Szia…see ya

Saying goodbye is never my favorite thing to do. Fortunately, you never have to say goodbye to other Christians, just see you later.

Most of my students after our final class

Friday was our last day of class in Gherla. While I was sad to say goodbye to our students and the many new relationships created there, I am excited for the future and the growth that will come from our two weeks there. I was incredibly blessed by the people of this Hungarian Baptist Church and my precious students. I will continue to pray that they learned infinitely more than English, but that they felt God’s love through me. We parted with lots of hugs, kisses, and even some tears. Hugs and “I love you”s from my sweet students is all the reward for the weeks of work I could ask for. They are such jewels of children, and I will always remember the love I received from them. I am excited to continue my relationships with them. Some have already emailed and friended me on facebook. yay technology!

These three weeks, God has given me renewed hope, shown his great provision, and reminded that each moment of my life is an incredible blessing filled with his presence.

The people have invited us to return and teach next year. Everyone I told goodbye in both Somosjuvar and today in Oradea asked when I will return. I have to tell them that I’ll be back if that is God’s will. My blogs from my Romania trip in 2009 end the same way. It’s been an amazing journey! Who knows, maybe God will send me back here one day.

In the mean time, I’m happy to be back home tomorrow and for the adventures that await this summer and throughout my senior year at Baylor.

To Romania, I say “szai” (that’s like hi or bye, and ironically is pronounced “see ya”)

“Nothing Blog-worthy”

When my dad asked me last night how this week has been, I told him it’s been really good, just nothing blog-worthy. His response caused me to reevaluate that idea.

It’s pretty silly that even in Romania, as I spend my days preparing and my nights teaching, I can even forget the wonder and majesty of what is happening. Of course it is blog-worthy. I’m blessed to have this opportunity. I’m building incredible relationships that will extend into eternity, I’m receiving loads of love from precious children, and I’m cherishing this wonderful time with my Gran. How many granddaughters get to spend three weeks with their grandmother serving the Lord overseas? I was guilty of ignoring my blessings because everything was going smoothly. I am sorry for that. And I know that I am guilty of this all of the time.

This phenomenon of thinking our lives are “nothing blog-worthy,” happens regularly in our Christian lives. Then we met a new Christian, or someone who has experienced a real miracle, and think to ourselves, and notice the difference. We forget to be excited about Jesus! We forgot the glory of his salvation and the very real presence of his spirit. We ignore his majesty in the flowers, the clouds, and in filling our lungs with breath each morning.

So, I take it back. Every moment has been incredibly blog-worthy, filled with God’s love, his provision, refreshing rains, beautiful sunshine, and the majesty of my saviour king.

How has your week been?

God is always working.

And he always provides for our needs.

Yesterday, I woke up feeling pretty crummy, and actually fainted from dehydration. We worked and played hard in Lapus on Saturday, and there just wasn’t any noncarbonated water around. After giving Gran a pretty bad scare we decided to rest upstairs during church and just do church ourselves. Who would’ve thought that I’d be the one sick and not the seventy-four-year-old. After the service, Annamaria came up to check on me. Gran and I had been researching dehydration online, and it says that when you faint from dehydration, you should go to the emergency room. Obviously, that wasn’t really an option we wanted to pursue here. We knew that I needed something other than water to replenish the electrolytes my body desperately needed, but how? Annamaria had the answer and again, we didn’t even have to ask. God provides. Annamaria told us she had some electrolyte strips for dehydration from America. I’m still not sure how she had them, but thanks be to God that she did.

When Annamaria returned with the electrolyte strips, juice, and crackers, she expressed that she never knew why she had those electrolyte strips. She had never needed them. Now she knew why. God planned the whole thing. He knew I would be here at this exact time and need them. Those strips made the journey all the way from a Walgreens in the US to Romania to bring me back to good health yesterday, and after my day of rest, I am happy to say that I am in great health and had a wonderful Monday, with all praise to God. He is always working, and he always provides for our needs.

Hope

Two years ago, I spent one month in Romania working with Romanian orphans. I loved on young girls in an orphanage where the older girls started prostituting them out as soon as age eleven. I felt so hopeless leaving those precious 4, 5, 6-year-old girls there, knowing that my time there made very little impact on their bleak future. The system needs to change. This experience is part of what is driving to pursue macro social work.

Yesterday, I learned that my darling Krisztina, the six-year-old who brought me the ice cream, is adopted. My heart swelled when I received this news. She is just the age of some of the children I loved on two years ago. Hugging her here, now, knowing that she is in a home with parents who love her and are involving her in activities in a church, makes me cry joyful tears. There is no doubt in my mind that this opportunity to love on her now is a gift of hope from God. She is a reminder that God provides and his plans are so much bigger than I can see. He sets the fatherless in families. He never forgets a one of his children, no matter how oppressed and isolated. I don’t even know how to adequately express the deep emotions I’m feeling. It’s like God just dropped her in my lap to deliver daily hugs, smiles, and genuine happy eyes to me from his father heart. I have renewed hope.

On another note, I have a proud mama moment for you all. In class yesterday, my students wrote in complete sentences in English using the vocabulary we’ve learned this week. That’s right! Sentences! They didn’t know any of these words or how to say anything more than “My name is…” five days ago. I’m so proud of them! They’re really learning! I love these darling ones!

This morning, Gran and I traveled with Pastor Vilmos and his family into the mountains to visit a 600-year-old orthodox church, monastery, and a lake. The view from the church is phenomenal! Yet the people worshipping there are so lost. 40,000-50,000 people journey here every August seeking forgiveness of their sins at the festival of the Virgin Mary. There is a statue of Mary in the church said to have once had tears in her eyes, making the place “miraculous.” Some walk for weeks to reach the festival and be cleansed. It breaks my heart that even from a place so beautiful, where all you have to do is look around to see the one true God, people can be so lost. He is all around in his creation.

Unexpected Blessings

The most wonderful parts of today came without any effort on my part at all. I think it probably always happens that way. When I stop working so hard to do things my way and just give up my will for God’s will, everything turns out infinitely better than I could have hoped.

Class starts at 5, but students start arriving around 4:40, so I just hang out in the classroom and visit with them (as well as we can, silly language barrier). I was enjoying chatting with Kata and Priszcilla when precious little Krisztina came in with an ice cream cone for me. She is my darling six-year-old who can’t follow 90% of what we’re doing in class, but I love her anyways. That sweet gift started the class off on a great note.

4 of my boys were out on a school field trip and a couple others were missing today because it was raining outside and almost everyone walks here, but it was a great class none the less, a bit rowdy, but still good. Here are some of my sweet students from today.

After all of my students had left the classroom, sweet little Krisztina came running back in with a big smile on her face, gave me a huge hug, and then ran back out. What a blessing she is to me!

Gran and I ate dinner with Melea in her apartment down the hall from us tonight because Lihel was off at one of his 9 churches. Another woman in the church brought the dinner. These church women are so kind to us. Gran and I both were praying today for God to provide an opportunity for us to become better friends with Melea, especially me since we are less than two years apart. Well tonight, God provided that opportunity and it required no work on our part. God did the whole thing. After dinner, Gran and I noticed a basket with some balls of yarn in the corner and asked Melea about them. She brought over some knitting work, and when I expressed that I didn’t know how to knit, she handed it over and taught me. The student became the teacher, and the teacher became the student. She was a good teacher, too. I knitted a whole row. That opportunity to humble myself and need to learn from her and empower her to use her strengths to teach me was exactly what was needed to take us another step towards friendship and boost her confidence.

Thanks be to God for these simple, wonderful blessings.

Teaching

English classes have begun in Romania!

I am happy to report that I like teaching English I was so nervous beforehand, but the past two days have gone so well that I actually like it. As it turns out, I’m good at teaching English. I suppose that is a good thing, since I’m here doing just that for two weeks.

I am teaching the children. I have 18 students, ages 6-13, all very beginners. They are SO energetic. But I put their energy to good use

Monday, I taught the alphabet, calendar, weather, and parts of the body. Because the students come to class from 5-7, right after school, we are careful to make our classes very different from school classes. They are fun! To learn the parts of the body, we sang “Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes,” with all of the different body parts. We also played a game where the kids were on two teams and they had to draw a paper with a body part in English written on it and then draw that body part on the board. Every member of the team added a different body part and the best one won. It was hilarious! The children LOVE competition! They didn’t quite understand the game at first, so one body was just a row of elbows, tongues, thumbs, and hair.

We ended the class by reading Psalm 139:14 together, in English and Hungarian, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” Lihel helped me explain to them the meaning behind the verse in relation to learning about body parts. It is so important to me to incorporate scripture into all of the lessons. No matter how much people have or how educated they are, without Christ, they have nothing. It’s easy to get so caught up in helping people, that we forget there is one thing we all truly need, Jesus. Without him, everything else is meaningless. Sometimes I think our generation is so focused on humanitarian aid (which is super important) that we forget to tell them about Jesus. But what God is a full stomach if the soul is empty?

Anywho, yesterday’s class left me so exhausted that I just couldn’t write until tonight. Teaching takes it out of you. I can’t imagine what its like for teachers who spend all day doing this. I just spent 2 hours. And it took me all day to prepare.

Today was fun, too. We reviewed from yesterday and then learned numbers. We played numbers bingo for almost an hour! They loved it! Plus, it forced them to hear the numbers in English and match them, then repeat them to me in English when they had a bingo. I tried so many times to move on, but they said, “No! No! Another number!” I just love their enthusiasm.

After the lessons tonight, we were invited to the home of a family in the church for dinner. Seriously, though this church is small (about 30 members) they have big hearts. We have been so well taken care of. Never before have I been on a mission trip where all of my meals just come to me. The pastor’s wife organized a meal schedule for us where a different church family is responsible for each day. They are such jewels.

Please pray for our students and especially their parents. We have more students than there are members in the church (40), which means most of the students and their families are not members. Please pray that these English classes will not be the only time the children come to church. Pray that this will plant a seed in their hearts and their parents’ hearts to come and receive what they need infinitely more than English. May they understand that we traveled around the world to teach them not because we love English, but because we love them and we want them to know God’s endless love.

 

And because prayer works, we have a toilet now. hooray!

Lapus

Today was a glorious, wonderful, fantastic, phenomenal, beautiful, heavenly day.

Gran and I traveled to Lapus (pronounced la-push) with Lihel and his wife Melea. Pastors Lihel and Vilmos don’t just pastor this one church, you see. Together, they pastor nine different churches within a three-hour (or so) radius! 9 churches! Can you imagine that? They are wonderful men of God.

Any who, Lapus is a small town of about 13,000 up in the mountains. The drive there and back was absolutely phenomenal! The pictures don’t even begin to do it justice. This country, especially the Transylvania region, is incredibly gorgeous. It’s like God spent some extra time pouring out his beauty here.

In Lapus, we had lunch and dinner in this precious couple’s home. The food was “fenom” (delicious in Hungarian). The family owns a bakery and a coal mine, and she’s cooked lunch for all forty of their men employees for years. That’s expertise Language barrier aside, this couple communicated incredible love and welcome to us. Our time with them was like a little piece of heaven. It is always such a joy to meet Christian brothers and sisters around the world and experience such wonderful fellowship. The husband even spoke in Hungarian that it will be such a joy to meet and be able to communicate in heaven one day exactly as I was thinking that same thing. The Holy Spirit filled that place.

This afternoon, we went with Lihel and Milea to the children’s time the church hosts there every Saturday afternoon. The church in Somosjuvar is planting a church in Lapus, but the building is under construction. For the time being, the Pentecostal church lets them use their building for church meetings. The church is actually being constructed in the neighboring village where the only Hungarian church is Reformed Catholic. Needless to say, that pastor is not very excited about the Hungarian Baptist church coming to town. Even though the Hungarian Baptist church doesn’t have a building, they have a big ministry in the area. 21 children came to the children’s time today. It was so obvious that Lihel and Melea love the children very much, and the children love them, too. They led the children in a few fun songs with darling motions. Then, Gran and I took over for some fun English time.

Who knew teaching English could be so fun? Gran let me take the reigns. We started with the song “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes,” to teach them the English names for body parts, with the children taking turns leading the group using different body part names. They had a blast. The next song was so fun. We sang “Old McDonald Had a Farm,” to teach the English names of different animals. The kids had so much fun making the animal noises, especially the pig. The last song we did was “The B-I-B-L-E,” to teach some of the alphabet and some more vocabulary. They each had letters to the song and held them up at that part.

After the songs, Lihel talked with the children about the Bible, or so I gathered, he was speaking in Hungarian after all. He did an excellent job of involving them. They were so incredibly enthusiastic about the discussion and the whole time, really. During the prayer time, each child took a turn praying, just going down the rows. That is how they do church prayer meetings here. It is such a blessing to hear little voices talking to God. Melts my heart. Maybe we should start that in the states. No one is afraid to pray out loud over here.

Until it was time to go, we got out a game of horseshoes we brought and played that in front of the church. The kids had so much fun competing and learning the English numbers 0-10 as we kept score between teams. I am so hoping that we get to go back there next Saturday. It was such a dear dear blessing.

Tomorrow morning, we’ll get to be a part of church here again. I love doing church. Not just going to a church, but actually being church. Living it out with members of the body on the other side of the world. I am grateful that salvation comes by faith alone, not by works, but the works bring so much joy to my life. If you never do any kind of missions or Christian service, you are missing out on part of the eternal joy and life that God has for us. It starts now. And I felt that eternal joy, today.

And in case you’re wondering, the toilet stopped running, after flooding the bathroom and leaking into the walls. eek. now it just doesn’t work, but honestly, it’s not a problem. It’s just an excuse to spend more time next door with Lihel and Melea (who is nearly my age wow! I can’t imagine being a pastor’s wife, let alone a married woman, at only 22).