January 2008

Dear Friends and Family,
Happy Holidays and Happy New Year! I hope this letter finds you all overflowing in the grace and peace of our Lord who has showered us this year out of His abundant love, and I eagerly anticipate all that awaits as we peer over the edge of one year into the dawn of all that is new and holy. God has certainly been showering us with blessings in our ministry in Hungary, and I am excited to share all that He has been doing with you and invite you to join us in prayer and participation!
There are many things God has taught me and is continuing to teach me this year, one of which is how He is ever preparing us and the way to do more than we can imagine for His kingdom, and the other amazing thing is how if we are obedient to do small things, God can use us to do great things. Very enormous and incredible things are happening in Hungary, and it began simply by the legacy of American teachers at my school who have prepared the way for me. It is hard to say how it all began, since it has been going for a long time now, but at the start of this year we were asked by our students if we would host a barbecue for them at our house, since other teachers had done it before. We have a wonderful setup provided by our school, and live just a 5 minute walk from there, in a house which is large enough to have big gatherings, with a yard for Frisbee, American football, and at this time of year, snowball fights. This barbecue was followed by another, and another, until the demand was so great that we had to sit down and plan together organized monthly parties for our students to come to and hang out with us. These have escalated from a Halloween dance party, to a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, to a Christmas formal ball with a reenactment of the Christmas story and Christmas caroling.
It was at the first of these, that I mentioned to a good friend our need for help, that we have full-time teaching jobs and these events require enormous work to plan, and we also have many more male students than females, and need some quality men to come hang out and connect with our students on a level that we can't as women and as their teachers. The enthusiasm which followed among my friends was enormous, and more than I could have imagined. What began with two guy friends eagerly coming and connecting with our students grew to a group of about 15 volunteers, ranging from Hungarian and international university and graduate students to other American missionaries, looking for practical ways to be of service. It became apparent we needed to get together weekly to plan outreach together and pray together, and through this team of teachers and volunteers, we caught a passion and vision to do even more, to bring a spiritual focus to our work and be vulnerable with our teens. And with the advice and counsel of other teachers in Russia, we began something weekly which we have now donned Word Alive! Starting in December, we invited our students just to come to our house after school on Tuesdays to practice their English, but also to discuss issues of relevance and importance in their lives, and to share with them our lives and our hearts and our God. We started with 2 students, then 3 and at our last meeting we had over 15 students! In a matter of weeks, it began to quickly snowball and we are still trying to catch up and seek the Lord in the direction Word Alive should take.
At one such meeting, my Ukranian friend Viktor, a law student, brought his Bible and a student picked it up as if to throw it. Viktor's aghast face began a discussion and his own paraphrase of a story he had read on the way there in 2 Chronicles about King Solomon. I have never seen anyone jump for joy at reading 2 Chronicles, but the passion with which Viktor shared the story had these two students on the edges of their seats. Viktor was even by the end able to explain why he believed this was a true story, and not some myth, and I saw a lightbulb going on in one student's brain as he exclaimed, "Maybe I can believe it is true now." This is just one example of the ways God is working in our school and our students, and how just one small idea and one prompting from God has thrown me into a position of starting and leading a youth group, growing faster than I can keep up with it. This wasn't planned, I hadn't even dared to hope for such a thing to happen, I only saw small opportunities and suddenly I barely have the time to write you all the amazing things God is doing! I only pray that God will give me the wisdom to know how to proceed, how to live and lead for Him, and to have the strength and energy it takes to teach full-time and do full-time ministry. It is often overwhelming, but the joy and fulfillment far outweighs the difficulties.
There are many ways in which I need you as family and friends. I have been blessed to have the opportunity to come home for Christmas to rest and catch up with many of you and share this great work that God is doing. I hope that this will give you specifics to pray for, and those of you on the east coast, pray harder at 8:00am on Tuesdays and surround Word Alive with prayer. In this year, I have never seen so many answered prayers, that my friends and I cannot deny and we all can only stand in amazement. My friend Lian from Holland told me one day, "When you pray, God really answers you! Pray for me to find a new place to live!" We prayed for her together, and within the week, she had the perfect place. Prayer is no small thing, and it is the ultimate thing I ask of you. I also have realized that this is the beginning of something marvelous and as yet undefined that God is doing, and I am committed to following God to its fullest. To the question I've gotten the most while at home, "How long will you be in Hungary for? Are you staying another year?" I've decided it's no longer a measure of time or years, but an indefinite call to serve until God calls me elsewhere. I can't even attempt to put a timetable on that; it is all in the Lord's hands. I know that I am a part of an amazing adventure that is much bigger than me, and am so grateful to be given this incredible responsibility to teach Hungarian teenagers, and will do it as long as I can! The answer to the question is not up to me.
The other way you can help is financially. From my plane ticket to the States for Christmas, to a recurrent health problem that I had to have looked at while I was home, and the medication it needed has left me in debt. It will take around $500 a month to sufficiently pay for all the costs of the ministry, for travel costs, visa costs, health insurance, and the like. That requires only 10 people to give $50 a month, or 50 people to give just $10 a month to fund this ministry. If you cannot support, would you consider passing along this letter to someone who might be interested? I have confidence that God will provide the means for all that I need, just as He has been doing all along, and I pray that you will give as you feel led from Him to be a part of His plan for this ministry. Your gifts and your prayer are the reason I am able to be in Hungary, and I thank you so much for all you have done throughout the years. Your encouragement and prayers keep me in going in times when I can't see how it will come together. Thank you for your love.
Blessings and Thanks,
Joanna Fessler
How to pray:
- Pray for wisdom and direction in Word Alive, for unity among leaders and peace in the home, that they would know we are Christians by our love. It's sometimes harder to agree than I would have believed.
- Pray that God would bring the students He wants to speak to, that they would ask questions, be open to talking of spiritual things, and be ready to share their ideas and their lives with us and be ready to receive the things we have to share.
- Pray for logistics, for the funds, the time to plan, the motivation in between our jobs and busy lives, and the passion and love for students would grow and grow and never die.
- Pray God would bless our volunteers in their studies, in their jobs, bless them for their desire to minister and give of themselves. Pray God would rain blessings on them for their work.
How to give:
Go to http://www.teachoverseas.org/contribute . You will find step-by-step instructions on the three ways you can give which are:
1) Online. At the website above you can contribute with one click if you have a PayPal account, a very safe way to give using your credit card. Make sure to specify you are contributing to Joanna Fessler.
2) Write a check. Make it out to TeachOverseas, and put my account number (205138) in the memo line and send it to:
TeachOverseas.org
444 East Huntington Drive
Suite 200
Arcadia, CA 91006
3) Electronic Funds Transfer, the easiest way to become a monthly supporter. Go to the website above to download an EFT form and send it along with a voided check to the above address.
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