Hello friends!

I wanted to give an update of the key points over the last couple of months:

Language study continues to be great, hard, interesting, overwhelming, frustrating, exciting, overwhelming (did I say that twice?). Each day it is any of those adjectives in any combination. Sometimes Hungarian is like the Greek hydra from the epics- you conquer one grammatical "head" and 3 more spring up from the stump. Other times it is shockingly easy/simple compared to English. But, all of that aside, our language teacher assures us we are progressing at an excellent pace. Especially Helen, who has lately been receiving high praise. Pray for us as we continue and please pray we would find someone to help us in several ways: we are looking for someone to watch the kids while we get focused study time in (maybe 1-2 times a week for a few hours), and also seeking more friends who are patient in practicing. There is at least one girl who will practice with us, and we are looking forward to spending more time with her.
I have had opportunity to visit villages with many more opportunities on the immediate horizon. We’ve been instructed to step slowly into village work, as it’s easy to get involved in all of the different programs that RBU or local churches are doing. We are intent on making those connections, but also wanting to make sure we can speak in the villages without constant need for a translator, so most of our time up till now has been spent in intense language study. I think it’ll be a few months yet until we are making solo ventures to the villages, but there are so many Roma that travel in and out of the city each day we have much to do just here locally!
This leads me to the next point- While we are primarily language learning, I have been hard at work over the last few weeks planning, sketching, and producing the next major Bible Coloring Book for the UNA Clubs. This is my biggest project to date, being a 28 page coloring book. Several of you have heard about this, and it was a mountain of work but I so love doing it! I have made friends with a man here that runs a printing shop and he works with RBU to produce our materials. So my first print project I have done since we’ve been back is this 28 page book working with 2 translators to create 4 seperate books. The book is a mixture of lessons, scriptures, coloring pages, games and a small amount of literacy pages to help the children start writing. These books are now headed down to Serbia to be used in a village in our furthest reaching ministry: the village at Bor. Please pray as many of our team are down there as of tomorrow, putting on childrens’ clubs, sharing the gospel, and distributing our new Family Bible and the new UNA Coloring book. Pray these books would touch the lives of the families there, pray our team would be empowered and open as they preach, teach and share. It has been miracle provision after miracle provision that the Lord has used to bring this program together. And now, after a month of work from over 20 people, we are ready to send the traveling team on this 10 day long trip. (I didn’t end up going to this one, as it’s quite a ways away and I cannot speak Serbian. So instead, I was heavily involved in the preparation. Next year’s big 10 day trip will be in Hungary though, so Lord willing I will be speaking well enough by then to hold my own!)
Finally, I want to let you all know we are putting on another 24-hour prayer day for RBU. We had a wonderful time praying last time and I know several of you joined in through Facebook and I thank you for that! On September 15th, we will be sending out a list of prayer topics and you can sign up in advance to pray over the course of 30minutes-1 hour. The idea is to have constant prayer over many RBU-related topics over the course of that day for 24 hours, from all over the world. If you cannot commit to praying for one specific hour, but still want to pray, let me know anyway! We password protect the requests and they are not put up until the day of. This is to protect some of the more sensitive information. If you are interested please sign up here. The sign up page will be put up in a few days. I'll send out another email about it soon!

As always thanks so much for reading and so much for praying with us through this journey! God is moving in incredible ways here and we look forward to what this next season will bring!

The Lord bless and keep you,
-Taylor