Monday, March 22, 2010

Seeing Family

Family's great, especially when they give you an excuse to travel in the middle of the week. Last Tuesday, I took a 1/2 day from work and drove up to Strasbourg, France, to see my uncle, aunt, cousins, and some cousin in-laws for the day. We toured the 12th century cathedral, climbed the 330 stairs to the top, meandered around the old parts of the city, and ate a magnificent meal before wandering around some more. It was such a treat seeing relatives and sharing stories of what God's been doing so far at BFA with a real live person!
I loved this picture of all the coins on the statue's head. Many of the coins were not Euros, which means they've probably been lying there for a while. In the last picture, my favorite building was the one that has 5 stories in the roof alone! Talk about a steep roof!So, who wants to come visit next? Any takers?

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Gotta love sophomores!

I'm excited for tomorrow morning because I get to hang out with these guys:You'll meet them in my next Prayer Flash and Newsletter. (If you don't get either and would like to, please let me know via comment or at katrinacuster@gmail.com.)

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

High School Retreat

Wow, where to begin! The town was an adorable Alpine mountain village, and the slopes literally were across the street from our youth hostel. We had the entire hostel for our 200+ students and 50 staff members, which was super nice. The beds had fluffy down comforters, the food was a.m.a.z.i.n.g., and the decorations all bought at Ikea. I spent a wonderful day on Friday on the slopes: the morning teaching a student which end to point the skis and how to let gravity do the work rather than the poles. In the afternoon, I got to go fast with some of the other RA's - soooooo fun! The only scary part was going down a black diamond and coming across a patch that was all mogels - not my favorite!

The four session with our speaker, Greg Speck (he spoke at Northwestern at least once a year) were fabulous! He balanced Biblical truth with practical applications and teenage humor perfectly, and the students related to him so easily. Praise God for that! The time with my small group, which was made up of 5 senior girls, was overall excellent. On Friday, we were all dead from skiing all day, so conversation was somewhat stilted. But by Saturday, everyone was open, very open, in fact. I was pleasantly surprised by the transparency, and we had some beautiful times of prayer together. There were also great times of laughter. For one activity of the weekend, we were matched up with a guys small group and had to pick and perform a Disney song. Our group chose "Kiss the Girl" (can you tell we had senior girls and freshmen guys?), and within 30 minutes, we had to be ready to go on stage. In all the franticness of practicing, guess who got cast in the role of Ariel? Yeah! Actually, the funniest part was that of the 16 teams total, 10 chose "I'll Make a Man Out of You" from Mulan. We were SO sick of that song by the end of the weekend!

On Saturday, we were hit with a blizzard that dumped nearly a foot of snow on us. I opted to not go skiing in the snow storm and instead rested. It was a good decision! Anyway, here are some of my few pictures. Thanks for all the prayers for this weekend!

(bag line to load bus)

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Warning: English nut

Does it bother anyone else when one person comments, and then it says "1 comments" on your blog? I almost want to post another comment myself, so it won't be grammatically incorrect. :-) I'm such an English nerd.