I imagine that many of you reading this have attended VBS before. Probably many of you have helped teach at VBS. However, I doubt any of you have experienced quite the ups and downs of the VBS we had in Tarian last month! It was beautiful and difficult, and the gospel was presented, and it was hard!
We (with the help of our teens) had passed out over 200 flyers throughout the community — all to Romanians, because it is our calling here to plant a Romanian, not a Gypsy, church plant. On the first day, only one Romanian kid showed up. Some of the ladies working with us went to the gypsy community and rounded up some children. Talk about going into the byways! So, we finally get some kids to minister to — and they are wild. Not just normal gypsy wild, either, a wild wild. Possibly the worst-behaved kids we’ve had. We ended up stopping early before we even got to do games or snacks because they were so bad!
That night, we got home and started praying hard! We asked some friends to pray, and I don’t think any of us slept much. Day two came, and it was as if God had sent us totally different kids. They were the same kids, but with totally different attitudes! We were able to teach them that day and finish the entire program. We learned this week that the reason no Romanians came after we distributed all those flyers is that we had the dates wrong on the flyers. But in the end, the Lord knew the kids we needed that week, or the kids who needed us!
“Therefore go into the highways, and as many as you find, invite to the wedding” (Matt. 22:9 NKJV).
Prayers and Praises
• Pray for encouragement for us in Tarian. Finding out all our flyers were wrong was a hard blow this week. Pray for God to encourage our hearts and direct us in the way we should go.
• Praise that God’s answer to prayer during a hard week of VBS!
• Pray for the English Club during this school year. School just started this week for Romanians, and we’ll resume English Club soon!
•Praise that BMA’ Global’s Missionary Care partnered with Bethel Baptist, Fulton, Miss., to gift BMA missionaries in Europe, Asia and Africa with an amazing care retreat last month. We spent a week in Turkey being poured into in some amazing ways! I am so very thankful for these two groups!
Thank you for reading and praying. If you would like to learn more, you can do so at my blog Candra in Romania (candrainromania.wordpress.com). If the Lord leads you to give to this ministry, you can do so at the “Become a Partner” section on my blog. God Bless!
