Jonny and Lisa Lobel

I wrote this last Monday and didn’t post it for a while.  The first paragraph a slight exaggeration…

Czech men vigorously commemorate the Monday after Easter by quaffing copious quantities of hard liquor while roaming the streets in search of women to beat with sticks.  The alcohol binge isn’t that unusual here; Czech consume more beer per capital than any other nation.  The stick whacking ritual, meanwhile, is a once-a-year event (to the relief of the female population), allegedly designed by ancient Czech pagans to chase out the evil spirits of winter and usher in a new season of fertility and prosperity.  I’m not sure what family life was like back in the olde tymes when holiday designers still roamed the earth, but I can’t imagine that a special day set aside for domestic abuse was a catalyst for a romantic evening even then.  In any case, it seems that Czech women collectively lock their men out of the house for the day.  This necessary, but effectively unsupervised, concentration of testosterone is likely the impulse for ensuing alcohol consumption.  Even as I write this, I can see groups of disgruntled males staggering through the mud and rain, looking for victims.

The Easter weekend here is a pretty big deal.  Monday is a national holiday, for the merits outlined above, and many people get the preceding Thursday and Friday off as well.  Taking advantage off the long weekend, our church youth group planned an all night prayer meeting starting at 10pm on Saturday evening and ending at 6am on Sunday.  I waffled for a while last week about going, thinking I would be too exhausted to function on Sunday when I was to play on our worship team and share a testimony at church.  Then it dawned on me what an awesome opportunity it was.  Here were Czech teenagers, many of them BMA students, ready to spend an entire Saturday night before their creator.  I would be crazy to pass up the chance to wait and pray with these future Czech Christian leaders!

Each hour had a special theme and was led by two teenagers.  A typical approach was to start the hour with worship and singing, then read a passage of scripture, discuss it briefly in groups, and then pray about it.  It varied by the ability and style of each set of leaders.  One hour, for example, we spent some time worshiping by meditating on God’s attributes by drawing.  In another hour, we each composed our own short Psalm of praise.  I especially enjoyed a time of sharing and praying about our deepest fears (after snakes, of course) with a young man from the other high school in Frydlant who is applying to law school this year.

My Czech language was stretched beyond its normal limits and, by the wee hours of the morning, I was completely exhausted.  I grabbed a few hours of sleep before church, then fumbled through a testimony about Jesus alive in my life, during which I made up at least one new Czech word.  I didn’t follow much of the Czech in the Easter service either, but I came away encouraged.  Jesus is alive and he is at work in the Czech Republic!  Good thing he doesn’t whack us with a big stick.