I don't really run often, and when I do try and run it does not take long for me to lose my breath and slow to a staggering walk, thus reminding myself why I don't run. All that to say I hear that marathons are not so much about speed as much as they are about simply finishing the race. Which makes sense, because personally I find driving 26.3 miles tiring sometimes, so for someone like myself who doesn't really run ever that distance seems unattainable.
With only one month left in my race, I can remember back to moments during August when I was in Kenya and thinking do I really have 10 more months of this? That seems like a lifetime ago, and yet it feels that it was only yesterday that I was in Africa getting my passport stamped for the first time and just starting out this journey.
A lot has happened between my time in Kenya and now, 10 countries(though technically I've been through 12 at this point with some stops in Hungary and Austria for a few days) and as many months, each one with it's own joys, adventures, trials, and experiences of God working in my life and those I've come across along the way.
This past month I have been working at a Baptist camp in a small village of Sistarovat in northern Romania a few hours from the Hungary border in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. My team has been working with two other teams so we have had 21 of us here total, staying up in some of the camp dorms in many ways reminding me some of the dorm days of college. Due to the fact this is the off season of the camp, a lot of the ministry we have been doing is behind the scenes, think cleaning carpets(they don't have rug doctors here, so that meant taking the 2x2sqaure foot pieces of carpet that they have pieced together outside scrubbing them with soap and water letting them dry in the sun and then try and piece the puzzle back together), gardening, yard work, cleaning buildings. This has meant that we have not had as much interaction with the people of the village or the churches here, compared to many of the other countries we've traveled to throughout the past ten months.
However we have met some people in the village, and one of my favorites is a woman named Sophia she lives right across the street from the camp, and though we don't speak the same language she loves to talk to us anyway. One day she gave us a tour of her farm, and let some people milk her cow.
The next and the last country that I will be traveling to is Moldova, as of now I am not sure what we will be doing, all I know is that we are working with a group called World Team and they plant churches all across the Moldova. Hard to believe that with that this means I'm only a little over a month away from being home, but until then I must continue to remember that I'm still running.
