God never takes a vacation.
This past weekend, we went to Budapest, Hungary. We left Romania early on Thursday morning and took a train to Budapest. We had planned on this trip for a while because one of our teammates, Emilie McNatt, was friends with a family of missionaries there. I was really excited to get to hang out in Hungary and get to meet some new people as well!
When we got to Budapest, we kid of just walked around the city until we were ready to head to her friend‘s house. We were going to take a bus to their house just outside of the city, but we had a hard time figuring out how to buy tickets. We went to a couple different machines and asked for help from different people, but they weren’t able to help much. Then when Emilie finally found someone who could help her figure out what to do, she discovered that he was actually a Hungarian missionary who lived in Tennessee for a while. She also lived in Tennessee and asked if he knew her friends whose daughter also lives in Tennessee, and he said he did, and they’ve actually worked together in ministry! So that was pretty cool!
So when we got to Emilie’s friends house, we got to meet some of their family and hear some of their story. They are a family of Americans, but they’ve done ministry abroad for almost all of their married life. They work for campus crusade for Christ (aka Cru, the organization we worked with in Ecuador). They started out in Belarus, and had a wonderful ministry there. Many people were open to hear the gospel and their ministry was really growing and thriving. However, eventually the government passed a law that no religious activities were permitted outside of the walls of the church, and Cru is pretty much entirely evangelism and discipleship outside of the church. They’d already been doing Cru pretty openly before the law was passed, so it was difficult to go under the radar after being above it. Then when the husband was traveling to Hungary for a conference, he was approached rather viciously by immigration, and they invalidated his passport, and said he has to leave the country or be put in jail. He flew to Hungary, unsure of how to get back to his family in Belarus with his blacklisted passport, so the family made the quick decision to go to Hungary with him, initially thinking it would be for a short time, but now they’ve been in Hungary for several years working with Cru there, but they have been able to do a lot of wonderful things in Hungary, and as scary of a situation it was to move from Belarus to Hungary, they knew it was the Lord’s leading and have peace now about being in Hungary.
While we were there, they also asked us really deep and intentional questions about the Race, like what we’ve learned about God’s character, what we’ve learned about ourselves, and what brought us to the Race. It was really beautiful to get to spend those 2 days with them, and we felt really spoiled to be living in their little oasis of American culture again!
The next day, we went to explore Budapest again, and we went to this covered market with handmade crafts and food and such. Some of the girls in our group ended up running into some missionaries from Denmark. We didn’ get to spend a whole lot of time with them, but they got to share encouragement with us on our journey, and told us how important it is now to have missionaries in Europe. Because many countries are becoming so secular, it’s becoming more and more important to have missionaries share the gospel and the love of Christ with people who are trapped in the things of this world. Even though it was a short interaction, it was really cool running into some more missionaries in Hungary!
Getting to spend those few days was such a huge blessing in so many ways. It was nice to step away and have an adventure weekend in a new country, but it was also so cool to be encouraged by all of the people we got to meet along the way. Even though we weren’t in “ministry”, God was still moving in our time in Budapest!
