oh, the farmer and the cowman can be friends

hello friends! sara here to update you on our travels....probably our last update before we return :(

as i said in our last post, we left chamonix for taize, france. i had heard of taize from my kairos days (for those of you who don't know, kairos is a young adult group affiliated with The Falls Church). one of the old kairos guys, Bill Haley, had mentioned Taize as a place he went as a new priest to hone in on some key spiritual disciplines such as prayer, meditation, and silence. so with that information we set out to be transformed.....

taize has mostly catholic origins, but we met people that were from all christian faith backgrounds...and we all got along! taize is run by brothers (kind of like monks) who are committed to silence, prayer, and common work. they are also committed to social justice and serving the poor. they don't take any donations or money and even their inheritances are given to the poor. these guys know how to depend on God for everything. i know that i am not doing this community justice so if you want to know more, check out their website at www.taize.fr. then you can click to read about their site in english.

basically, we spent 2 days at taize taking in 3 church services each day, participating in teaching and small groups. the church services were more like prayer times - there was singing of many songs in many languages (latin, german, french, english and one in russian that i just listened to) as well as a long time dedicated to prayer. each day they would read the same scripture and a psalm in about 4 languages. sometimes the brothers would interject with prayers in their own languages - polish, spanish, italian, russian, chinese, etc. i can't begin to describe how special it was to be among believers of all nationalities. to me, it was a reminder of how big God is (and that He doesn't only speak english!). i also appreciated the songs because they were simple songs where you repeated the same words over and over. it really allowed for some great time to think about certain aspects of God....and it was a challenge to have 3 services a day with a lot of time devoted to prayer. the last service of the day was longer and afterwards they asked for silence until the morning service. i was really struck by how much you can HEAR when you take the time to be silent. it is definitely a discipline that we lack as busy americans.

in between the services there was time for a teaching as well as small groups. the teaching time was done by one of the brothers in 2 languages simultaneously! there was a large german group there during the week that we went so there was translation in german and english, but all around us we could hear people translating into other languages. after the teaching we met in small groups - we were in a group with 2 catholic germans who worked for the church, 1 italian who lived in croatia, 1 guy from belgium, 1 protestant german, and 1 canadian who worked for WorldVision of all places (it's base is in DC). we had some rich sharing and it struck me that we have such differences in how and where we may live, but we share many similarities because of our shared bond in Christ.

taize was a special place. we were struck by so many things that would make this blog entry way longer than it already is. but to take some time out to focus on God; to meet with him through silence and prayer; to meditate on aspects of his character through simple songs; and to share in the community of believers was such a gift. i hope to visit again someday....check it out if you can. next stop: beaune, france and the cote d'or - REAL wine country! until then...