In the beginning of the month, our host told us about an opportunity to visit a church in Serbia for ministry, and we were all totally on board. It was only a 3 hour drive from Pestere, Romania, so why not hop over to Serbia for a day?
We woke up Sunday morning and drove with our translator and his wife to Serbia. It was a pretty smooth ride. We made it through the border just fine, and the church wasn’t too far from the border.
However, we noticed that our driver was pulling over and asking people for directions a lot. We weren’t really sure what was going on, but I was trusting that he knew what he was doing.
We were in a town and we stopped at a red light, and when the light turned green, he pressed the gas, but we didn’t move. He tried a few more times, but we didn’t move. After sitting in the intersection and cars behind us honking at us to move, we determined the car was ”kaput“! We prayed over the car, that it would be fixed, or that if it couldn’t be fixed, God would send an angel to help us and that we would still get to church on time.
We put the car in neutral, and in our Sunday best, we pushed the car from the intersection into a parking spot and tried to figure out what to do. None of us spoke Serbian and we didn’t have any phone service in the country, either. Our translator’s wife had service to call our host and the pastor of the church, but there wasn’t much else they could do to help. We pulled out some Serbian money and decided to take a bus to church, and praise the LORD that the bus came almost immediately after we said that! God gave us our angel in the form of that bus!
So we took a bus about 10 minutes outside of the town to the Romanian-Serbian church. We were dropped at the bus stop and walked about another 10 minutes to the church, and luckily we got there right after worship and had time to share our testimonies with the church!
We were all a little frazzled so our testimonies were all very interesting. The church service was full of joy and fun stories from things the Lord taught us. I shared a story about my first mission trip when I locked the key in my dad’s van, and a woman on the street prayed for me, and we walked to the van and it ended up not being locked in the van! Then I shared about how God was faithful then, and faithful with helping us make our way to church, and prayers dont’ always have to be big and extravagent. When we present our requests to God, He is faithful in everything, big or small.
We spent the day at the church and got to talk to members of the church, tell them about our travels, what the Lord has taught us, and where we are going after the Race. So despite the snaffoo in getting to the church, it was totally worth it, and God used it for good in that church. We ended up having some friends from our translator’s church bring a van to Serbia to pick us up and take us home, and we got back to Romania safe and sound.
