Our time is winding down and it’s starting to become very apparent that we won’t be here much longer.  Well, sort of.  I finished my last week at camp on Friday; it was really fun to be back in the camp environment again, and I got to teach quite a few really sweet kids.

Daphne + her favorite instructor

Two weekends ago we were able to go on a camping trip with our Bay Area church, The Highway Community.  We had an amazing time and are so, so blessed to be a part of the church while we are here in California.  Undoubtedly, our favorite part of the church is that they have summer barbecues for Post-College aged people (PoCo).  So every week on Tuesday nights we looked forward to a youth group type setting of fellowship + hearing someone from the church community speak on the series Lasting.  There was a huge range of perspectives from one speaker to the next about the things they’d learned that has been lasting in their lives.  Some started out as young missionaries like us, but I also loved hearing about what God made relevant in some of the other speakers’ lives.

This is from the camping trip during a flying egg contest. We lost :/

This past weekend we got to do something I’ve always wanted to do… attend a bar mitzvah!  (This is why I really need a tangible bucket list- it’s not as much fun to only mentally check it off of a half-made list!)  The bar mitzvah was interesting, kind of just like attending church in another language.  The best parts were when the sun shone through the stained glass above the pulpit.  I’m still not sure I was allowed, but I snapped a few photos to share with you anyway!

No yamaka? No problem! You can use one of these!

Too bad there wasn't a basket of pants up for grabs, too.

This is Noah and his family before he and his sister broke the bread wishbone style.

This last photo is from Burke’s Grandma’s birthday party- all of her children were present for her 67th birthday:)

Party time!

Burke will still be working until just a few days before we go back, but in the meantime I am catching us up on all of the things we haven’t had time to do in the last month.  One of the first things on my list was getting a California drivers’ license (check!).  We have many more things to do between now and September 10th, but I’m not worried.  We certainly know that God will continue to extend his amazing provisions for us.  We’ve been welcomed into five different homes so far this summer and feel very taken care of by a lot of people.  Of course, we would appreciate your prayer support during our last couple weeks here.  Please pray that our time would go smoothly and that we would be ready to return to Slovakia.  More importantly though, please pray for Burke’s mother, Lisa, that she would have a quick healing process during the surgeries that she has to undergo in the next couple weeks.