As I have mentioned in my last blog, this month is ATL month for Team SC, and so far it has been such a blessing to us.
Coming into this month for me personally was hard as I had some preconceived notions about the town of Novi Pazar, and the people who live here on a daily basis. After being here for almost 2 weeks, I can tell you that all of those notions have gone away from my heart, and I have come to realize that the people here are just normal people who just have different beliefs, but in the larger view of things we all believe in God, and to me that is the important thing because as a good friend taught me is just how huge of a deal about having some kind of spiritual life is whether or it is Christian or Muslim, and not to mention that it has been interesting to hear the Muslim call to prayer several times a day (especially at 5:30 in the morning), which hearing that call has also reminder to myself to pray as a Christian on a daily basis for the things that are on my personal prayer list. Also this town reminds me alot of a town back home call Dearborn just based on the fact that Novi Pazar is the Muslim capital of Serbia, and Dearborn is the same for not just Michigan, but for the entire US as well.
Another thing about life here is that it reminds me so much of life back home in ways of style and the setup of the town. The downtown area reminds me alot of my hometown with the park, and all the little shops & the main grocery store in the center of town, the high rise apartment building and not to mention the numerous coffee shops around (too bad that none of them have a trivia night, and that would be cool). I know that we stick out as we walk around town, but we are like everyone else, just going about our daily routine, and frequenting our favorite spots to eat, drink coffee, get ice cream, shop, work out as part of our ministry to build relationships with the people of Novi Pazar. We have made so many awesome connections with people here by means of a English professor at the local university who gave Aundraya’s phone number to some of her former students, and they reached out to us wanting to know if we wanted to hang out. We have hung out with quite a few of them so far this month, and one of our favorite people to hang out with is a gal by the name of Hana. Hana is a psychology student at the university who speaks really good English, and she is Muslim, and it has been such a pleasure to hang out with her, and she has been shown us around town, and taking us to some of her favorite spots in town to eat, get coffee, and play as just the other day she took us to a rec center to play ping pong for a couple of hours. I call it the ping pong ministry. We have also met for food and coffee with several other students, and the owner of the food place we went to on our first day of ministry after the whole registration debucle. We have also gotten many random people numbers who have literally stopped us on the street as we were walking throughout town, who upon hearing that we were Americans & wanting to get together with us at some point during the month. So yeah we are quite the celebrities here.
Through our connections, we were told of a place called American Corner. It turns out that this place is run by the US embassy here in Serbia, and is paid for by our tax dollars, and it is a source for people to come and be able to borrow American books and movies as well as a place to learn English. Every Monday & Wed. they have English classes for both HS and university students as well as on Thursday night they host a TED talk and discussion for adults. They also have a monthly American movie night for the students as well. The 2 gals who worked there that we met are Serbian gals who did an kind of HS exchange program when they were in HS, and their English speaking skills were great, and they were full of infomation that helped us out for our month here.
There is also a gym here in town that my teammates and I go to almost everyday to workout since that is one of the perks of ATL is having a flexible schedule to be able to do things like that. Back home I did workout fairly often, but here on the race I really haven’t had the opportunity to until this month, and IT FEELS SO GOOD! Even if I am not really training for anything special until next year (OCR & golf season) as this is just a thing to keep God’s temple in better shape while on this journey. Working out in a gym where there are mostly big burly Eastern European dudes who can bench press about 300 pounds working out there was something that did intimidate me as while I am pretty strong, I’m not that strong, and I haven’t been in a gym since last fall, but as a testament to wanting to grow, the fact that I am going a few times a weeks, and being around these meatheads is just proof of my growth, and having teammates who like to workout as well also provides great motivation as I know the old me would have gone once, and not go back because of them.
So that is look at my ministry so far this month, and I am so happy that this ATL month has been going better then I could’ve expected this month to go especially with my past history with ATL.
Til next time your fellow sister in Christ,
Bonnie
Team SC
P Squad
Psalms 18:2
YOLO
