Pablo Picasso is quoted as saying: "the purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls." While I do think that is a beautiful statement that I have definitely experienced, yesterday I found that the dust of daily life that had accumulated on my soul recently was washed off not by art, at least not the traditional kind, but a creation much more beautiful: two amazing people of God who we are so blessed were brought into our path.
At this point in the Race, while there's still a daily amazement and a bit of newness and excitement to this whole being everywhere in the world thing, some of that has worn off, and it's been so easy some days just to lose that drive and that passion. We can't just live off that spiritual high and excitement that comes with the week-long mission trips I have experienced in the past. Some days I just want to stay in bed. Some days I just want to be sitting at the Chicken Hut with delicious ranch dressing and sweet tea instead of in the amazing places I'm in. Some days I just want to escape and just live out of routine instead of passion. I just want to get through the day without any thought about how God is moving or being open to the spontaneous impulses of God. It's often hard and exhausting and some days I would just rather not do community and I would just rather not push myself. But then there are those days in which I can't imagine my life elsewhere and in which God rejuvenates and inspires me once again and stirs that fire and figuratively, washes all that accumulated daily life dust off my soul.
This month, my team has no ministry contact. Instead, we are doing a month called Ask the Lord in which we daily strive to follow wherever the Spirit is leading. We are also, in this, working on a new WR project called Unsung Heroes. We are striving to make connections with other ministries in Romania, hearing their stories and maybe even starting a relationship that will continue in the future through other WR teams. Before we even landed in Romania God straight away placed two amazing people in our path. We met Richard and Wanda Clark, two IMB missionaries stationed here in Bucharest, on the plane from Istanbul. Yesterday we were able to meet with the Clarks who so awesomely invited us into their home and truly catered to a Racers' biggest love language (food), and simply just poured into us. They told us stories and gave us just a ton of amazing insight into Romania's history and people and were so willing to help us in any way. I think I speak for all of us when I say we just felt so at home (maybe a little too at home at times). These were just amazing, honest, spirit-filled people full out following God daily, even when it's super hard and doesn't make sense in the terms of the world. Seeing that in them just totally stirred the fires in my soul, and I am so excited about what God is doing here. You know: just another perfect day completely falling in love with God's people and being crazily loved on in return. (and when I say day, I mean that we were actually with them for like 9 hours which flew by, I don't know how they put up with our craziness for that long). With all the beauty in this world (which I absolutely love), those every now and then perfect days that come along, at least in my life, don't generally have anything to do with where I am but the people I'm with and the conversations I have. Yesterday was one of those special days, and I absolutely expect much more of them this month, because as beautiful as Romania may be, her people, I know, are just exponentially more beautiful.
As an extra treat here's a fun story from yesterday:
The dude Dracula is based on is called Vlad the Impaler. Here's my abridged version, probably not quite what you'd find in a history book or even wikipedia, but here goes anyway. Vlad apparently is a hero here in Romania. He was some military guy back in the day who was faced with an incoming Turkish army. Well, I think he was pretty outnumbered, but he did have 4,000 and some Turkish prisoners. He decided to use the strategy of shock and awe on the incoming Turks so what he did was take all the prisoners, impale them, and cover the battlefield with them….aaaaaand it worked and the army left thinking whoever would do something like that is a madman and the devil. You are welcome.
Also, it should be noted that in the middle of this story, we spent 30 minutes discussing and explaining what it meant to be impaled in this way. The final explanation provided by Beth was that it was like a scarecrow but with the log going through instead of being hung on. Can't get any more accurate than that.
