Sunday afternoon we left Lovech for a trip to two small villages about 45 minutes of windy road outside of the city. My team and I were armed with our sleeping bags and mats and painting clothes, ready to attend the tiny church in Dragana and spend three days painting the church in Bezhanovo.
That same Sunday, a Bulgarian boy tried to teach me how to say “I love you” in Bulgarian. It is language that I keep thinking of in relation to my three days in Bezhanovo, language and food. Both meant survival; both meant relationships. I never did learn to pronounce “I love you,” but I have learned how to say it, over and over again.
This is how to say “I love you” in Bulgarian:
Ivan and Silvia, the deacons of the church in Bezhanovo, opening their home to six American missionaries with stinky clothes and sleeping bags. They have three children- Pavlo, Angel, and Mariella- and jobs, and cannot speak English, but still let us pile into one of the four rooms of their house and sleep and eat with them.
Playing dodgeball, ten adults and four children running around breathless and laughing, until it is too dark to see.
The fresh bread Ivan’s mother made from scratch every day. The way her eyes filled with tears when we left, even though she spoke only Gypsy and we spoke only English, and she hugged us tight.
The ten grandmothers that make up the congregation at Dragana, giving us fresh fruit from their gardens and hot banitska. One held my hand with purple-stained fingers, dark from picking grapes to make into wine. They had prayed for the baptism of the Holy Spirit the previous Sunday, and even though theologically I know that it is something different, as I sat in the tiny room filled with strong women all I could think was, “This is the body and the blood. If every church was like this all the time, we wouldn’t need communion.”
Communion, with real wine and fresh bread, sitting around a long table on a cool night between the kitchen and the garden. Hearing the words in Bulgarian and English that Jesus spoke at his last supper: “This is my body. This is my blood. Do this in remembrance of me.”
The body of Christ is the church, and until this week I didn’t realize the fullness of that concept. We are family, brothers and sisters in Christ, and my team and I were welcomed like sisters into the lives of a family in Bezhanovo, a little Bulgarian village far from our homes. But I kept looking around at Silvia and Angel and Mariella, at Baba and Pavlo and my team, and thinking, “This is home. This is love.”
I realized as we left on Wednesday that communion had not been a one-time thing this week. Between painting the walls of a little church and hours of kicking a soccer ball around, we had eaten in companionable silence with the body of Christ. I made friends I have not said more than four intelligible words to. And I had communion at every meal.
It didn’t matter that we painted their church, or that their church was the size of a two-car garage and my church is the size of two gymnasiums. They welcomed us because they loved us as we were, English-speaking Americans, but Christians all the same.
This is how to say “I love you” in Bulgarian: with fresh bread and tulip-patterned coffee cups, football and rice pudding, sitting under a single lightbulb in the early evening darkness and laughing until it hurts. No language necessary. No language needed.
