Ready or not

Well I wasn't really ready for another birthday yet, but I guess that didn't really matter :)

I had an awesome day, starting with going down to The Cities to meet Jess after just a little more than to years. Mitch went down there to pick up the Horol Missions Team from the airport and I thought it would be a nice opportunity to get there!
We met at Caribou to talk and catch up on each others lives, so good!

When we got back home I could already smell my birthday cake and I was really excited to have carrot cake again - something we need (more of) in Germany!

Somewhere between coming home and eating dinner Tirzah asked how old I was now and when Mitch said 'She's 19 now', Tirzah said 'Oh so you're a mom now?'. Best quote of the day!

I got to choose my favorite meal for supper just like every other Theis kid, thanks to Steph for cooking and baking for me!

While eating Mitch started a round of "Memories we have of when Kathi first came here" which was really fun to remember little things of my exchange year!

After supper we had the cake with ice cream - yummy!

Parents + birthday child photo

Now I just got home from a friend's goodbye party who is going to Uruguay this year - yay going abroad!

Thanks for all the congratulations, I had such a great day!

Ready or not

10,000 Reasons

It's been way to long!

After two years I finally got back home. Kimmy said that today when I talked to her in church: "I didn't know you are home yet." - that made me smile!

I arrived at MSP at 6pm on Saturday July 20, 2013 after a long journey from Germany over the Netherlands, to Iceland and finally to America. As Steph mentioned in her blog post already the timing was perfect and neither of us had to wait for a long time :)

We stopped at the Albertville Outlet Mall on our way home where I bought new Nike shoes since I didn't bring any tennis shoes. Luckily I didn't have any problems with the time difference so that I just went to bed and woke up when everybody else did.

Church the next morning was so much fun! Just seeing everybody again and their reactions of seeing me again :) I saw Tracey and walked over to her and she looked so surprised! "I thought I would never see you again in MY LIFE!", is all she said for a while.
Missed my second church family so much!

On Friday Allie and I went to Panera for lunch. It was so nice to talk to you again girl! Sally picked me up later that day and we went out for dinner and saw a movie later. I just missed my little Japanerin and her humor :)

I didn't get a lot of sleep before we left on Saturday morning to go camping down by Rochester at Whitewater State Park. I just realized that the last time I went camping was probably two years ago when I went to Sonshine :) Steph also posted about our camping trip in multiple blog posts with 100 pictures os make sure you check that out!

Speaking of pictures, I brought my SLR camera that uses films - so no digital pictures to post here :) I will scan and post a few after I get home and got them developed but for now you'll only have my texts and Steph's pictures.

Anyway, we got home from camping on Wednesday and I left again on Thursday afternoon to go camping with the Youth Group up North in Schroeder.
The landscape up there is just so beautiful! It was so much fun! We focused on "being still and know that He is God", going through different Psalms and the Lord's Prayer. Besides that we went cliff jumping, swimming, hiking and climbing - such a great trip!

I just got home last night and was very happy to finally be able to sleep in my bed again. However, Tirzah claimed it back during my second camping trip so that she really wanted to sleep in it too - we ended up sharing it which was really funny since she is about half my size but used twice the room!

Church this morning was again really awesome, I met Kimmy - so great to see her :)

I'm going horseback riding now and to Youth Group later tonight... Life is GOOD!

10,000 Reasons

All I Have is Christ

Wow, I'm back in Germany for more than two months already and today was the first time that I went to church since July 24! I decided I wanted to check out the church I went to with my family - that would be once a year: Christmas - before I came to America, but I kept finding 'excuses' why I couldn't go.

I got so mad at myself because I didn't do anything, I think in the last 2 months I read my Bible once completely on my own - I listened to the sermons from Calvary that are online so I read a few passages along - so I did quiet time once. I don't even know why I think it's so hard, it really isn't! Back in America I thought it would be so though to find a church that I would like to go to and stay confident in my faith.

I didn't go to church the first Sunday because we took my brother to the airport (he went to Ecuador do to voluntary work for a year) and after that I just found a whole lot of reasons why I didn't go.

Last Monday me and my mom visited my Godmother, because it was her birthday, and I talked to her daughter for quite a while! She asked me if I wanted to borrow a couple of books from her and she gave me "When God Writes Your Love Story" by Eric and Leslie Ludy. I started reading it yesterday when I took a break from studying for my drivers license test and I really like it - I'm only on page 48 though... I am a really slow reader. Anyway, when I read it I realized how much I pushed God away the last couple of month and I started watching Fireproof, knowing it would remind me of the greatness of Him! I felt so good when I went to bed last night :)

Then this morning I woke up at 8.45am to get ready to BIKE (I usually hate biking, I'm just not the biggest sports fan, but it is so nice outside and my parents were still sleeping...) to church. It is so cool that I went this Sunday because it was the best sermon I ever experienced in Germany! The church has a sister church in Ghana and works together with a missions organization. They had a choir from Africa come to our church and the songs were so beautiful. Plus it was a very long sermon (2 hours) compared to the usual ones (45 minutes) so it was a lot closer to what I am used to from Calvary :) And another awesome thing: they translated most of it in English for the choir. I know it sounds weird but I still understand English way better than German. There are a couple of old words that are used quite often in church that I don't know so it was nice to have the English translation :D

My school offers a retreat for 10th grade (my grade) every year to a former monastery. They take 30 people every year. Here in Germany we have Religion class in school, but if you want to you can pick Philosophy instead beginning in 9th grade. If there are more than 30 people signed up for the retreat they'll prefer the students that chose Religion and if they still have to many, they will draw the names. I'm really excited for this and hope I'll be able to go.

I love all of the Animation videos from Sovereign Grace Music, but this is definitely my favorite one so far.
It is so incredible and almost always makes me cry.

Please pray for me that I take my time to read God's Word more often and trust in Him!
I miss you guys ♥

The hardest part

So now that I got the Family Trip post out of the way I still have a lot more to catch up on!
At first I really had a lot of stuff to do so that I didn't get the chance to blog more but then I also didn't really want to finish the post, because it made me a little sad thinking about everything again!

I had so much fun on our trip and the whole rest of the year so that it's really hard to just finish it up like that.

Anyway. 'The hardest part' was going back to Germany, not knowing when I come back to America (it's definitely a 'when' and not an 'if' though!).

I was pretty busy with packing my 3 suitcases - which I started doing about a week before I left. And even though there were 3 suitcases with lots of room I still had tons of clothes I gave to Holly and Hope because I just couldn't take them with me :)

My last Sunday at church and Youth Group made me pretty sad. I asked Josh if I could come up front during Youth Group to thank everybody and say goodbye. When I did that everybody gathered around me and prayed for me and that already made me cry :(
Thinking about it again right now makes me wanna go back right now - especially with school starting tomorrow :D

On Wednesday we had a Goodbye Party for me which was pretty amazing! I have no clue how many people came to say goodbye but there were a lot and it was so nice to see everyone ones more before I left!

That night I finished up packing everything while Mitch was playing XBOX 360. I asked him when we will leave and he really freaked me out when he said 8 AM. We ended up leaving at 7 and that was totally enough time but still made me worry a little that I might miss my plane which took of at 10:56AM (you now being there 2 hours earlier made it 8:56 plus driving for about 1 1/2 hours is 7:26 and then usually you should plan with traffic so I would have left at 6 xD) Anyhow we were just fine and not that I would have complained if I missed it and would have had to stay in America a little more :)

I felt a little sick that morning and like I would throw up every moment (probably because of all the emotions...) so I decided to sleep on the way to Minneapolis.

Arriving at the airport I checked in my suitcases and then we still had some time to take pictures - which you can see on Steph's blog :) Then it was time to say goodbye which was definitely the 'hardest part' of the day and the worst goodbye I ever had! Not knowing when you see your family again really isn't fun at all!

When I walked down to my gate I was crying pretty bad and a airport person even asked me if he could help me somehow. I was so messed-up I forgot to go through the security check correctly: I left my shoes and belt on, didn't take my laptop out of my bag at first, didn't empty out my pockets...
Oh dear I made some people mad :)

I bought an 6-hour-energy-shot because I forgot to buy one earlier. It's good to have when you have such a long way to go and don't want to be sleepy when you arrive :)

Then I went to my gate (E6) and waited till it was boarding time. I sat next to a woman who was really nice and we talked a lot about being an exchange student etc. It was nice talking to her and it kept me from being to sad. She had EarPlanes and said she would give me her extra pair if I wanted it. It helped so much and I was really glad she gave them to me.

In Chicago I went straight to my gate because I was afraid to miss my flight like I almost did coming to the US. I met another exchange student from Germany who was there with Rotary and a missions group who went to Ukraine for 3 weeks.
In the airplane I was sitting right in front of the 'wall' between the business and economy class so I had a lot of room for my legs :D I wasn't able to watch the movies or anything because we didn't have a screen in front of us but I just watched a couple movies on my iPod :)

Arriving in Germany I had to wait a little long to get all my suitcases and my saxophone but once I had it I got to my family really quick! My parents, my brother and my aunt and uncle picked me up and it was a fun way back home!

Well now I'm home for over a month already and it's weird thinking about heading back to my German school tomorrow. I also started having driver's lessons so I can get my license as soon as possible. Fun times!

Again I will recommend Steph's blog post about me leaving on July 28th! 

The hardest part

Give me your eyes

Operation St. Cloud was great!

I'm really sorry that I didn't post about it earlier, but I just never felt very motivated to write everything down. If you read Steph's Blog you already know that it was a really great idea. It was basically a missions trip but we did all the ministry work in St. Cloud. We stayed about 20 minutes from town in the Riverside Resort in Richmond, Minnesota.
The five girls of our team, Kenna, Kaitlin, Katie, Rachel and I, stayed in Cabin 14 and the 7 boys, Jordan, Will, Darris, Colton, Trey, Caleb and Josh stayed in Cabin 10.

We left on Monday at 11am from Calvary... well actually that's when we met there to pack everything up so we probably didn't left until 11.45. We head out to go on a Prayer Drive - we stopped at the Dream Center, Downtown in front of the Court House , Federal Building and Catholic Church; St. Cloud Hospital, Place of Hope, and at Southside Park where we did the VBS. We then also walked around and handed out flyers to kids for our Vacation Bible School. We then went to our Cabins where we unloaded everything, played volleyball (lots of fun!), ate, took showers, talked about the next day: what we would do for VBS etc., and we had Devotional Time and a Camp Fire.

A 'normal' day looked kind of like this:

  7.30am Getting up and ready
  8.30am Breakfast
  9.00am Devotional Time
10.00am Prepare Lunch Bags
10.30am Leave the Resort and drive to St. Cloud
11.00am Set up for VBS
11.30am Go out and ask kids to come
12.00pm Start playing with the kids
12.30pm Do the craft and snack after that the drama and lesson
  1.00pm Pack everything up and drive to Lake George for Lunch
  2.30pm Leaving the Park and going to the Dream Center
  6.30pm Heading back to the cabins

What we did at the cabins kind of changed in time every day but we basically discussed what we did so far and what we wanted to do the next days.

I really enjoyed the whole 'Operation' :)

Give me your eyes

Heal the World

Thank you sooo much for all the donations for the 30 hour famine!
I was able to raise $180! With that money World Vision will be able to take care of a child for half a year :)

The 30 hour famine was a great experience and I will definitely do something like that again in the future! I started fasting right after my lunch period in school on Friday at 12pm. When I came home everybody had Animal Crackers for snack (I love those!) and Micah said 'Haha, you can't have any!'... not nice :) But really it wasn't that hard not to eat - I thought it would be harder since I'm snacking all the time.

Mitch, Eden, Micah and I went to TCF to go through some bank-stuff which took a veeery long time because it was very complicated, but it was also very entertaining :D After that we went to a game store to get a couple CDs/DVDs buffered and after that we went to Little Caesers to get pizza for the others for supper - that was fun. Mitch called in before we got there so that they would be ready when we come and he ordered "3 pepperoni ... and 1 sausage please". When he said 'sausage' I said "Yes... nooooo" because I love sausage pizza but then I realized that I won't be able to have any :(

At 8pm I went to Church then where I spent the rest of my fasting time together with all the others (I think there were about 25 of us.. maybe more).We started of by playing a couple games boys vs. girls - we won! :) And then at around 9.30 Josh talked to us, showed us a very cool video. In that video kids who don't live as good as we do asked questions about our life here in America - "Do you really eat 3 times a day", etc. It also included information about the difference of our countries - "A woman in Africa walks about 6 miles a day to get water, that's how much an American walks in A MONTH!" It really opened my eyes about what's going on in the world and on top of that we then watched End of the Spear.

The next day morning we woke up at 8.45 and started at 9.30. We did three service projects throughout the day - hand out bag of lunch to people who otherwise won't have a meal -, collect caned food donations and we cleaned up a park :)
Throughout the whole time i didn't really struggle with hunger, but more with a lack of energy and I was cold all the time except when I was in my sleeping bag... then I felt super hot. I think I had a little short cold or something because I also had trouble breathing (it felt like somebody was sitting on my chest when I tried to breath in). Usually my temperature is around 96°F when I take it with the thermometer we have but on Saturday when I came home it was 98°F... I don't know doesn't really matter I guess :)

We broke out fast together at (Surprise...after 30 hours) 6pm on Saturday with rice and something like taco meat and ketchup. I think I never enjoyed a meal like that before - you really start appreciating the food you have the more you learn about all the hunger in the world!

Anyway it was a great experience and thanks again for the donations!

Heal the world 

Earth Song

So yesterday at Youth Group we got some information about the 30 hours famine that is going on this weekend at Calvary.

We start fasting at 12pm on Friday (right after my lunch period in school) and don't eat for 30 hours. That way we will see what it's like to hunger for such a long time like many people have to.

Here are some facts about hunger in this world:
 - Hunger kills another child every 10 seconds!

       So that are 8000 kids under the age of 5 that die because of hunger-related causes (starvation,      illness due to malnutrition, ...

 - More than 1 billion people go hungry every day!

One in six people on earth will go to bed hungry tonight . The odds are worse for kids living in poor countries, they have a one in three chance of going hungry!

For me personally I knew that this is an issue but I didn't know that there are SO MANY people who don't have anything to eat!

So with the 30 hour famine we also want to raise money for the organization World Vision so that kids can get food.

$30 would help to get food for a child for ONE MONTH - so that is $360 to help feed and care for a child for a year! I think that is pretty amazing and when we compare that on how much money we spend each month for ourselves not a lot!

When I thought about how I could get as many donations as possible I had the idea that a blog post about it would be so helpful because that way I can inform a lot of people at the same time about it.

So if you would like to donate some money for this please tell me! I need the money by Friday because that's when I will give it to my Youth Group leader. 

You can donate any amount of money you want and checks should be made payable to World Vision - I would actually prefer checks because I would have to write out a check to hand the money in anyway :)

Now that I think about it, it would be sooooo great if people from Germany would donate some money too!

1. Just divide however much dollars you want to donate by 1.35 (that's about the currency rate) to get the Euro value for it. 

2. Then you can ask my mom about my account information (didn't ask you yet but I hope that's okay mom?! ^^) or you could also email me and I will send the information to you... I just kind of forgot what you need for that so it would be great if you could tell me (I know it's the name, the account number, the bank name and the bank identification code, anything else?!)

3. Transfer the money on my account

4. Please send me an email (you can find my email address on Facebook, in my profile here on my blog or you could text/ask me about it!) and tell me how much money you would like to donate so that I can keep track of that :)

Any questions please (!) ask me or you could also look it up on the website I named above (World Vision or 30 hour Famine).

If you don't want to or you can't donate money then please pray for me and other people who participate in this that everything will work out and that we - together - can raise money to prevent kids from dying because they don't get enough food!

It would be sooo great if I could get enough money that would support a child for a year - I think that would be amazing!

Thank you so much already :)

Earth Song

Happy Day

Yesterday was a very happy day :)

My Christmas packet from my parents arrived:

It is very big :)

Thank you so much!

I already got my Christmas present with the packet but I gave it to Steph so that she can keep it until I can open it :)

We also left for the Fall Retreat from Youth Group yesterday, which was awesome. Unfortunately we are already back so we had just about 24 hours there but it was still very cool.

We girls slept in a cabin together with a squirrel :D

There was a hole in our window (the wood frame was eaten) so that's probably how it entered. It was very crazy: every time we got back from lunch etc. there were other girls running out of the cabin and screaming. I never got to see it but it should be very big ^^ Here are some pictures from the Retreat:

The bus

Sun goes down

Emily, Elle, Alex and Jamie

Alex

Everybody's listening to Josh ^^

Laura and Paige

Grace and Paige

Becky

This was the squirrel protection :P

We were kind of afraid and stand on the couch, table, etc. :)

That's where the squirrel escaped

Jamie and Elle

One of the fun games for our Girl-Guys competition (let the pencil jump into the cup letting it drop on the eraser)

Happy Day

I have a shelter

Okay, so I planned to wait till I know what song we sang last Sunday after my Baptism, but I reeeally want to post about this so I just decided to pick another song which fits very well with this blog post :)

You can see Steph's blog for her blog post about last Sunday and very good pictures of the baptism.

It was just incredible and so awesome. When you read Steph's post you will get a very good idea what the baptism was like so I won't write that down again :)

I was so extremely nervous when we went up the stage to change into our baptism clothes. And it got worse when we were standing in front of all those people. I noticed that my knees were shaking and that was a very weird feeling because I thought I'm used to stand in front of a lot of people just because of all the concerts I already had (must be about 200 now :D). Anyways it was just amazing and I can't really tell you exactly what it was like.  

When we were all baptized and when our friends joined us for prayer I was overwhelmed with emotions - I almost started to cry - it was just amazing to listen to the prayers of my friends: Thank you to all of you ;)

I really hope that we'll get the video of the baptism so that you all can listen to our testimonies.

I have a shelter

Faithful

Wow, it's been a while again :)

I was bored the whole day for the first time since I arrived here in America: and it feels awesome!
Because I have a pretty bad cold, I'm tired almost the whole day and that's why I got up at about noon today :D I took a shower and when I opened the door Steph, Malachi and Tirzah were in the laundry room which is right next to the bathroom and Steph said: "Good morning!". I think that was pretty funny.

After I had 'breakfast' I skyped with my Dad, what took kind of long (about 2 hours) :) It's weird because every time I look back and try to find out what we were talking it's always just a little bit. But it's fun.

When we were done skyping I wrote with my aunt and a friend from Germany and I also answered a message from my godmother and her daughter. I read it again after I already sent it and realized that I would like to blog a lot of things that I wrote down in the message so I'm just going to copy these parts :)

Right now I'm just enjoying being bored after lots of busy weeks! Because I'm done with volleyball I have a lot more time^^

I enjoy going to church/Small Group/Youth Group a lot :)
And I would like to be baptized again here, because it's now that I understand the Gospel more and more each Sunday and I accept Jesus as my Savior :)

I'll go to Minneapolis tomorrow to go to the Theater with a friend of YFU right after church and I'm pretty excited about that.

It's so awesome her at school, it is not as hard as the German schools so that I don't have difficulties to understand the things we are studying. I was kind of afraid that it would be hard since it's in another language even if I think that I know English pretty well because I studied for 7 years already. But it's not as hard as I thought it would be and I'm sooo proud of myself that I have an A (~98%) in Math right now (I used to have a D in Germany ^^).

We had a bone lab in A&P and were able to see and feel the bones of a cow :D Including the knee joint and it was pretty awesome to see how all the muscles, tendons, and ligaments work together :)

The class (A&P=Anatomy&Physiology) is my hardest because we have lots of tests and I have to study vocabs and other things all the time, but it's so awesome and interesting. If I'm really going to study medicine I'll know lots of stuff already from that class :)

We have lots of projects and funny things in our Health class, too. We already watched two movies (A Beautiful Mind, and Philadelphia). Our first project was to pretend that we are HIV- positive. Our teacher gave us 9 little medicine bottles filled with Skittles and other pill-look-like candy we had to 'take' every couple of hours. They all had special instructions on them, e.g.: 'Take 1 pill every 4 hours on an empty stomach.', 'Take 2 out of this bottle every time you take one of bottle #1', etc. I made a schedule and set my alarm so that I don't forget to take them :)
Right now we have a project where we should write down what we eat (for 4 days). We went to the computer lab and typed everything into a special program and we printed 7 pages full of information about our diet. Now we should answer questions and write down how many vitamins, proteins etc. the diet included.

And I had a choir concert on Thursday and there will be a Band Concert on November 4th :)

Our whole Choir (Women's Choir of Apollo High School)

And again with our director Mr. Parker (I had my camera in my bag and Steph took the pictures Thank You!)

Chamber Choir of the UMD

And the whole Choir of UMD

I also got to know the American snow a couple of days ago :) It feels weird to have snow in October since I always had 'real' snow (enough to go sledging) in January. We were very excited in 2005 when we had snow on my dad's birthday which is on November 25. I don't really know what I should think about the snow: on the one hand I'm glad that the mosquitoes are gone, on the other hand I really enjoyed having a warm summer :) I also don't have a lot of winter clothes so that means shopping!

I hope I'll be able to post my next post very soon to keep you updated :)

Faithful

A night to remember

Wow it's been a while again :)
So I'm going to post more posts during MEA Break and on the weekend to have everything seperate :-P

Starting with our Senior High School sleepover at Calvary:

It was sooo amazing, we had so much fun ;)
It was from last Friday (Oct. 15) ~7PM to last Saturday (Oct. 16) ~9.45AM.
We started with playing some games (Twister,...), dancing (Chihuahua) and eating some food. I don't remember the 100%-right order (I should probably try to post right away the next time...) but time ran very fast and we had a fashion show, a woman who goes to our church as well (Angel) told us about her life and gave us tips what we probably shouldn't do and we sang worship songs for about half an hour ^^
We talked a lot between the different activities and time ran very fast.
Another thing we did was:
We all sat in a circle and Kari had a band of ribbon. She hold one end and throw the rest to another girl, then she was supposed to hold her part and throw the ribbon to the next girl so that we eventually all were part of a very weird star thing of ribbon :D Every time you throw the ribbon to another girl you said something to her, what you admire about her, why you want to get to know her more, etc. It was so awesome to hear all these things :) At the end, when everybody got the ribbon we cut it in pieces and we are now wearing them as a bracelet or around or ankle to remind us that there's always something about us that is awesome :)

Here are some pictures:

Cami (sorry when I spell your name wrong!), Kari, Rachel, Alex and Becky.

Fashion show

I love you girls it was sooo much fun!

Kari, Becky and Rachel (our leaders)

Part of the awesome decoration of the Youth Room

Door to the hallway

A night to remember