This
month in ministry I am very fortunate to be staying at Casa Shalom (house of
peace). I would describe Casa Shalom as
a place for missionaries to stay and was originally meant to be an orphanage. There are people that work here and kids that
have sort of been adopted by the founder.
They don’t have to stay but choose to.
Camps are run for kids here and church services are held. Really it is a multifunctional place. This month we are definitely not roughing
it. We are staying in a beautiful new building
with hot showers, laundry, and meals are made for us. Also, I
have stayed in Bucharest which has been a definite plus. After a day of ministry we are able to hop on
the bus and get to a mall, downtown, restaurants, etc. This is a nice change from the village life.
We have
spent a couple of days working with the women at Jubilee. I was excited to do this ministry but as we
began to work with the women I found it to be very challenging. It is hard to entertain adult women with our
limited resources and the difficulties with communication. Our first day was very difficult and we left
feeling exhausted. This ministry is not
very physically intense but it is emotionally.
Our team wanted to be as beneficial as possible but realized there may
be strongholds in this environment that were limiting us in our connecting with
the girls. We prayed several times as a
team to release energy into our team, we prayed to break strongholds, we prayed
that God would build the relationships for us, and that our days would be as
fruitful as possible. Well, God proved
Himself faithful and the next day we had energy, bonds were easily built with
the girls and we had plenty of things to do with them.
We have
two days a week we spend at Casa Shalom helping with staff on the compound. This week we emptied an 18 wheeler trailer
with donations sent from Germany. Later
that week we removed the stuff we put in the garage from the truck and some
would say reorganized but I wasn’t sure, it seemed we just put it back in. I did know the staff here was appreciative of
our work so that’s all that matters.
So far
I am enjoying Romania very much. We had
a chance to go to a multicultural church. This was refreshing as this the type
of church I go to back home. But this
was the real deal. There were people
really from all over the world. There
was an Indian guest speaker which was a great sermon to hear. Later we got a
chance to go to a gypsy village where I found living conditions were very poor.
Some from our team got to spend more time with the gypsy kids at camp at Casa
Shalom. Sounds like the kids are in
desperate need of love.
