Thank you for the prayers for our family. We arrived back in Thessaloniki late on July 11th. We took the next few days to settle in and get the things that we needed for our new home here. My youngest sister was able to come with us and will be here to minister with us for a while.
It is always great to see how the Lord works. When I had arrived back in Rochester, I was surprised to find that our passports had not arrived yet. We gave it another couple of days and then a friend began calling daily to try and find out when the passports would be sent. On July 5th, we still did not have them and we only had 3 mailing days left to receive them by. We found out that the lady that had handled our passports had left the US on vacation so our passports were just sitting somewhere. Praise the Lord, a gentleman called back (after repeated voicemails) and said he had our passports and asked if we wanted them sent to us in the envelope we had sent – YES PLEASE! 🙂 We received them the next day and much to our surprise and delight, our visas were for 1 year instead of the few months we were told they would be! This means that during our stay here, we will not need to go do any more work on our paperwork! A big thank you to Mrs. Koletas for all of her hard work on getting this done!
Our first Sunday all back was a great blessing. The people of the church were so loving to my family and were so happy to see us back. One of the ladies had taken 6 hours to do a deep cleaning of the church to make sure it was perfectly clean for our children!
We have been able to go back to the square and pass out tracts. It is quite different to not have a translator to assist with the street work. Please pray as I am hard at work to learn as much Greek as possible to communicate with these people. We already had quite a few people who had come back to talk and we were not able to go anywhere with it.
On Wednesday, after service was over, we had a middle-age man named George that came in. He had received a gospel tract and came by the church only to arrive after the service started. He had not wanted to interrupt so he stayed outside the whole service and then came in to talk to us. He said he has been searching for answers and Telemachus was able to talk with him for a few minutes. He said he works Sunday but will be back on Wednesday. Please pray for him and his salvation!
The weekends during the summer have empty streets. We went downtown on Saturday only to find the square empty and most places closed. Most of the people have vacation in July and August so they leave town because of the heat. Fortunately, we still had a full church this morning. There were 18 people at church today, including Kosmas, who is a friend of Telemachus. I had a good conversation with him after church has part of the sermon had been about traditions and he had many questions about the traditions of men. Please keep him in prayer.
Our family is gradually getting used to life here again. We will be looking at some more areas of ministry opportunity in the next couple of weeks as well as continuing in the evangelism that has already been started. Thank you so much for your prayers for this ministry and your interest of it. We count ourselves very blessed that God has allowed us to minister here for a while.
Charlie and family