Children's Day

June 1st is Children's Day in Romania. So of course, the question we got from the kids at the orphanage during the week prior was, what are you going to bring us? This year we had gifts from our home church in MI, Fair Haven Ministries. The Wednesday night KICK kids (Kids in Christ's Kingdom) made little gift bags for them in March. A special thanks to our church family back home! It is great to have our church involved with the kids here, and of course the kids enjoyed getting a special gift.

KICK Kids Coloring Cards

KICK Kids Assembling the Gift Bags

Handing out the Gift Bags

Rebecca with Alina - The card reads: Dear Romania, I hope you like kick.

Mark with Marius

Vic - The outside of the card said : Jesus loves all the children of the world, it was in English and Romanian.

Ioana and Vali

More kids checking out their gift bags.

There are a lot of different ways to be involved in our ministry. We covet prayer for us, the kids we minister to, and the directors (Romanian gov't), and guidance for H2H. We are always in the need of more hands, hands to love and hold the kids, to minister to more kids than just the staff can reach. And of course H2H could always put your dollars to use impacting kids lives forever. Check out h2hint.org for more info, or drop us an e-mail if you have any questions.

God Is Good, ALL The Time

This week we got some great and not so great news. Lets start with the great news because it is so really really great that we just can't even contain ourselves! Our Church will be providing our ministry with twice as much monthly support as we had originally anticipated, and that is a huge answer to prayer! We have been praying hard for God to provide our monthly funding and this is a big step ahead. Normally missionaries get a certain amount per year if they're with an independent organization, but they get twice as much if they are partnered with the Reformed Church of America's mission agency. We are working on partnering with the RCA but it is a long process and there's a lot to be worked out so we were only planning the base amount. This week, however, our pastor of mission and multiplication met with the Romania team and they decided to give us the full amount!

God has definitely been at work here, working in people's hearts to increase their passion for the ministry we will be doing. There are so many people from church behind us and supportive of our mission, it is just wonderful. We are so thankful for this extra support, to God and to our church and all those that were involved in this. It is yet another affirmation that this is what God wants us to do.

The not so great news is that Mark will be laid off again starting next week. Many other people at work are still laid off so much prayer is needed for all of us. The comforting thing in this is that we know that God is in control, and we know He is good all the time. We are learning more and more to depend on Him, through the mission preparations and the roller coaster of being laid off. We have hope that He will keep his promises and that He cares for us deeply. Isn't it great knowing that we don't have to worry about a thing because God has a greater plan than we know? We think it is, and we are clinging to that.

Our Fund Raising Dinner

Last Sunday was our big dinner at church to raise funding for our missionary journey to Romania. We prepared a traditional Romanian meal, which was a lot of work. We spent most of the day Saturday chopping up veggies and grilling chicken. Then we cooked the rest of the food on Sunday a few hours before the dinner was supposed to start. It was a real whirlwind but it was a lot of fun. Unfortunately we didn't take any pictures so I had to find pictures on the Internet that look similar to what we made. Here is the menu we had:

We started with European hearth style bread that we bought at a bakery in Allendale, The Great Bread Company. It was delicious. Bread is one of the main parts of all Romanian meals, and it is called Paine.

Next we had soup with dumplings, our favorite soup that we had at summer camp. Soup is an everyday meal in Romania. This one is called Supa De Galuste.

Next we had Sarmale, which are basically meatballs wrapped in a cabbage leaves with saur kraut and tomato sauce on top. They are one of our favorite dishes from Romania.

The last part of the meal was build your own Shawarma, basically a chicken wrap. They are unique because they have french fries inside, along with pickles, cabbage, mayo and catsup.

To wash everything down we had ice cream, coffee, and juice.

The meal came together nicely, especially since we were planning on at least 100 people and we've never cooked for that many before. Thankfully we had help from some of our family and some friends who went to Romania with us on previous trips.

During the meal we showed pictures from our previous trips, and then Mark explained a little of what we had done there and what some of the pictures were about. Then he told the story of Elena, the girl at camp who had the greatest impact on us. You can read more abut her here: Elena. We then showed a video that tells about Heart 2 Heart and their ministry to the orphans. That video is linked in the sidebar of our blog so if you haven't seen it you should check it out. It is a powerful and emotional video that really pulls on your heart strings. After the video Rebecca told about how we came to this point in our lives where we are taking a leap of faith and following God's call. Maybe we'll write more on that one sometime. At the end Mark talked about the needs we have financially and asked people to prayerfully consider supporting us monthly, something that we ask you to do as well. If you feel lead to do so you can download the forms here, and indicate on the card that you would like to make a monthly commitment. These commitments are what we really need before we can go and start our ministry. They will sustain us while we are there and enable us to be used by God to do his work in these orphan's lives. Before people left we answered some questions and tried to clarify what we'll be doing the best that we could.

Everyone who came to the dinner seemed very interested and supportive. Around 65 people showed up, including some of our family. We had planned on at least 100 so we had tons of food left. We were initially disappointed that more people didn't come but we figured that we just have to trust that God knows what he's doing. He can make great things happen with very few people. We are praying that God used this to work in people's hearts and ignite some passion for our ministry. We are also praying that those who were there will decide to support us monthly and tell others about our ministry also.

Ultimately we are very thankful to God for helping us pull this off, and we are very thankful for everyone who helped and everyone who came. We know this is all part of His plan and he will provide for all of our needs.

Thanks Fairhaven!

On Sunday we were able to share a little about our time at camp with our church and it was great. Early last week we were asked to if we would be willing to talk about our trip and show some pictures. We had been wanting to do this so we were very excited. At each service we went up in front of church with a microphone, and Pastor Doug (our pastor of missions and multiplication) asked us some questions. Our pictures were being shown up on the big screens so that people could see what we did in addition to hearing. First we talked about what we did at camp. Then we talked about the most significant/impacting thing that happened at camp, so we told about our relationship with Elena. Third we told about some of the ongoing needs in Romania which are prayer, funding, and most of all people to go there and love the kids. Last we told a couple prayer requests. The congregation clapped for us a when we started and ended and we could tell that people were very interested in what we did. Many people that we didn't know came up afterward to us to talk about it and to show their support. We just felt so good because of the positive reaction. We just want to thank everyone at Fairhaven for their prayers and their support!

We are hoping that our church can partner with Heart 2 Heart to help minister to the orphans there, and our biggest hope is that many people will be inspired to go. There are short term trips happening all the time, and they are listed on the website: www.heart2heartint.org These trips are good for going there the first time because you are exposed to all the different sides of the ministry and you learn a lot about the Romanian culture. Longer term trips like what we just did are great to build solid relationships with kids. We are so thankful that we had the opportunity to go and we're praying that more people step up to the plate.