Home again

Hi, we're home... more or less.... in body anyway.
The flights were good, except for the last one where I think we all felt totally exhausted and realized that United is potentially not the best airline in the world. However, the other flights went well. I (liz) saw the Empire State Building and the statue of liberty for the first time out the plane window as we landed in new York :).
It was a great trip... I think we will take a while to debrief and reflect. The team will meet later this week to check in, and also share briefly in church next Sunday.. meanwhile, here's a letter we received from the pastor of the church in Chisinau where we ministered and where Paul attends and preaches.. bless you and thank you SO much for praying.

Dear and Beloved Brothers and Sisters in Christ Jesus, Hello!

We bring you great thanks for the work your church did here in Moldova. For these ten days when Kate, Liz, Matthew and John were here, we received a lot of blessings. People from our church (also from different churches) were encouraged; many of them received inner healing and other kinds of ministry. Through your team, God opened to me things our church needs to give attention to and to work on.

I say to your church and you all - ’Thank You!’

We hope for a continuous relationship of our Church with your Church.

Blessings,

Zanfir Nita,

Pastor of Christ Church, Chisinau, Moldova.

Another Brick in the Wall

Yesterday, we all hit the wall emotional and mentally. God is faithful in carrying us through a very difficult day (Friday) as we met with the "sister" church in Orhei. It was nice to see the old Orthodox church also in Orhei that is dug into the mountain side. Later that evening we had a nice time visiting one of the home groups (Johnson's) and enjoyed Paul's leading Bible teaching. Today, we are glad not to do any cross cultural ministry. We will just be praying for Paul & Gala. Later, we will have a Thai dinner with the Paul & Gala and Pastor Igor & his wife. We will leave early this Sunday at 8 + am which means 11 pm Calif. time for a long plane ride home. Looking forward to seeing you all again and seeing my cat Fiver! Please do pray for travel mercies and as we re-enter our culture.

Lots of praying

I don't think I have ever prayed so much in my life.... in so many different ways, and I have never taught and prayed for people in short phrases which have to be translated as we go, with myself having no idea if what is being translated is close to what I was intending. Made me think that must be how God thinks sometimes... "Everything I say, they interpret, apart from that brief moment on the mountain with Moses..." Ces't la vie as Jon said.
It's been great to be able to connect with the pastors and leaders here and encourage them with prayer and reflecting on how things are going. We spent two hours last night (Katie and I) talking with our hosts, Tanya and her husband Pastor Igor and their eighteen year old Vika, hearing the testimony of their life... Vika's views on boys, Tanya's experience before she knew Jesus (incredible story) and how Igor feels about what is going on in church and their lives. It felt like family....
And, big news, first time of sleeping through the night.
Today we are visiting the street kids ministry, and teaching (probably) at the prayer meeting...
We are about to have coffee with Paul and Gala (we brought them Peets.. yay). One important piece of news for prayer.. Paul has an incredibly sweet tooth... he was eating chocolate condensed milk from the bowl yesterday...

C'est Maldova

Matthew and I had an interesting adventure yesterday that forced trust building.

Our phone at the apartment decided not to work anymore and we hadn't set up the details of the days plan because we were planning on calling in the morning. We didn't know whether to wait at the apartment (which in hindsight was the right thing to do) or to go the meeting or go to Pauls. We walked down to Paul's apartment, but missed him, because he was riding a mini bus up to ours so that he could find out why we were not answering the phone. When he or his wife were not home, we decided to go and try and find the church office on our own. The other time we were there, it was sunday and all of us were together and talking and so I had not paid any attention to how to get there. So I had to trust Matthew and his ever present map that he has out everywhere to get us there. The map of course doesn't have the mini bus routes and the major buses were on strike. Traffic was terrible yesterday and there were protesters in the city center. We ended up making it there 45 minutes late and had everyone worried about us. We didn't really know where the office was in the building and were wondering around it until we finally found a woman who let us use her cell phone. (We had tried earlier to use the pay phones but could not figure it out. You have to buy a card and punch in numbers from the card, but the cards are in Russian so it is really hard to figure out which of the dozens of numbers on the card are the right ones. We are going to carry Paul's cell phone with us from now on.) We called paul and he called the church office and they came out and found us. we were walking right by the door when they came out. So in the end it worked out fine and Matthew got us there.

We are learning to be flexible and to let things develop and happen as they happen. Don't worry be happy. C'est la vie. (That's life!) One Moldovan told us that everyone has such a great sense of humor because there are so many things that don't work the way you would hope, that the only thing to do is to laugh. If you get mad, you would always be angry.

Thanks for your prayers. We can feel them guiding and protecting us.

What a mess

What a mess! Mot-to-mesk (just say what a mess) means thank you in Romanian or Moldovan.
Yesterday, was a mess. Our land line was down, so Jon & I had to find our way to the church office in the morning via trolley bus and minibus. We made it there only to not know which door goes to the church office. However, we found someone with a cell phone, and called, and to our surprise as well as Pastor Igor, we were standing right outside. I suppose we just chalked that one up to Moldovan time for being an hour late to the church planting meeting.

On a personal note, I am becoming more aware how the Holy Spirit prompts me to speak up. At home, I think I tend to dismiss His promptings. So at this particular meeting, our team met with their leaders (pastors Igor and Zimfir, and evangelist Johnson with Paul). My initial thought was I don't know anything about Church Planting so I will just listen and defer to Jon, Liz and KT. Then the Lord started to prompt me to speak up. At first, I tried to have Liz say something about what the Lord was speaking to me about, but quickly realized that I just need to speak up. So I did. I shared about the need to have organized the leadership around ministries that flow from one's giftings. If we are not leading/ministering out of our giftings, the church will not grow as well and one may risk being burned out. So I shared how we can diagram one's giftings (have a frank discussion about that), followed by the current assigned tasks, and see if there are ways to re-delegate ministries that better aligned to ones' gift clusters. Then Jon spoke more about this as well as KT and Liz. It was interesting to see us as a body working together as we "spoke from the seat of our pants" with wisdom that God gave us for the moment.

The night before we had this wonderful time with Pastor Zimfir and his wife Allah. It was really good relational time which I think is helping build some trust between us and the leadership here in Moldova. Yesterday afternoon in spite of the traffic jam due to some sort of protest - it took us a couple of hours to go a few blocks on a bus - Jon and I managed to make it in time for one of the boy's youth home group meetings. Great group of guys who are passionate in prayer and their love for Jesus. BTW Bible training is a huge area of need, as well as relational inner healing training. Just scratch the surface, and their is a lot of relational pain which I believe Jesus wants to heal.

Interestingly, most young people speak only Moldovan (Romanian) and not Russian. So establishing a church for the Romanian population is critical. Viorel (home group leader) and Serghei are both wanting to plant a Romanian speaking church. I might add they are younger than Jon!

Liz and KT, yesterday went to minister to the girls youth group. Today, Jon & I will be doing evangelism with Johnson (Nigerian). Liz and KT are planing to visit the street children ministry.
Tonight Liz will be speaking at the all church prayer meeting. It has been quite an adventure so far.

Marshruka and other amazing phenomenon

The marshruka is coming. Sounds like some aliens being but really they are mini buses that take people everywhere in the city. Unfortunately, they get very crowded and is standing room only. The top ceiling of these mini buses are carpeted. It's a good thing, since when you stand up, one's head is right against that ceiling.

Today, we had a rather serious day of discussion with the team and then prayer. Later, we met with the church leadership. I am simply amaze how God met us and really answered our prayers. I am also really blessed to be on this team. Thank you for your prayers for us. It's hard to tell you all the details, but let just say that God really moves as we seek Him in prayer. I think something really, really big happened tonight in the spiritual realm for this wonderful church here.

God is Moving

Everyone,
thanks for your prayers. They were evident. We really had a powerful prayer ministry teaching session on Saturday, with people from several churches attending. We had somewhere around 60 people come. Our ministry time at the end lasted about 2 hours. We were trying to train and equip the Moldovans while praying for people to be healed from physical and emotional issues. KT talked about unforgiveness and dealing with that was the key to several people being healed of physical problems. Prayer ministry through translation is always interesting. God did some amazing things.

Sunday Paul taught on Luke 4 about the Spirit of the Lord being on Jesus (which was an awesome message by the way) and then we did ministry time with the people who were trained up the previous night. Again, lots of good stuff happened. KT rocked with giving words and called men up to the front to be equipped and empowered to have compassion to care for the poor as well as some specific words for healing. It was cool to see her step out in faith.
It was all very tiring and we really needed the long wonderful lunch at the pastor's house that kt and liz are staying at. Please continue to keep us in prayer as we seek God in what he is doing and how a partnership might be formed that will benefit both our church and the church here in Moldova.

The spiritual sense here is not dark or evil, but brokenness. When Paul talked about Jesus being annointed to lift up the brokenhearted, that really seemed to hit home. Moldovans have been conquored and oppressed by so many physical outsiders for most of their history. I got the sense that the spiritual situation is the same. They need hope and healing. Thankfully, Jesus can give us and them both of those things.