Sommer and Jen, circa 2004.
I just found the Team Germany blog. We have a team of volleyball players, staff and Julie Muse who are on a mission's trip in Germany right now. There are posts, pictures and comments. Leave a comment and say hi to Julie.-C
I've had this post ready for a couple of days, but I couldn't get the picture that I wanted for it. You'll have to check out the pictures on the Team Germany blog. Can you find the one where one of the players is wearing a Maranatha Soccer sweatshirt?
Julie Muse and Grace Komis (Sommer Rodolph and Jen Adam in the background) at the church in Erlange, Germany - June 2006.
Many of you know that this blog began as a result of the men's and women's soccer team's missions trip to Germany last summer. You can read about that trip and view pictures by clicking on the May/June/July 2006 links to the right. This summer the Maranatha Volleyball team is taking a mission's trip to Germany and they will minister in a few of the same places. Two weeks ago, Julie Muse, a member of our women's soccer team and a good all-around athlete was asked to be a part of the volleyball trip. Before she know where the money would come from, Julie agreed to go.
Julie will have a great opportunity to minister in a place that will be more familiar to her than anyone else on the trip. An even greater blessing is that many of you were so generous for the soccer trip that we had a surplus left in the account. (I wanted to spend it on warm-ups for the women's team but that would not have been a wise use of the money that had been donated for mission's work.) We decided the best choice was to keep the money in the account until the next time we took a mission's trip - until we found out that Julie would be going with the volleyball team. The surplus was enough to cover Julie's trip this summer.
All of us who participated in last year's trip are a little jealous of Julie but we wish her the best. I hope all of you will remember the volleball team in prayer when they leave for their trip at the end of May. It is a great blessing to see the hand of God work.-C
...and if anyone is interested in helping the Maranatha women's team purchase new warm-ups for the upcoming season, you know where to find me. :)
While on the mission's trip in Germany this year we found out a lot about each other. . .sometimes too much. . .I won't give details. However, one of the hidden talents that we discovered was Bryan Oliver's ability to look terrible in almost every picture taken of him. Bryan is really a decent looking person in real life and at the rate Adam Steen was snapping pictures, you would think that at least one of them would turn out. It almost became a game at the end of each day to look through the 100 or so pictures taken by Adam and try to find a good picture of Ollie. I thought that the readers of this blog might enjoy a sampling of the pictures we found.
Bryan struggles with photos, but the camera loves Kirk . . .
Adam likes to hold up his camera and just snap random shots. He caught Bryan at a bad moment, but we wondered if he had any good moments. Kirk managed to look pretty GQ somehow. 
We have three pictures of this pose, this is probably the best one as far as Bryan is concerned.
Okay, here is one good picture of Bryan from last season.
Sorry, ladies, Bryan already has a girlfriend - and she probably doesn't have to worry about losing him after this post. While downloading these pictures of Bryan, I did find quite a few pictures of myself that I may need to destroy. . . especially if Ollie gets a blog. -C 
