OCT/nov update
Hello friends and family! Kate here!
This is so cliche - and I am sorry for even saying it - but I can’t believe it’s already been two months since we arrived in Berlin. Also, how has it ONLY been two months since we arrived in Berlin?
Firstly, if you did pray for us I want to thank you, especially the prayers for me when I shared my fear of loneliness. I really don’t feel lonely at all. I miss you terribly but I am not lonely. Our teammates are incredible and we’ve made friends at language school as well! This is such a huge praise and I believe this is a big part of why we feel so good right now.
A few of you have asked about different events around Berlin and if we attended. Sigh I wish. We are generally so exhausted after language school that our evening entertainment is often a nap followed by either a walk or a bike ride. No complaints here, though. Those walks and rides have been filled with conversations about how we are feeling and what is going on in our hearts and minds during all of this. God has been stirring awesome things up in both of us. We’re using that time to process it all, out loud with each other. It’s been so good for our marriage, especially after the last two years of the “in-between”.
I was asked by someone if I felt pressure to perform well for our supporters. Initially I said “Yes,” but I changed my answer because I’ve never felt pressure from any of you. I still struggle with my own misinterpretation of what this work is supposed to be like and I end up putting a bunch of really foolish rules on myself. “Don’t be too happy.” “Hide failure.” “Hide pain.” “Give surface level updates.”
None of you have placed that burden on us and I’m incredibly thankful for that. This is still new! I don’t know what I’m doing!
Okay! Here’s what’s going on for your Omaha/Berlin Damons.
We have a routine that is working. Wake up at 5:30am to take the dogs out. Then we sit and have coffee while Joel does his homework and the dogs have breakfast. Next we go for a long walk with the pups. We have to be at our Tram stop by 8:02am if we want to get to Language School on time. Classes are from 9-12:30. Monday-Friday. A couple times a week, we go into the office after class for regular team meetings. Then it's back to our quiet neighborhood to let the dogs out and eat some lunch.
In the afternoons and evenings there are lots of social things we do with our team like dinners, art openings and events, etc. Buuuuuuuut…it is important that we learn German so we end up staying home more often than we’d like; our ability to learn and retain info is so much better when we are rested vs tired. I take care of my homework in the evenings, the way normal people do it.
There was one big event we got to help with, Sprig (the gallery at our Envision site) had a fundraiser to help pay for our new space! The gallery held an impromptu 250€ Art Sale called This Old Thing? It was a ton of fun and Joel got to meet lots of local artists. Later he told me that quite a few of them were very curious as to why we/Sprig were being so kind. It turns out, a lot of opportunities for artists in Berlin come with application fees, expensive rental agreements, weird contracts, 50% (or more) sales commissions, and fees for installing the art. Yikes, but that’s also not abnormal in the art community, making their curiosity warranted.
Joel got to tell them “We love artists. We here are for you, not to make money off of you.” and that was a little difficult for them to believe! I wish we could just tell them “We are here to care for you because you deserve so much love, and we support you’re work as an artist because you have important things to share with others,” but they wouldn’t believe that either. I’m excited to see how God will use us to love these artists well.
What else? I got a haircut! My inspos were my mom and Sigourney Weaver, both in the 80s. I was in a losing battle with Berlin’s humidity and rain so I had to embrace the curls!
The Christmas tree lots and Christmas markets are being set up for their big opening on the Nov 24th.
Language school is both all-consuming and really fun. After 7 weeks of classes, we can now understand 3 year olds, sometimes. I saw a meme that said “Learning German has made me live in the moment…because I only know how to speak in present tense.” That is my current state of language! Most people have been accommodating with our rudimentary speech and one person even said we sounded “cute” with our American accents.
The days are getting shorter and it is throwing off our dog’s internal clocks. Samson thinks it's dinner time around 4:30pm right now because it’s completely dark by then. There are always a million fun things to do here; but Winter in Berlin means you’ll just have to be prepared to do that fun thing in the dark. That early nightfall has also led us to slow down. We’re grateful for that. Rest was something that was brought up many times over the interview process and in the prep for moving. “How are you taking sabbath rest?” We’d always say something about how we’re “bad at resting, but trying”. The truth is we weren’t trying. We filled every minute we could with something. But now it seems we are starting to learn the beauty of rest. Our souls, brains, bodies desperately need it. All of us.
For our praying friends:
Pray for our language learning.
Pray for the city of Berlin. Everyone is dreading the winter and there is a collective melancholy looming over the city.
Pray for us. Everyday it feels like we know even less than yesterday. So much of what we were told to expect has been the opposite in reality. In good ways mostly, but also it means we prepared for specific situations and had preconceived ideas on how life would be here. Fun example: Someone told us to bring muffin tins in our suitcase because they don’t have them here. I can confidently tell everyone back home that they do indeed have muffin tins here, lots of them in fact! To me, it sounds like God wants us to trust him and not ourselves. Imagine that?
Praise for our dogs remaining so healthy. Plus they LOVE it here. They have spotted foxes and hedgehogs while out on walks! We did have to get bark collars. (no shock just beep and vibrate), Sam and Joon were being bad neighbors when mom and dad were gone.
Praise that we have cool neighbors.
Praise for the day to day joy we are experiencing.
Praise that we get to love the people of Berlin. This is a cool city overflowing with amazing people.
Love,
Kate, Joel, Samson, and Juniper