Forjan's in Radovljica

DON’T MISS IT if you’re in town!!!

Young people are going to preform in Radovljica and I can’t wait to see them! My sister is leading the choir and there are five young people from our town in the choir (some from our youth group).

BAROCNA DVORANA in Radovljica, this coming Saturday, 10.12.2011 at 6pm!

Also, be praying for the night and for the message that will be told!

Let me just say I never had this many people in my house for dinner!!! Thank you Jesus for my house that can hold this many chairs for our dear youth who don’t know you … but you love each one of them!

The night went super well! Our meal was delicious, our time special and our hearts were greatful!

one of our high school girls, sabina, did the napkins and candy bags. Stephanie thought of the mandarin oranges and cupcake papers for candy and glorija set the table. GREAT group product!!!

Not long ago we celebrated Samuel’s arrival to our family. He turned ONE on 11th of November. Two months ago Sebastian went to ‘Advance training’ weekend where they talked about taking every oppurtunity to build new relationships. He came home so inspired and he said to me: ‘Gloria we are inviting neighbors over for Samuel’s birthday and all of our friends from the area’. Now, when he was gone, I spend some time on internet thinking about Samuel’s first birthday party. Patrik’s first party was fun. We invited our dear friends and family and the day was lots of fun. But as I was reading through websited and searching for ideas for Samuel’s party, every website I came across said something like this: ‘First birthdays are less for the birthday child and more for the parents! Gather your family together to celebrate the completion of the first amazing year! I was convinced we should only have family here. I couldn’t wait to tell Sebastian how I made a list of things we will do as a family and how I came to realize that the best option to keep it private. Let me tell you, I enjoy having people here, but this time I already made a plan and it was good. Now I had to come up with something different. I wasn’t sure if I had energy for that. And if he ment friends, yes that’s doable, but our neighbors that we hardly know and people we see maybe twice a year!?!.

We did come to agreement that trying something new might be fun! First of all we chose to call it ‘Forjans open house’ instead of a ‘birthday party’. We send invitations out to around 40 friends and people we know saying: ‘Dear friends, Samuel is turning one on Friday and we would love for you to stop by our house on Saturday anytime from 10am – 1pm to congratulate Samuel, enjoy a delicious piece of cake and a cup of tea or coffee. He will have a birthday party on Sunday with his family and will receive already enough gifts. So please, don’t bring gifts. We would really like to treat you this time and share this moment of joy with you. Hope you can come!’ We ordered a nice home-made cake from a friend and I had two ladies from our bible study group come to help me with serving people. I decorated our home and here we were waiting for people to stop by. First people arrived at 10.30 and than within an hour the house was full. Over 20 people came. A night before the party I prayed that God would give me one opportunity to share the gospel. And he did! YES!

It was a fun time being together with some dear friends and some others who we care for and would love to grow closer to them! I’d call it a success and we will definitivly do it again!

Here’s a few pictures:

Traditional family picture with the cake!

You can tell Sammy is a 2nd born child! I spend two weeks training Patrik how to blow a candle for his first 1st birthday. The ‘lost expression’ on Sammy’s face is my fault! He had no idea what he was supposed to do!

We had one game in plan, the rest of the time time was spend talking to one another, drinking coffee or tea and enjoying the delicious cake!

What surprised me was how people quickly connected without knowing eachother from before. The example from below is a proof:From the left we have Terry, who is American living in Ljubljana and is our team-mate, than there’s Dusan in the middle, who is from Trzic (A husband of a lady I got to know at the hospital giving birth to Patrik!!) and Robert who goes to our church in Ljubljana. They seemed to have a good time.