pre-English Camp

Tomorrow (Wednesday), Paul and I are taking our first trip to Bucharest --- not to get on a plane and come home, but to pick up the American Team! They will be arriving after 20 hours or so of traveling, to get in a van and drive another 4 hours to Craiova. We can't wait to see everyone! After arriving in Craiova, and cleaning up, we will go out to dinner (ordering from a Romanian menu is quite entertaining if you aren't from here). Jared Holbrook and Jonathan Chapman are staying with us and we have already planned to take them to get pastries on Thursday morning. I would encourage everyone to eat as many pastries as you can, especially Romanian pastries (and go running)! On to more serious things... The American and Romanian Leadership Teams will leave on Thursday morning to travel to...

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Faith

I want to have faith in God. The God we see in scripture is an awesome God. He is powerful, mighty and He takes care of His people. I was inspired today by a very familiar story in Daniel 3 about Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-Nego. For those of you who may not be familiar with the story, King Nebuchadnezzar had arrested these three men and demanded that they fall down and worship a golden idol that he had set up. Here is what they said in response.Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego answered and said to the king, “O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter. If that is the case, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and He will deliver us from your hand, O king. But if not, let it be known to you, O king, that we do not serve your gods, nor...

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Bobby & Raluca's Wedding Photos

Go to this Link:http://www.pixagogo.com/3891444230Enj...

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The Blog of Steele: Limited Atonement

I posted a lengthy post on the Blog of Steele about why I feel like I must (from scripture) reject the doctrine of limited atonement. If you are interested, I would love to hear feedback. You can find it at:http://theblogofsteele.blogspot.com/2008/07/limited-atonement.h...

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The adventure of the pillowcase

One pillowcase from our bed decided that it didn't want to be part of our lives anymore, and we are sad. We always tried to show it love and respect, but apparently it wasn't enough. The pillowcase decided to leave us.Here is what happened: Cris was hanging our laundry out to dry on Friday. She didn't know that the pillowcase was hiding in the corner of our fitted sheet, just waiting to make the jump. She strectched the sheet out to dry, and I saw the wily little guy leave us, and fall out of sight. I assumed that the pillowcase had fallen from our fifth floor balcony to the ground. I underestimated the pillowcase. If it had fallen to...

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Discussing the gospel with Catalin

Today I met with a close friend here named Catalin who became a Christian less than two years ago. We were discussing God and the gift he has given us in Jesus Christ. Cata said, "Think about this, would you send your only son, whom you love, to go into the river and die to save a mosquito? Or if you saved the city of mosquitos through sending your son to die, what would you do if an ungrateful mosquito landed on you and started sucking your blood? Would you love it? Would you still try to save it?"This analogy he makes is sticking, because we won't do these things, but it is not strong enough. There is a larger gap between God and us than there is between us and a mosquito. We have offended God much more than the mosquito who sucks our blood. So God sent His Son to save us. His love is incomprehenisble.What...

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Handing out invitations again

Hey everyone, Cris and I are going to help OSCEC hand out invitations to English Camp tomorow at 10:00am (3:00 am in America.) We would appreciate prayers. We still need to have around 20 more students to attend camp. Pray that those that the Father wants to come will be at camp with us! We want divine appointments as we go out tomorrow.**Adendum**We just got back from actually hadning the invitations out, and it went well. We invited over 100 students that we have never met before to camp, and quite a few seemed genuinely interested. Hopefully they will get back to us and actually come. Please pray for th...

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proDeo

We went to proDeo on a Sunday morning for the first time yesterday. The external appearance of the church service and church body looked like a smaller version of Cornerstone. Perhaps it resembled the 1992 version of Cornerstone with about 60 people and only a few children, almost all of them five and under. The entire service was from 10 to 12 in the morning and started with about 40 minutes of worship, a few announcements, a 10 or 15 minute break and then Doru (the current senior pastor of proDeo) preached a message that was around an hour long.For those of you that don't know, ProDeo was formed from the student ministry OSCEC in 2002. The church formed primarily because the other churches in the area were not specifically focused on reaching students, and the students in OSCEC were seeking...

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Update on Invitations

Hey everyone! Thanks for praying for us as we were in the Center last night! We were able to hand out about 70 invitations and explain camp to those who may be interested, but would still like to do more than we were able to do last night. The crowd was actually younger than we were expecting (most of them were in high school and we are aiming for college students). Marius, one of the OSCEC students, suggested going to the University next week during registration (we didn't know this was even possible until he told us), and going to a local park that is quite popular. Marius said, "We must do everything possible!" Paul and I were really impressed with his heart to reach the students and to ask them to sign up for camp. By us handing our fliers, students will learn about this opportunity,...

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Handing out Fliers

One huge prayer request on this end is that more students would sign up for camp. There are only 12 who have officially paid. This is fairly typical for late sign-ups, but we need more people than usual this year since the American team is larger (yay!). Anyway, tonight & tomorrow night at 7pm (12 noon your time), Paul and I will be helping the Romanians pass out fliers and spend time talking to people in the Center and a local park.Please pray for this time:1. that God would direct us2. that we would have divine appointments3. that students would be interested and sign up!We already know the Lord will call those who He chooses to camp, so pray that we would be open to the Spirit and follow His directing!Thanks!!!***Update***Our graphic designer, Robbie, had a computer problem and he lost...

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Our Apartment!

Sorry it took so long, but here are photos of our apartment! The Living Room: The Kitchen: The Bathroom: Our Bedroom: The Views from our Balco...

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Bobby and Raluca's wedding

Hello everybody! Cris and I had a very interesting cultural experience yesterday when we went to Bobby and Raluca’s wedding. For those of you who are not aware, Bobby is the leader of OSCEC, the campus ministry we are working with. We have also gotten to know Raluca over the last two summers, so this was a wedding of two friends. Romanian weddings are not very much like American weddings. Although this wedding was not totally like the Romanian Orthodox weddings that are more common here, it still was very different from any wedding in America I have been to. This is the case even though as Baptists their theological positions and worship styles are similar to ours. First, the ceremony is long. It was right at two hours, which is quite a lot longer than our 45 minutes or...

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House Church

Everyone is wondering how church was....it was great! The way proDEO does it is that they have typical Sunday morning meetings one week, and the next they have house church meetings, which are basically small groups. There are three groups and we went to the one with mostly college students, led by Razvan. It was smaller than a typical house group meeting because a lot of people were preparing for Bobby's wedding (in the afternoon), but the people in attendance were: Razvan, Oana, Marius, Catalin, Stefan, Serafim, Paul, and myself. I was so excited because we are actually going to be able to go deeper and get to know these people we are serving alongside! There was so much humility on display as people were sharing what the Lord was showing them or where the Holy Spirit was convicting them...

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Prayer Requests

Hello everybody. Cris and I would be blessed if you could spare some time to lift the two of us up in prayer in the following areas as we go through our time here.1. That we would have rich quiet times.We will be weak if we are not communing with the Lord. We need His grace to enable us to see His face, and if we cannot see Him, we will not be able to show Him to others. So please pray that Cris and I might establish our lives here in Romania with rich fellowship with the Lord. 2. That our communion with the Lord would overflow to our relationship to each other.We want our relationship with each other to be marked as a relationship between two people who know the Lord, and not merely two people. The Lord needs to be around us and the effects of Him need to be discernable in our interactions...

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We Arrived in Romania!!!

We are officially here in Craiova, living in our cute little apartment in the center of town! We'll put up pictures once we have our bags unpacked. It is wonderful! We are really close to the University, the church, and little shops that we may need from time to time. It is perfect and came furnished so we didn't have to buy anything, and will be great for hosting people, especially students in the future! Oana was very kind to clean for us and buy some essentials we would need in the first few days.Yesterday, we arrived in Craiova in the evening, got cleaned up, and were invited out to dinner with our close friends, Radu and Olivia. Then, after catching up on two night's worth of sleep (13 hours...) we woke up today (Wed.). We are still trying to get settled in and unpack everything,...

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