Ah how time flies!!
After leaving Brad and Kelsi’s teams in Viile Tecii, Jory, Weston and I hopped a van ride down to Targu Mures where Matthew and Bethany’s team where living for the month. Tragu Mures is an awesome city with a small town feel, beautiful side streets to venture down, little antique shops next to plenty of coffee shops, and an amazing rose garden right in the center of the city. Bethany and Matthew’s teams were partnering with Pastor Zsombro and helping him to evangelize throughout the city. They would also take trips into gypsy villages, interceed at church services and hopefully got to play with some kids at a local hospital. They have made some AMAZING relationships with the youth in that city that have been very fruitful!
I loved being able to spend time with both of them and their teams. The more I spend time with each team them more I fall even more in love with them! Its so crazy how even in month 9, with 2 months left God is taking me deeper and deeper in love with our teams and especially our team leaders. Another thing that I absolutely loved about Matthew and Bethany’s ministry was the sweet Romanian house that they lived in outside the city. It was the cutest, old bungalow tucked into a little town in the valley. Althought it was cute the age proved to be quite a challenge one night during a freak thunderstorm. I guess half of the house wasn’t really built for thunderstorms because it ended up flooding and we ended up cleaning the mess! It was pretty funny though!
On Saturday we jumped on a train (At 6am) and moved out west to Arad to see April’s team. April’s team is currently living and helping an orphanage that houses 5 incredible kids! When we got there we fell right into the madness and by dinner that night we were already being hugged on, yelled at and wrestled with. A lot of the work that April’s team has been doing has been demoing and restoring a house that the orphanage used to be in, as well as an after school program with the kids. While we were here we got to help with the demoing part haha! I learned how well chipping away tile adhesive on a kitchen wall relieves aggression and how fun it is to dig a HUGE hole in the muddy ground (or at least watch Weston and Josh dig it).
I LOVED getting to spend time with one of the most awesome teams (I’m biased because they were the team I spent the month with last month and are like my family now) and their super sweet leader April. We have had so much fun playing with the kids, drawing tattoos (I have a tattoo of the Holy Bible on my arm right now), wrestling, running around outside and just loving on each other. We took the kids bowling one day, which many of them have never done, and just had a blast dancing and singing! Oh and you can’t forget about our awesome mudfight!
The city here is an art historian’s dream! The architecture is beautiful and holds so much history to it. We have spent plenty of hours wandering around the city and enjoying the food and second hand shops. Tonight Weston, Jory and I are attending the symphony and opera (they are performing Carmen) before we jump on another train at midnight to Bucharest. Once we get to Bucharest we will spend 2 days at Casa Shalom so that we can pick up our amazing coaches and fantastic former squad leaders plus the oh so awesome Ashley Musick! Needless to say I am pee my pants excited to see them all! Then its up to Brasov for debrief! LOVE MY LIFE!
