Summer has been in full swing around here and it has been bursting at the seams with many amazing things going on. One of the major highlights for me has been the relaunching of my photography ministry. Inside of Switzerland life has much returned to normal, and we have been able to resume our regular local outreach programs. This was something I was waiting for with much anticipation and when the moment came I was fired up and ready to go! I have brought it back bigger and better than ever. Before the lockdown, I was leading weekly outreaches in the city. Now that we are back, I have doubled that to 2 outreaches a week with more photographers involved. It is hard for me to even put into words how exciting this has been for me. Every time we go out it never ceases to amaze me the people we cross paths with. People who would never set foot in a church or take interest in God are being impacted by young passionate believers with cameras and a battery-powered printer! The space for conversations around the portrait shooting and printing is so perfect for getting to know people. We have even had non-photographers come with us just because of how well we break the ice for conversations.
On one of our more recent outreach times, we met a Catholic lady from the Ivory Coast named Ortance (pronounced “Oktonce”). She had just moved to Switzerland and was currently living with her children in the city. Her desire was to move into her own place and get her own life setup which can be quite overwhelming here. On this particular afternoon, she was feeling depressed about her situation and when to the park to think. We gave her a photo (she didn’t want a portrait but asked for a picture of the lake instead) and prayed for her and you could immediately see her demeanor lighten. There was suddenly hope in her eyes. As we were saying farewell, I was so struck by just how good our God is and the way He set us up to encounter and encourage Ortance.
In addition to all the amazing things going on with the photo ministry, life around the base has been quite busy for me. Both of the other people in the creative media department have been gone for a good chunk of this month leaving me both alone and in charge of all the things we are responsible for. This has been quite a lot to handle and I have found it to be at times somewhat stressful. I was already a fairly efficient person, but this experience has pushed me to grow quite a lot in the area of time management and prioritization.
While running things single-handed, one of the major things I have been working on is our setup for remote teaching. Right now we have 4 schools running on the base and all of them are resorting to having teachers over zoom because of the complex travel situation. Prior to this, we had one classroom with a webcam that was used every once in a blue moon. Almost on the fly, I was tasked with figuring out a good solution that was not too complex but had good audio and video to accommodate interaction between the remote speaker and the students. We ended up settling on a small camera designed for concert recording connected to an HDMI capture card that could convert the video feed onto a USB connection. While this was not nearly as complex as some of the systems I have designed and run before, it requires a bit more set up than plugging in a webcam. Thus, there was also a fair amount of training alongside setting them up with the various staff in the schools, each of them with very different levels of technical ability. It was a bit rough at first but now that we have people well trained and all the technical details worked out, the classroom experience is incredible! It is really rewarding for me to know that the technical work and training I am doing is making a big difference in the quality of teaching all the students on the base are getting. The improvement to quality is helping them get more out of what the speaker has to say and that is what makes it truly worth it at the end of the day.
With all the busyness of the summer season, I have made a conscious effort to get out and explore a bit on the weekends when I get the chance. I was blessed with the opportunity to do day trips to both the old city of Bern and Zermatt where the Matterhorn is located. I brought my camera along and got some fun photos, here are some of my favorites:
On a more personal side of things, as I already mentioned this month has been very stretching. One of the aspects I have been pushed the furthest in has been working with others. I love to serve and never want to disappoint others, however, when the manpower of my team goes from 3 to 1 there is no way to keep all the balls in the air. Resetting expectations, telling people what they want isn’t feasible at this time, and not always being able to meet all the requests thrown my way has been difficult for me, especially when the other person feels frustrated or upset about it. When this results in relational friction, I really struggle to have peace. I have been taking great comfort in the book of Ephesians where Paul discusses unity in the church despite our many differences achieved through the love found in Christ. I have found maintaining this heart position of love and grace to be so helpful in tricky situations and a lesson from God I will not soon forget.
As always, thank you for coming along with me in this adventure of faith,
Ben