Preparing for Christmas

This past week the kids at Periş decorated the club room for Christmas. We made snowflakes, snowman mobiles, and ornaments. Later that week they decorated an artificial tree. They kids really enjoyed making these crafts and were very excited. This time of year is busy, but a fun time to be working with the kids.

Making snowflakes

Mark and I with Lorenzo and Catalina

Excitement (and crafts) in the air

This past week we also decorated our apartment for Christmas. We went to Carrefour and bought a small artificial tree and decorated it. We also put on display the glass ornaments and table cloth we bought in Sinaia.

Our apartment

Yet in this time of business, shopping and activities sometimes we forget what we are celebrating, or lack the joy we should have. Do the gifts really matter? Do we really need all homemade goodies? Or is what we need some excitement like the kids have. Not excitement for presents, toys, and candy, but excitement in remembering our Savior's coming to earth. This Christmas we are telling (again) the true Christmas story to the kids. Will you join us in praying for these kid's hearts, that they will be able to know who Christ really is and have eternal joy? It is the best gift of all!

Ziua Recunostintei - Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving week is always a time of reflecting on our blessings and giving thanks to God for what He has done for us. This year our hearts are especially overflowing with thankfulness and we wanted to share with you what we are thankful for. One year ago we had just put our house up for sale and started fund raising so that we could come to Romania as missionaries. Praise God that even in the down economy He miraculously sold our house and raised up many faithful people to support our ministry here. We are so thankful for our supportive family and great friends who continue to pray for us and stay in contact with us.

We are very thankful for our financial and prayer supporters and want to let them know how much they mean to us. We could not be doing this without their support. We are thankful for the call God placed in our lives to minister in Romania. We thank God for giving us a great family here in the staff of H2H and our friends from our church here. We have been blessed with a smooth transition and have been learning the language quickly. Our faith and bond with the Lord has been tremendously strengthened over this last year as we learned many lessons about patience and looking to God as our sole provider. His guidance is precious to us and we thank Him so much for all these things.

We celebrated Thanksgiving here by having most of the graduates of the H2H Transition Programs over for dinner. We had a wonderful feast and after dinner there were several skits and songs. It was a really fun time and it was great to see so many young adults that have changed lives because of the work that H2H did with them.

Nearly 60 people came, everyone did a wonderful job preparing everything for this huge get together.

Of course what we are most thankful for is the sacrifice that Jesus Christ made for us on the cross. He has given us the gift of eternal life and has called us to a life of service to Him. It is still amazing to think of how much He loves us and that He longs to call us His children.

After reading this I hope that your heart is overflowing with thankfulness to God. We have all been greatly blessed and we usually take it for granted. We would love to hear what you are thankful for, please comment so that we can share in share in rejoicing with you.

Romanian Experiences

Since our trip to Sinaia we have continued to keep busy each week. It was time for us to apply for our long term visas. Thank goodness we have Costel here who is the Romanian president of H2H. He was working on our visas before we even knew it. First we had to have a doctor give us a clean bill of health so we went and had a very thorough exam. He asked us if we were sick and he listened to our breathing, then declared us officially healthy. The day we were supposed to apply there was a problem with the department's fax machine and they changed their schedule so we had to go back a couple days late. After waiting in line for two and a half hours we finally made it to the window, slightly afraid that they would hassle us for applying late. Praise God that they didn't even say anything about it, so we should be on track to get our visas on time.

On Saturday we went out to eat to an Indian Restaurant for a date night. It was a very nice place and we really enjoyed it. The food was wonderful, top notch quality and it tasted so good. This is one perk of living in the biggest city in Romania, there are lots of different restaurants here.

Mark had Lamb Vindaloo, a very rich curried lamb dish. We had Nan bread and rice with our meal also. Mark had ginger lemonade to drink which had quite a spicy bite to it, very tasty.

Rebecca had mango chicken which was amazing. She also had a mango lassi to drink, which is a yogurt smoothy drink.

The next week started out with Rebecca getting a manicure from Andrea, one of the transition house girls. The girls are doing a program to learn how so that they can earn certificates from the school. This should help them find jobs since this job is in growing demand in Romania. They need live models to practice on so Rebecca and Jen went in, and after three and a half hours and several band-aids they had beautiful nails.

We went to the orphanage twice since the baby hospital is still closed. We had fun with the kids, Rebecca got her hair styled and Mark played soccer. It is always a joy to see the kids and to see how they react when we come there.

We also helped with the class that H2H is doing with the kids, the theme is heros and the qualities they have. We are trying to teach the kids that they can have these traits in their lives also and that they can be heros too.

We continue to study the language and this fills up our time when we are not doing all these other things. It has been going well and we are able to understand a lot more of what people are saying. We still have four months of class so there is still much to learn but we are thankfull that God is blessing us so far.

Sinaia Excursion

Last Saturday we took the day off from our language lesson and we went on a road trip with the rest of the H2H gang. The girls from the transition house came along as well as two wonderful women from Scotland who came to encourage and spend some time with our team.

We stopped at a glass workshop on the way and watched how handblown glass is made. We have always been fascinated with glass blowing so this was a real treat. We got to look around a vast warehouse of ornaments and we picked out a few so that we can decorate our apartment at Christmas time.

The colors in the mountains were beautiful and it was a very nice day.

We had not seen the Pelișor castle before, it is a nice place that looks very Bavarian. In fact the king that built both of the castles here was from Germany, and he built them in the late 1800's.

We enjoyed the beauty of the Peleș castle, even though we had seen it on our first trip it was still fun to see it again.

The entire area is beautiful, it is easy to see why King Carol chose this location to build his castles.

We really enjoyed spending time with our H2H friends and it was a nice break from the business of our weekly routine. We love spending time surrounded by God's creation like this and it is nice to get out of the city too. Praise God for giving us this time and for his wonderful creation!

From Gross To Glory

We have a pair of pigeons that has made their home on the window sill outside of our kitchen. They are nice looking birds and they make a soothing cooing noise, but they also make a big mess and make us upset with them. Somehow thinking about them made me think about our relationship with God, read on to see what I mean.

Here they are at their home away from home, our bathroom window ledge. This is where they go when we shoo them away from the kitchen.

This is what they do to our kitchen windows. Somehow they manage to make almost the entire window dirty with their own filth.

The windows were cleaned before we moved in but shortly after the pigeons got them all dirty again. I finally couldn't stand looking through the windows like that so I took to cleaning them off. Doing things like this is part of life, even for missionaries.

Having clean windows again is very satisfying and it's so nice to see clearly again. Although it was gross and hard to clean it was worth it because of the great outcome. Isn't this a bit like our lives and our walk with Christ? We are constantly getting ourselves dirty by sinning and often we let it pile up. Sin separates us from God and we can have a hard time fellowshipping with Him and seeing Him clearly when we let this gunk build up in our lives. Jesus went through a lot to wipe away our sins and make us clean again. He wants us to be clean so we can have fellowship with Him and our heavenly Father now and for eternity. When we ask God to forgive our sins through Jesus' sacrifice, He wipes the slate clean and we are just like the clean window. Isn't it great knowing that He is willing to do that for us? I know I am thankful, so glad that he loves me enough to clean me and save me.

Babies

This past week the guards at the new baby hospital informed us of some difficult news. Fear of H1N1 virus had caused hospital officials to prohibit all visitors in the hospital. Currently we haven't heard of any cases here, but surrounding countries do have lots of cases. The doors are closed to us, doesn't matter if we are healthy or if we take proper precautions. It is hard to know that we will not be able to go there until December 1 or later. But we take comfort knowing God is still watching over them "He defends the cause of the fatherless and widow, and loves the aliens, giving him food and clothing." Deut 10:18

Pray for God's protections for the babies, and also that the doors to work in the orphanages will stay open.

Mark and his favorite set of twins, Mihiela and Florica

Rebecca's favorite, Florin, who has a great laugh

Mark and Twin #2

Twin #1

American Traditions in RO

In America celebrating every "holiday" is a big deal. Decorations come out sometimes months before. Halloween is not a holiday that is widely celebrated in Romania. As we went about our week, it was like any other week. We had language lessons, went to the baby hospital and our Bible studies. It was good to be back at the baby hospital this week. The babies are becoming more expressive and interactive. It is exciting to see them develop. The changes are partly because they are growing, but the time spent by us and other volunteer who interact with them, is a big help to their development.
Saturday after our language lessons we headed to the team house to pick out our costumes for our Halloween party we were having with the Transition House Girls. There are four girls currently in the program. Two are from an orphanage, the other two come from broken families and needed the extra training and help to be able to find employment. H2H staff went all out in preparation for the party. We played fun games and enjoyed the night.

Our "frightful" meal

Wise guy and wizard

Happy Halloween from us all!

H2H Staff Training Week

Last week was a very special week for all of the Heart 2 Heart staff. We all gathered at the team house and spent the week there for the annual staff training. All of the H2H American staff flew in and we also welcomed our main speakers, Jim and Roe Dodgen. The main topic of the training was being wholly surrendered to God, and the second main focus was on finding our strengths and how we can best work together. Each day we started with a quiet time and then the rest of the day was spent learning about our strengths and spending time doing team building activities. The entire H2H Staff is shown in the picture below, notice that the weather was very nice!

We also had several fun activities each evening. One night we decorated masks with crate paper. We didn't know what we would be using them for but we were pretty suspicious that something was up. Another night we found out what we would be using the masks for a contest in the city. The goal was to get pictures at as many famous landmarks as we could, while wearing the masks.

Our team in front of the Pipera Metro

The Arc de Triumph is in the background

The week was filled with learning, fun, and time to grow closer together and closer to God. It was a nice break from the regular routine (although we still had to study a little for our next language lesson).