Shall we sally forth to the chalet?

At the beginning of this semester, the GBU had a training camp in the mountains at, you guessed it, a chalet! I'd never been to this particular one before but it was in the canton of Neuchâtel and took just under 2 hours from Lausanne to get there. (I was lucky enough to go by car.) After winding up narrow roads and through charming little villages we arrived at the chalet with a charming view of fields and mountains and...more chalets!

The weekend was designed for French-speakers so when two Finns came along from Geneva without much French between them, I translated for them for most of Saturday and another student translated for them Sunday. This required quite a bit of concentration when the different session leaders spoke particularly quickly. I wasn't doing any kind of formal translation so it was mostly just summarizing the main points of what the person had just said in whispers to the Finns beside me.

The main speakers for the weekend were a young French couple who had written a book designed as a kind of handbook for Christian students. They came with their two kids, a 13 month old and a one month old. This meant that during pretty much every session one or other of them was wearing the baby and the wife would sometimes pull out a bottle, stick it in the baby's mouth and continue talking! They were pretty impressive. Their parenting skills aside, their content was also really great and engaging. I struggled to keep up sometimes since they spoke super fast!

One of the Swiss staff did a session on sharing your faith and her main point was to find the ways in which the gospel connects to our culture. She incorporated secular music videos and films to illustrate how it would be easy to get a conversation going, to identify what are the problems we agree with and how the Bible offers different solutions. Even if you don't speak French you can check out below a music video by the popular Belgian artist Stromae that she used as one of the examples. In it, Stromae asks a lot of questions about who is God? And why doesn't he answer? His video crosses a church service with a rock concert and the idea is that instead of worshipping God he worships music.

All in all, it was a pretty cool weekend and I'm glad that I went. I think everyone learned a lot and went away feeling encouraged.