to create materials that will bless our staff and be used as a tool to eventually bring young people to a place where they hear the gospel.

Back on the home front Titus attended his second day of preschool. It was fun dropping him off again and feeling more comfortable. Like Wednesday, we had no issues and Titus didn’t cry or get upset when we left. However, Bethany was just a few minutes late picking him up today and he was pretty sad. He told me, “Mommy didn’t come so I cried and cried.” I just laughed. She wasn’t THAT late, pal. He also told me the class went for a walk, but outside of that I don’t know what else happened. I’m glad he’s doing good and hopefully starting to adjust. We’ll continue to have him go three days a week for now and reevaluate it at some point.

I did the grocery shopping tonight by myself. Shopping is still a hilarious experience because there’s so much I don’t know. I end up calling Bethany on the phone five or six times asking, “Wait, what does half and half look like? What kind of package does it come in?” “I have no idea where to find cottage cheese.” “How do I know if the grapes are seedless?” Tonight was an ever bigger challenge because when I got to the check out counter the water I was buying broke open on the conveyer belt. The lady said something to me in Czech that I didn’t understand but wasn’t about to continue checking out my groceries so I ran those bottles back and grabbed another set of water and we continued. Then when we were all done there was some issue with the computer and my bank card so the line began to back up and people were not looking at my very happy. In the end we did get it to work, but it took a good five minutes of a lot of card swiping and re-swiping, a lot of Czech I didn’t understand, and multiple employees. My only concern is that I was now charged for the same amount twenty times over. Only time will tell, but until then…goodnight.