I’ve learned many Romanian words this month, as I expected to. One thing I didn’t expect to hear were hybrid English/Romanian words. Vitali, the pastor of Emmanuel Church where we’re working, speaks English well but sometimes uses words he thinks are English but really aren’t. Planification is one of them! He uses planification as meaning a plan and planificating means planning. Makes sense to me, let’s add them to the dictionary! 
When we arrived in Moldova for the month Vitali gave us a schedule of what our days would look like and what his plan for ministry was. It looked to me like a good plan with a purpose and structure to our days. I liked having that written plan of what each day would look like. Well, we quickly found out that the plan changed everyday. Welcome to the World Race!
We often didn’t know what we were doing for the day until five minutes before we left to do it. We ended up doing everything and anything that needed to be done. We did so many different things for ministry. Usually some of us were working in the church’s garden everyday. The original plan was to build a greenhouse…I bet you can guess by now that didn’t happen. We did everything but that, though. Hoeing weeds, picking veggies, cleaning up trash, building a pig pen, cleaning the chicken coop and beaver pen- yes beavers…except they were actually muskrats. Still not sure why they call them beavers?
Also during the month we did house visits, chopped wood, helped with the church’s kid’s program, handed out invitations to a couple evangelism events the church held, picked apples, cleaned houses…I could go on and on. Sometimes I wondered why we were doing what we were doing. What impact did picking apples make? Or how did cleaning up trash make a difference? People will just throw more trash on the ground.
Then I have to remind myself that I might not always be able to see the end result or what’s happening behind the scenes. Maybe by picking those apples, we showed the Romanian man who was with us through our actions and gestures that there is a difference in us. Maybe he’ll see the hope and freedom we have and eagerly desire that himself. There’s no telling the impact we have in what we do.
God has His own planification. We are a part of it, we just might not be able to see it all right here, right now, but have to trust that He’s putting it together. Especially for me on this race, not knowing exactly what we’re doing all the time or knowing how it’s going to make a difference is hard for me to be doing all these things. One amazing woman of God in my life recently reminded me that humanitarians help people but Christians LOVE people. God is planificating all these things to fit into the big picture. We have to do it in love and He’ll take care of the rest.
