Romania was not supposed to be on our list for The World Race. We were supposed to be in Bulgaria this month, but things come and go on The World Race. So here we are in Draganiste, Romania. I feel like I am in Western Europe, more specifically England. When coming into the country, I was hoping and praying to work with gypsies and orphans. I don’t know if many of you knew this, but March was supposed to be a month where we “ATL-ed”.
This means “Ask the Lord” for the country that we were supposed to ministry in. We would ask and wait until we received confirmation from the Lord to go into that country. Even though it wasn’t written on our list when I found out the countries, I just knew we were coming to Romania. I had the confidence that this is where God was calling me to sometime at the beginning of 2012 and that he would do many things through me. Perhaps, he is calling me here long-term. I have already fallen in love with this country and these people.
As we are now here in ministry, I believe God is going to extraordinary things through these two teams. As a corporate team, we pray a lot! The area we are in has 0.2% Christians. That means 700 out of 500,000 are Bible-believing Christians in Olt County. The spiritual atmosphere here is very dark. There is witchcraft and the Orthodox Church does not speak about Jesus Christ at all. They talk about tradition and the Bible, however Jesus has no part to do with this “culture.” The priests of the Orthodox Church are usually involved with the witchcraft as well. For someone to have a change of heart would mean being excommunicated from their homes and would be called “po-key-ts”, or in English “repenters.” This is a very common term among the missionaries here as they continue to press in for their communities. Along with prayer, there are movements of teaching the children how to pray and about Jesus, evangelism in markets, and even a new ministry established through us of shoveling snow. Just today, I was asked to start an English ministry and teach accurate pronunciation.
