It’s Sunday morning in Romania. I woke up at about 6am to the sound of dogs and the brightness of sun pouring through the room. I got a good night’s sleep (even though I am just on a sleeping pad + sheet), but was a little stiff. My mind goes through a quick list of to-do’s for this morning: setting out breakfast, stretching, writing, going to the penny market to buy lunch for the squad. I get up and slip my tennis shoes on, passing by sleeping squadmates as I walk through the house. We’re 55 housed in this one location this month, so it’s tight living quarters. I lay out a towel on the concrete in the back and start stretching. One of the three dogs living here comes up to sniff my face. He starts trying to nip at my glasses. I shoo him away. When I’m done waking up my muscles I head inside for some breakfast. I’m not feeling particularly sociable this morning, so I leave my headphones in for the first few minutes of food prep. I give up, though, when I see smiling faces and decide to pull out my only introvert-protection-mechanism: headphones.
We are halfway through the month, and I haven’t put up one blog post. I’ve barely shared photos, and most of my close friends from back home haven’t heard from me. Coming into the race, I really expected a lot of down time. This has been completely untrue so far. (But who knows, there’s still 9 months to go!) I have partially-written blogs from this month titled “Orientation” , “Growing Pains”, “Crashing & Burning”, “Submitting to my teammates”, “God’s kisses from Thessaloniki”, and “The Neighbors”. Suffice it to say, a lot’s been going on.
This month, my team is functioning as office staff/stragetic support for Hope church. The church has local, regional, and international outreaches, and has a vision for sharing the hope of Jesus across the Balkans. Much of what I have been doing this month in ministry is locating and contacting potential international ministry partners. From the Balkan region, we look for existing ministries that could benefit from a partnership with Hope Church, primarily by receiving ministry teams sent out from Hope. Throughout the rest of the world, my search includes churches, organizations, and individuals who have a heart for Romania, and want to come alongside Hope Church’s ministry through prayer, regular encouragement, financial gifts, sending mission teams or long term missionaries. My hunt has me searching missionary pages, praying for guidance, and google-translating websites from Bosnia. So. Stinking. Cool. I haven’t gotten to see nearly as much of Romania as I’d hoped at this point, but I have been really involved and dedicated to our work for the month.
Coming into Romania, the Lord told me that intercession needed to be a high priority. I was eager to look at the schedule to see how I could plan to [hopefully] pray an hour each day. Whala! As it turns out, our contact shares the same heart and commitment toward prayer; our first hour of official ministry each day was planned intercessory prayer. Excellent! Our squad actually gets there and does worship for an hour before going into intercession. I’m happy happy happy about that. I’ve had the opportunity to lead worship a few times now. Usually I end up on the floor, overwhelmed by the goodness of God, by the end of the set.
Maybe at some point you’ll get some of those other blogs. Genuinely, I am really hopeful for some alone time (does it exist?!) to sit, think, and write about everything I’ve seen this month. If you want to see more about the ministry I’m working with, you can check out their website ( www.hoperomania.org ) or follow “HOPE for Balkans” on Facebook. If you or someone you know is desirous to work with Romania or other Balkan countries, shoot me or the ministry an email. ([email protected] // [email protected] )
Much love!
Natalie
