Two Worlds Collide

The last time I wrote to you all I was in Guatemala, preparing to leave for Romania, and now I’m here! Romania has been a culture shock in some areas, but there have also been some familiarities as well. One thing that I didn’t expect was that Romanian and Spanish share a lot of commonalities. I can’t speak Romanian by any stretch of the imagination, but I can actually understand an okay amount because it is a Latin language. The biggest difference here is the cold, which in some ways is also a familiarity. My body was a little shocked to be in 30-degree weather after living in 80-degree weather for 2 months, but it has been nice to see the leaves changing color and see some snow. It feels like I am in Colorado with the mountains and cold air around me.

Ministry here has been a change for me as well, but God is moving mightily. Most of the squad is currently in Craiova serving the church there, but my team had the opportunity to go up to a city called Alba Iulia and serve with Harmony church. Our goal is to meet young people, mainly high school age, build relationships with them, and connect them to the church. To achieve this we started an English practice on Friday evenings and invited a bunch of kids to it. This involves going out to local high schools talking to the kids during their breaks and inviting them to come hang out with us on Friday nights. A lot of them have been very interested in coming and also quite surprised to find out that we are not 17 years old like they are. We have been using our American-ness as a draw as well. Some of them came to practice just because they think Americans are cool.

The first night we had the practice my team was nervous that no one would show up, but God has been blessing us here and 20 kids came. Not only did God bless us with good attendance, but He also guided our conversations to Himself. After about an hour of talking and getting to know each other we naturally began talking about church and religion. Most of the people in Romania are Eastern Orthodox. From the conversations I’ve had with them the churches here teach that God is far away. The priests say that only they can talk to God and that the people can only reach God through them. They are also told not to question the priests, their word is more authoritative than the Bible and to question a priest is a sin. Most of the people who attend church are from the older generation and many of them go to church just to catch up on the gossip, sometimes even about the priest himself. Because of this the younger generation doesn’t understand why it’s good to go to church and their parents and grandparents only say it’s good to go because it’s tradition and it’s good because it’s good. That night my team was able to share with them about our relationships with Jesus and how it is personal, God cares for us as individuals and speaks to us directly.

 To continue building relationships and share our culture we invited them all over for Thanksgiving dinner at our house. Since Romania doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving they didn’t have the usual premade Thanksgiving dishes. So, we spent several days making our desserts and stuffing and potatoes all from scratch. In the end, our menu consisted of turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, cornbread, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, dinner rolls, apple pie, ice cream, candied carrots and roasted zucchini and butternut squash.
In total 8 people attended in addition to the 7 people on my team and the coolest part is how God multiplied our money and food. Firstly, we were worried we wouldn’t have enough money for the week to buy ingredients for the dinner and the rest of the week, but our grocery bill came in under budget for both the dinner and a whole week’s worth of food. Then we were worried we didn’t make enough food for the amount of people eating so we prayed that God would multiply it. Wow, He definitely did. After everyone had seconds and even thirds our refrigerator was almost overflowing with leftovers. We lived off of those leftovers for about three days and didn’t even touch the other food we had bought to eat that week until after that. It was so much food that we prayed again to say “ok God, you can stop multiplying now” Praise God!

The next day we had English practice again and only a few girls came, but God’s hand was in it. The conversation after just half an hour turned to Jesus. One girl connected well with one of my teammates and opened up about her beliefs in the spiritual realm. Another girl told us about a dream God gave her about heaven and in one part of the dream two women were sent to show her how to get to God; which is exactly what had happened earlier that day when two of my teammates approached her at her high school to invite her to the English practice. God is truly pursuing these kids here in Romania and we are all so humbled that God would use team Ruach to reach His children here in Alba.

But wait, there’s more. On that Sunday night my team was up late at night chatting out in the living room around 1:30 a.m. and suddenly the power went out. This is not normal here, or at least it hadn’t happened before this. We all jumped up trying to figure out how to turn the lights back on. I was about to flip the breaker switch and right before my finger could reach the switch I said “what’s the worst that could happen” and the lights immediately came on. We waited for a few minutes and then the power turned off again. All of us felt in our spirits that this was related to spiritual warfare so we began praying. God put it on our hearts to pray for Romania, our teams in Caiova and one of the girls we met at the first English practice. As we prayed, the lights would come on for a few seconds and then flick back off. God told us to pray until the lights stayed on and we obeyed. As we prayed against the spirit of religion here and for the blindfolds to be removed from peoples eyes here in Romania I saw a vision of the angels fighting against the demons and every prayer we prayed the angels would use as weapons against the demons. One of my other teammates also had visions of the demons we were fighting against through prayer and around 3:30 a.m. the lights came back on. We were all washed over with a wave of sleepiness and around 4 a.m. God told us we could go to sleep, so we did.

The next day we found out that the team in Craiova had been experiencing sleep paralyses, dreams and visions with demons attacking them. God was using us to fight for our teammates! A few days later one of my teammates had coffee with the girl we had been praying for that night and she asked how she had been. The girl said that on Sunday night, the night we were praying, she had a vision and sleep paralyses of a demon trying to choke her. My teammate was able to share with her about the spiritual realm and how to pray on the armor of God in Ephesians 6. How cool that God used us to pray for her and to allow us to minister to her in that way!

God has blessed our ministry beyond measure here in Alba. We have seen the collision of the spiritual and physical worlds far beyond anything I have ever experienced in the U.S. and God is using it. He has grown my faith for sure, but he is also growing the faith of my teammates and the kids we have built relationships with. I am in awe of God and who He is. How amazing is it that the God and Creator of the entire UNIVERSE trusts US to work in His kingdom. How crazy is it that even though we rejected Him and continue to reject Him everyday He continues to love us? So
much so that He sent His only son to be the perfect sacrifice to cover our sins. Even crazier, He grants us the honor of being CO-HEIRS with Christ in heaven. What?! Why would He do that? It doesn’t even make logical sense. We don’t deserve salvation let alone being elevated to sons and daughters of the King of kings. Praise God!