Blogging was a challenge for me last month. I wanted to write about life in Draganesti, Romania, about the street children we passed on the sidewalk every day, or about how disorienting it can be to see a horse and cart parked alongside a BMW. I wanted to write about Hope Church, our ministry for the month, and how Pastor Raul has given his life to a region often called ‘a graveyard for churches and missionaries’.
At the end of the month, sitting in a small Kindergarten classroom surrounded by cheap paints and paper snowflakes while wishing the only bathroom wasn’t a dingy squatter 30 yards away, I didn’t have words for any of it. I didn’t know where to begin. I still don’t.
I suppose I could have written about the collection of imposing, grandiose homes that line the main street of Draganesti, mansions relative to the surrounding poverty. Our hosts told us the houses were owned by wealthy Roma (“gypsy”) families and built on funds from human trafficking, prostitution, and drug-related crimes. We frequently passed Roma women on the street. They stood out in their long colorful skirts with all other sorts of decorative adornments, but I can’t talk about their mansions without talking about their poverty and the injustice of a society that alienates and rejects an entire community.
Living in a town with a 60% unemployment rate, I saw hurt and need staring back at me as I walked to church every morning, but every blog I started never made it to completion. Anything I wrote about the children, the Roma, or the elderly widow who stood outside the Penny Market everyday begging felt insufficient. I couldn’t find the words that would make everyone at home see what I was seeing or feel what I was feeling, so I didn’t really say anything at all.
But that’s not how I want to respond to Romania. In a small, unassuming building in the middle of Draganesti there is a church full of people who want something better for their community, and there’s something you can do for them.
…
Throughout our month in Romania, we partnered with Pastor Raul and Hope Church. Pastor Raul is firmly grounded in Draganesti while also striving to bring the gospel to the nations through daily prayer and offering up petitions and praises to God for all the ways He is moving within the Romanian church; I was continuously humbled by the way his church wants to meet both local and international needs. Hope Church is small, and coming from a congregation where Sunday attendance regularly reaches into the thousands, I found their vision daunting.
Our first day of orientation included an explanation of local witchcraft and the regional propensity to combine folk belief with religious practice. Orientation was similarly interrupted by a visit from a patient at the local mental hospital. According to our host, the patients were allowed to roam the streets at random during the day. Draganesti didn’t look anything like home.
My team’s specific ministry included seemingly endless hours of arts and crafts designing seasonal murals for two elementary school classrooms in Daneasa, a nearby village. Marion Stoica, a missionary with Hope Church, has been trying to reach this village for the better part of eight years, but his last efforts to help the school ended with a teacher being fired when parents felt he was becoming too involved with “the repenters”; that’s what they call Christians here.
I can continue to list all of my impressions of Romania, our ministry, or what is was like to live with 38 other people in a small house right in the middle of impoverished Romania, and I would genuinely love to share them, but I’d rather leave you with something else.
In 1 John 5:14 we are told, “that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.” So I’m asking. I’m asking Him and I’m asking you. Pray for Romania. Maybe we will only see the nations rise when we are already down on our knees. Read this blog as a call to prayer. I don’t know if I can tell you in one eloquently stated blog post everything Romania meant to me, but I can tell you that they need prayer.
