What a week this has been! I am so excited to share about our visit today to the Central African Presbyterian church, along with an overview of our ministry here, but first I have one last thought (or collection of thoughts) from Romania.
Sorrow and joy. Such opposites, and yet one cannot truly exist without the other. During our time with Hope Church, we saw a lot of each of them, and I wanted to share a few of those stories.
Our first time serving with our contact Dorothy, three of my teammates and I helped with her widows’ ministry. We stocked up on some essentials at the grocery store, divided them into bags, and traveled to the nearby village of Radomiresti to deliver them to five of the neediest women in the area. Most of the women this ministry has served are totally on their own, with no family supporting them despite their age and, for many of them, their physical disabilities.
The first woman we visited was paralyzed from the waist down and hadn’t left her bed in years, solely cared for by her adopted son. Dorothy had brought some homemade banana chocolate chip muffins (amazing!) and coffee for us to eat as we sat and chatted with her. With Dorothy translating, the woman told us her story, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying.
We closed our time together by singing It Is Well for her (clearly this is our team’s theme song since we always seem to encounter or think of it). I loved seeing the joy wash over her face after receiving the small gift of our company.
We were also able to spend a while talking to the next two women we met, who told us nearly identical stories. Both cried as they expressed how much they missed their grandchildren – one who hadn’t seen the little girls she’d helped raise in over a year, and the other whose granddaughter had been taken back to her mother’s just that morning, cutting her visit short.
We held their hands, we listened to their pain, we smiled at the warm advice they each gave us. I can only hope that our presence there shone a ray of light into their lives, that our prayers over them would mitigate the hurt and grief at this separation and heal the rift
in their families.
The Holy Spirit was moving in each of these visits as well. Even amidst their own pain, despite the struggles they have lived that we cannot imagine, each of the five women prayed the same blessing over us as we left. “May they have good health,” they each asked Dorothy to tell us.
That seems to be a customary farewell in Romania, to wish someone good health. I can see how it fits into the culture – the people have persevered through poverty, politics, you name it, as long as they were healthy.
Then last week, my team met someone who transcends that idea.
Her name is Niculina. Several teammates had visited her while I was with the group working at the church, and I heard her name come up over and over. Our last day of ministry, I got to meet her as well. She’s a believer, in her 40s, never married, and almost completely homebound, unless she’s in the hospital. Years of treatments for asthma have left her with diabetes, difficulty breathing, and a body that is shutting down on her. She doesn’t even have her health.
And she is the most joyful person I have ever met. We once again brought baked goods with us, and Niculina bustled around her small home, finding more and more food to share with us. We talked and talked and talked, and never once did her smile waver. As we were preparing to go, we asked her to sing for us.
A more joyful noise I have never heard.
When she sang, Niculina personified the spirit of joy. She didn’t seem ill anymore, her normally shallow breathing evened out as she lifted up songs of praise. She didn’t have much in the way of earthly things to be joyful about, but she had her faith, and that was more than enough.
As we hugged her goodbye at her gate, she asked Dorothy to translate one more thing. “If you don’t come visit my house again,” she told us, “I’ll see you in heaven.”
I nearly cried.
For all of the people that I meet on this journey, not just Niculina, the odds are stacked against us ever seeing each other again. It’s a strange thought, and a strange byproduct of this itinerant life we lead on the Race. It’s a little sad, to be so inspired by people and ministries and then to leave. But it’s also such a fount of joy, knowing that we don’t need to have our paths cross on earth for us to meet again. We have a great big heavenly reunion party that’s being planned right now, and I’m sure it’s filled with hugs and laughter and singing.
Lots and lots of singing.
