September 2025 Boumans by the Danube Update
Dear friends,
Julie and I are at home on a Saturday with no meetings or obligations for the first time since returning to Hungary in late August after a short visit with family. Like many of you, we have been tending to various obligations with work, church, friendships, and other responsibilities and opportunities. So, sitting her as the sun shines in through the window and looking at the day today as gift and opportunity, I’ll share a few updates on our lives since our last update.
We enjoyed about two weeks in August of good visits with family and friends in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Michigan. Highlights included attending a glorious outdoor concert with our kids in downtown Chicago, appreciating the glory of Lake Michigan, American breakfasts and craft beverages with good friends, and family time with our moms and siblings.
Since our return Julie has gone back to work at Olive Tree Counseling Center, and my Cohort Europe volunteers (Dasha, Justė, and Pamela) are all settling to their host locations (Berlin Germany, and Malaga Spain) and they are engaged in intensive language learning for the first month. See below for giving information if you would like to support any or all of these three dynamic young women as they serve in Berlin and Malaga this year.
My university class on the music and poetry of the American Civil Rights movement has begun again, and there are 12 students enrolled. We took a road trip last weekend with Hanis, one of our Cohort volunteers from last year, visiting our friends David and Mary in Berlin last weekend – David and Hanis share a birthday, and we celebrated both during one of David and Mary’s weekly “language café” nights with about a hundred recent arrivals and other German language learners in Berlin. We also got to catch up with Pamela, our newly arrived volunteer there. Driving from Budapest to Berlin and back takes you through Slovakia and Czech Republic on the way, so we also stopped in Prague to spend some time with Sikama, another good friend who left Budapest last winter to begin PhD studies in Prague.
Much of our time this fall will be spent (in addition to our regular ministry commitments) preparing for time away from Budapest between December and May (2026). The bi-lateral agreement between the US and Hungary requires that after five years of residency we must spend six months outside the country, and Resonate has procedures that will allow us to participate in a time of ReConnect with our supporting individuals and churches while we are outside Hungary.
One thing we are working on that you might be able to help with is finding a furnished apartment or small home or condo in Grand Rapids that might be available for all or part of that time (mid-December 2025- end of May 2026). A snowbird perhaps, or some other situation where a place might be available and affordable – we do have budget set aside for this. If you have something, or know of something possible, please let us know.
Also, if you are interested in getting together while we are Stateside, either as an individual or with a group to hear about our work and our plans for the next few years, please let us know. I’ll be sending separate notices to church contacts with more detailed information about our available dates for church visits. We are eager to reconnect with many of you in a way that our brief vacation visits don’t always allow.
Meanwhile, please join us in prayers for wisdom, for creativity, courage, and clarity as we experience these months of transition and moving around. We plan to keep our Budapest apartment, and are working on a creative potential sub-let arrangement, but it feels disconcerting to be leaving “home” once again. We also appreciate your prayers with us and our Grand Rapids church, Neland Avenue Church, as we navigate independence from the denomination we belonged to from 1915 until May of 2025. It is a time of sadness, but also of opportunity and new energy, and we are eager to see where God leads us in faith – your prayers are appreciated. And we ask for prayers in our process of reapplying for residency to be in place by next spring for our return to Hungary – yet another administrative detail taking up our time and energy this fall.
Another highlight for us from our August visit to the US was the opportunity to worship with our friends at Loop Church in Chicago. Pastor Derek gifted us with a sermon on the many greetings offered to friends and fellow Jesus-followers in Romans chapter 16. In the spirit of that sermon, and that passage, we greet each of you in love and in the confidence that the “God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus be with you.”
In confident hope,
Jeff and Julie Bouman
Giving information: We are grateful for, and eager to continue your financial partnership that allows to serve in this place. And if your church is looking to add a ministry in Europe to those you support, we would welcome a few more churches as partners as well. Details for supporting us can be found on our Resonate webpage here. After you tap the yellow “donate” button, you will be asked if you would like to donate in USD or Canadian, and then you will land on a page where you choose an amount, and then on the drop-down menu below you will choose “Missionaries-Europe,” and below that a drop-down menu will be a list of names, and you select Jeff and Julie Bouman. Below that are instructions for entering payment information. **(This same set of instructions applies for Justé’s page, Dasha’s page, and Pamela’s page for giving. Each of these new members of Cohort will be challenged to raise $10,000, and we trust God to provide for each of them as they serve.)**
PS And finally, as we sometimes do, I’ll offer the gift of a poem, “Affirmation,” that crossed my path sometime recently from Chicago poet, educator, and activist Eve Ewing:
Affirmation
Speak this to yourself
until you know it is true.
"I believe that I woke up today
and my lungs were working,
miraculously,
my voice can sing and murmur and ask,
miraculously.
My hands may shake, but they can hold
me, or another.
My blood still carries the gifts of the air
from my heart to my brain,
miraculously.
Put a finger to my wrist or my temple
And feel it: I am magic. Life
and all its good and bad and ugly things
scary things which I would like to forget
beautiful things which I would like to remember
—the whole messy lovely true story of myself
pulses within me.
I believe that the sun shines
if not here, then somewhere.
Somewhere it rains,
and things will grow green and wonderful.
Somewhere inside me, too, it rains,
and things will grow green and wonderful.
Sometimes my insides rain from the inside out.
And then I know
I am alive
I am alive
I am alive
they flew to Spain to begin their year of service.
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