Nr.136 ended with: “Are you born again? Are you family members born again? And what about your neighbors? Maybe you should share some of these musings with them…….!” (See richardandmarina.net).

There is always joy when a new baby is born; we have had lots of joy as we have seen so many spiritual babies born all over Flemish Belgium, wonderful! But it’s not only that, there is also joy seeing these babies grow and become spiritual adults and even leaders.

Because our living room was getting to be too small we started looking for a building to meet in, but that was not easy. There was nothing suitable in Lovendegem, so we started looking in towns around us and finally found a building in the city of Eeklo, about 13 km north of Lovendegem, a place of about 25.000 people without any evangelical church, as is the case with most cities and towns in Belgium. Eeklo was also the town where a few years later our three girls would go to a Catholic high school which had about 3.000 students.

After some time the church moved to Eeklo to an old rented store that we had fixed up. The large room on main floor was the meeting room, while the living quarters upstairs were used for Sunday school classes. We had a few people from Ghent and also from Maldegem, a town west of Eeklo attending. In time to come Bible studies were started in these places and ultimately new churches.

As we were busy in our area, I also kept going back to Limburg a couple times a week to teach Bible studies and visit people, and I helped in Beerse too from time to time. But there were also other activities going on. It is of course impossible to talk about everything that happened, but let me mention a few. For about 4 or 5 years we held a church picnic on Ascension Day in a large park just east of Beerse. Those were wonderful times as we had anywhere from 150 to 300 people attending. We would have lots of games, or people would just sit around and talk. We would eat together and later on in the afternoon there would be singing with Marina playing her accordion and a number of people guitar. The day would be closed off by either Henk or I giving a brief message. These were great times of keeping in touch with each other and fellow-shipping together. They were discontinued when churches started having their own picnics.

And then there were the camps, and the conferences…………! (Next episode Friday, June 26)(Go to Musings).