We slept VERY well...much needed rest.
Woke up and read some historical information on Romania, the Revolution, the Orthodox church, and prayed. Sam had given me a lot of this information Sunday night, but I had not had time to look at any of this information prior to Monday morning. As I was reading it, the Lord really broke my heart for the Romanians. I cared about them in a whole new way and really wanted to understand them better when meeting with them today. I came away with a feeling that for many of them, it was probably very hard for them to trust anyone. Just 19 years out of communist rule, I felt like it was probably still very difficult for many Romanians to trust anyone new...or each other for that matter. At his peak, it was said that Nicolae Ceauşescu had 1 out of 4 Romanians acting as informants for the Secret Police. If you were considered to be someone who was speaking against the government, you could get hauled off to one of their concentration camps and most likely, never heard from again.
I felt like our number one priority would be that we should love them to Jesus, giving the Gospel, but only using words if necessary. Love was the key. Seems like a pretty "duh" kind of statement, but that morning it just hit me a lot stronger that the love of Jesus was the only answer for how to get through to a hardened, untrusting heart. We would step out in faith, love the people in Cenei and let God sort out the details.
We went to breakfast and then our devotional, where Sam talked about the power of friendship through the story in Luke 11:5-13, where Jesus gives the story to illustrate persistence in prayer.
When we got back out to the site at Cenei, I decided that we should spend some time as a team talking about our experiences from Monday. Here were some of the responses:
* I learned to see beyond the person's appearance.
* (Gabriel's comment) I haven't had the courage to talk about God to others before. I didn't think they would want to listen. I realized that those thoughts were false and were just made up in my head. Yesterday was a real encouragement for me!
* We have to have patience and be a good listener first.
* People tend to put their guards up, saying they don't want to go to another religion. Most say they know God because they want to get rid of you.
* It was a good experience, I never thought I would have the courage to go house to house.
* We talked to one lady for 1/2 hour. She was - along with others we talked to - looking at our behavior. This lady was upset with Christians because of something that happened previously...our attitude is important towards them...we have to pursue them in relationship, as they are all looking for love.
I closed out by encouraging them all that it was no accident that they came and participated in this work yesterday...God chose them, before the beginning of time to do what we just did. These are all divine appointments...we have no idea when we step up to the door who the Lord has appointed for us to talk with. We must pursue everyone we meet and see with His love flowing through us. We talked a little about John 15 and how our job is to abide/rest in Jesus (when we trust in Jesus as Savior, we are grafted in to a union with Him - a real forever relationship), the True Vine and His job was to cause His love, life and strength to flow through us and produce fruit. We as branches can't produce fruit - it is not our job! We are just fruit bearers, and the fruit is not for us, but for others. Jesus has promised that he would produce the fruit!! We then prayed for boldness and compassion and went out.
What a difference a day makes and what a great day it was! Some highlights:
- The first house we went to - a lady named Tatiana chose to trust Jesus as Savior! She wanted and needs a Bible.
- The 2nd house - we talked to two kids, Christian & Dana. They wanted to talk, but were preparing lunch. They asked us if we could come back after they finished cooking. We said we would.
- The 3rd house - we talked to two other young men - Julian & Eeche and both trusted Christ! We stuck around and talked to Eeche's mom & dad for awhile and had a great conversation about fishing and television shows.
- At lunch we had some great conversation with Marinel about the book "Waking The Dead" and "Epic" by John Eldridge (www.epicreality.com) and how God is telling a grand story and we all have been given a critical role to play.
- After lunch, we went back to Christian's & Dana's house and Lauren led them both to Christ by herself with no help from me!!
- We ran into Lily - a lady we had met at the bus stop Monday afternoon and told that we had reading glasses - and she had brought both of her children with her to get fitted for glasses (we had purchased a ton of magnifying reading glasses in the States and brought them with us as a bridge building effort). We shared the Gospel with her - through the Cube - and she said that in the past she had trusted Jesus as Savior and was very encouraged.
- For our evening service, we had 12 people show up! There was lots of signing and I talked about the black grapes that we noticed everyone have in their yard and brought them back to John 15 and Galatians 5 to talk about our relationship with Christ as followers of His. We gave out the glasses to those who wanted them afterwards...it was a big hit.
- As a group, we drove to a pizza place for dinner. It was really good! On the way to the restaurant, Marius told me that over the past two days as a translator and just hearing the Gospel message over and over, he had made a choice to trust Jesus as his Savior!!! Praise God! We all encouraged him and celebrated his decision.
In all, we tallied that as a collective team, we gave 29 Gospel presentations on Tuesday and 8 people decided to accept Jesus as Savior...including Marius!
It was a wonderful day. It was our last day in Cenei as we had another mission point to head to - Sacalaz. The team was sad to leave Cenei and some of the wonderful people we met and worked with there...it is amazing how close you can get to folks in a short time! However, we were also excited to see what the Lord had in store for us at Sacalaz.
We slept well!
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