New SOTS Set

New SOTS Set
Originally uploaded by Kool.

Friends,
After 2 months of hard work in collaboration, we presented the new Story of the Soul (SOTS) 2 disc (CD-DVD) set to the SOTS Conferencees 2 days ago.

As I am writing this, about 40-50 staff and students from about 12 countries in Eastern Europe and Russia are meeting downstairs in the conference room to be trained in the philosophy and practice of SOTS. It has been a good year for SOTS, ministries in several countries adopted it and are using it among students to share the Gospel in a revolutionary way. It is obviously not a perfect method - none are :) - and it surely does not replace descipleship, but it does well in what it was designed for: Bringing students without God to the realization of their spiritual need through the "cry of their own soul" and giving them JESUS.

Due to the appearent success of SOTS, it needed a structural and graphical redesign. We outsourced part of the project to a young webdesigner and programmer to have the interactive CD programmed in Flash animation. The CD is completed. We designed its contents so that it could be easily uploaded to a website. Something I am working on even now.

We are registering storyofthesoul.net and storyofthesoul.org. Please make sure you check it out in a week.

Please pray that the Lord would continue to use SOTS as He has in the previous years.

Wedding

Wedding
Originally uploaded by Kool.

Behold my wife!

Some Wedding Photos

Dear Friends,

We just got back from our honeymoon. We had an absolutely wonderful time!
Please check out some of our wedding photos online at
http://balsa.smugmug.com/Weddings

You can also order them from this site if you wish. It will be printed at
Smugmug Fuji and delivered to you if you wish.

Kalman and Julcsi

Story of the Soul at YTL symposium

YTL (Youth at the Threshold of Life) has been a world-wide success for several years now, and like Story of the Soul (SotS), started in Hungary. It has been reaching students and teachers with the Gospel in the hundreds. Maybe even thousands. Through it, CCC has been able to train teachers to use the JESUS Film as a means to teach students in classes about the historical facts of the Gospel. Now, SotS and YTL met for the first time. Dave Robinson, the brain behind BOTH outreaches held a SotS session at the YTL teachers' symposium last night.

Here is his report:

"The Story of the Soul at the Youth at the Threshold of Life (YTL) was historic. I wanted to pass on a couple of highlights.
* three believers, key leaders in Church Planting and Reform Churches
ABSOLUTELY loved Story of the Soul. I invited them to come to the training.
They are thrilled and so am I.
* One 25 year old, hip long-hair, educator from Sopron came up to me today
at the close of YTL and said he loved Story of the Soul and would like to be
resourced. He will LOVE what you all are doing. He was so enthusiastic I
thought him to be a believer so I asked him. He said, ³No. Not yet. But
the whole thing touched me deep in my heart.² Later I found out that Matt
Jackson shared Christ with him the night before.
* Out of the 329 there, 155 passed back to us a comment card and 16 of them
prayed to receive Christ.
* One 60 year old woman said, ³I have been to many training sessions in my
life ­ some for drug prevention, some for the mental health of our students.
It was good. Like here, methodology was stressed. The traditional
trainings, however, are missing something badly needed and I did not know it
until this weekend. It is missing your added dimension. YTL has a strength
and insight into what matters most and offers great help. The values, the
character development, the tools for building friendships and our students
self-worth are wonderful. And I will tell you why. It has been prepared by
love. It is filled through and through with love. I am so grateful to all of you for this.²

Our Multimedia team has been working on taking SotS to yet another level. We have brought in a young designer Phil Konya to help us with the project. We are completely redesigning the SotS training package. Part of it will be an interactive training CD and a DVD full of short clips to help learning about, planning and executing a SotS session. It is already looking great. The CD is planned to be completed beginning of May and the DVD in September. We are looking forward to how it is going to be used by God in the coming months. Please continue to pray for SotS!

Kalman

Legal wedding photos

legal
Originally uploaded by Kool.

Dear Friends,
you can now find the first batch of photos of our legal wedding. Just click on this photo. More, higher quality photos are coming soon.
Kalman & Julcsi

Rejoice with us...kinda' :)

Dear Friends,
Yesterday afternoon at 1pm Julcsi and I got legally married. In Hungary this is a necessary thing. One does not have to have a church wedding, but has to have a legal wedding. So among Christians this is something they do not over-organize. Usually close family and the witnesses are invited and the whole ceremony takes no more than 15 minutes tops.
Christian couples do not consider this the real wedding so they do not move in together afterwards – thus the kinda’ :) in the subject. There is also a church wedding sometime afterwards. Ours is on the 1st of April as I might have mentioned before.
Please pray for our next 3 weeks as this will be an extremely busy time with work, school and getting ready for the wedding. We both feel exhausted and that we are longing to have quality time together – something we have had very little of in the past months.
We’d love to have you all join us in the ceremony if it was at all possible...
Praying for you all,
Kalman & Julcsi (pronounced “yool-chi”)

Karolina Court apartment building

karolina2.jpg
Originally uploaded by Kool.

Friends, as our wedding is coming closer (April 1st - no joke!) we have been extremely busy. Not only with work, school and organizing the wedding, but also selling an apartment in another town (belongs to my fiancé) about 3-4 hours from Budapest and buying another one in Budapest. After looking for several weeks and praying for much longer, we have been turned down. We almost got one, was it not for someone else who got in right before us. Time was pressing us, but we kept praying and in a matter of 2 days God provided us an apartment much better we could have asked for. Way better location (on the Buda side - that is the hilly side of Budapest), brand new and there was a special deal only THIS WEEK so they are selling it for about 5000 USD less than its normal price. It is gonna be a lot better investment of the money the Lord provided for...HIS apartment. Yes, we consider this His apartment. He got is, he provided for it, and we find ourselves praying: Lord, please help us to get you an apartment you will like. Only one little hiccup: Its cost - even with the special deal - is still about 5000 USD more than we can afford at the moment. Still, we believed this opportunity comes from the Lord thus we signed the contract yesterday (Friday, the 24th of Feb.). We will likely not be able to move in before December, and still need to figure out where we are going to live until then, but at least will have time to save money and pray that the Lord would provide for the remaining 5000 USD before December. Please pray with us, so that
- In the middle of all of this, we would have time for Him and each other
- God would give us a place to stay until we can move in to this new apartment
- God would give us the remaining 5000 USD or more. (more would allow us not to have to take a large loan from a local bank).

If our God is moving your heart to help us with this new apartment, please let us know at kalman.kovacs@ccci.org or call us at +36-30-251-2031.

May the Lord bless you!