June's journeys...

It's June, and it will be quite a month of travelling for me. In fact, this week alone I'll be passing through four different airports: Edinburgh, Málaga, Barcelona and Bucharest. I'll leave Scotland on Monday to travel back to my home in southern Spain, but I won't be there for very long before it's time to pack my bags again. At the end of the week, I'll be flying to Romania, where I'll be teaching in a Principles in Child and Youth Ministry (PCYM) school attended by students from central and eastern Europe. Because the direct flights from Málaga arrive in Romania in the middle of the night, I've chosen to take a morning flight to Barcelona and then an afternoon flight from there to Romania's capital, Bucharest.

After arriving in Bucharest, I'll take a three and a half hour bus journey to the city of Constanța, on the Black Sea coastline, and it's there that I'll be teaching in the PCYM training course. I'll be speaking about curriculum writing, and how to develop creative programmes for ministry with children and teenagers, I'll also be talking in particular about how to develop materials for 10 - 12 year olds - that critical stage of development where they don't want to be treated like "kids" any more, and need excellent input in order to prepare them for growing into their teenage and adult years.

I'm wondering whether being in Constanța will bring back any memories. We passed through there in 1979 when I was on a family holiday in Romania with my parents and brother. All I can remember of Constanța, though, is its iconic casino building on the edge of the Black Sea. Of course, there have been many social and political changes in Romania over the past three decades, and so I can imagine that things will be quite different now from what they were like in 1979.

After ten days on the Black Sea coastline, I'll catch another bus back to Bucharest and will fly from there to Barcelona again. I won't be returning immediately to Málaga, though. Instead, I'll be meeting up with a friend and we'll be taking a few days break in the little seaside town of Llança, which is right in the north of Spain, on the Mediterranean coastline. A friend of a friend is allowing us to stay in his beach house there. Although Llança is in Spain, the town is French-speaking, and the French border is only ten miles away. After our seaside break, I'll be flying back to Málaga where our Villa Rehoboth staff team will be having a few days of prayer and planning for the different training courses and retreats that we'll be offering there in 2013. Thanks for your prayers during all of my travels this month.