At Church This Morning

Today at church there was a brass band playing. Every Sunday there is a choir and organist. Sometimes they have an orchestra with strings, and at the evening service it is more contemporary with guitars and the young leading worship.

I had my digital camera and for the first time I used the little film clip button. You can view that on our picasa album webpage. http://picasaweb.google.com/skCarnazzo/BetelBaptist
Click on the third picture for a short 10 sec video clip of this brass band. We were in the last row of the balcony and the quality isn't the best, but you can have a little taste of a church here in Romania.

Where is Winter?

It is the end of February, and I have been watching the nasty weather reports from the Northeast US. That is the type of weather I expected here in Romania. It has been a very mild winter thus far. If one could even call it winter. We had just a few days of snow that dusted the ground and disappeared quickly. Our worry of survival with our 12 years of thinned blood from Arizona has not been a problem. Windy days back in January had us concerned; however, we could still have a late storm.

Right now we are enjoying the 50 degree temperatures while we jump over the large mud puddles from all the rain. All the early spring flowers are a month early this year and beginning to bloom. The trees are showing lots of buds, the strawberry plants are growing in the garden, and I have spied earthworms hanging out on our front sidewalk.

It makes me wonder if this August I’ll be melting in the heat as there are few places with AC here.

Kristi

Living Without an Explanation

I guess that is, in part, living out our Faith. There are many reasons we must live without any explanations in our new culture. The three most obvious are the differences in customs, culture and language. What do I give young children who are begging at the grocery store with their noticeable unwashed clothes and bodies, or what to say to young man at the car window who is faking an arm amputation to get money? What should I do when I walk past gypsies picking out of the apartment bloc trash to get food and other valuables?

Every time I see the children, I think how come I do not have a pack of peanuts or crackers with me. The last boy I saw, when we were coming out of the grocery store, I was able to give a bag of breakfast cereal and a box of long life milk. He ran away with a big smile saying “lapte, lapte” which translated means milk in Romanian.

Faith often has more subtle questions. One is having a time table that is in flux. This coming summer, Kristi and I are looking to find a place to rent in Timisoara with a safe storage space for adaptive equipment. Another is ministry planning. Starting in the late spring, we have a definite increase in our ministry schedule, and are humbly looking forward to God’s leading. Recently, I was reminded from an online sermon about God’s ownership of everything. He quoted the psalmist, “For every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on all the hills…If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world is mine and all it contains” (Psalm 50:10,12). He is not commanding us to serve because He needs our help, but to be a disciple of Him and love others. How true that is and how easy to forget! For the Apostle James instructs us how to be a disciple, “Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world” (James 2:27). In return for obeying, we are truly blessed more than we think. Recently, we meet a young teenager with cerebral palsy at a church based disability support group, and I was able to help her and her mother with some basic exercises for her arm. I feel blessed that I have cerebral palsy, because I am able to treat many people with disabilities offering them an example of encouragement while using my therapy training to assist them. God has a plan for us from the womb, through school, and even now. What a loving God!

There is always a reason for living without an explanation, faith demands it, but with a measure of hope and love everything is bearable. God often lets us see peeks of His master plan, but just like a good parent He knows what we can handle, and what will make us more like Him.