Hold on to spinning ground.....

Hey you guys! It's been a while. These past few weeks have been a flurry of activity, consisting of alot of farm work, nannying, and shopping for our trip in 6 days! We truly cannot believe that next Tuesday we will finally be crossing the border from Hungary into our dear Romania. :) Oh, and for those of you who are interested in what our team is planning on doing while there, please check out our mission blog: www.tmcmissiontrips.blogspot.com We both are so blessed to be a part of this team and we cherish your prayers for health, travel safety, and that the Lord would bless our efforts and fill us with His Spirit while we minister.

circled are the cities we'll be traveling to during our 2 week stay!

We'll be in the air for a total of about 13 hours, so if you have any traditions or grand ideas of passing the time, we'd love to hear them! ;)

Feeling: very-excited-kinda-overwhelmed-cough-cough-PACKING-cough-cough-hyped
Listening to: Be My Forever
Eating: nothing....but I've been craving donuts. Just thought I'd throw that out there. 
Liking: my new haircut! 
Working on: finishing preparing my mini sermons/testimonies. Oh yeah--and PACKING LISTS
Enjoying: this gorgeous weather we've been blessed with.
Hoping: this cold of mine is gone by next week.........>.<
Loving: the Lord's grace and mercy evident in my life and those of my friends. <3

-Sarah

Returning to Romania!

I hope you are having a beautiful and blessed first month of this new year; the prospects of a year yet to have stories written on it gives me a little bounce in my step that the end of a year just doesn't quite have. I am writing to tell you a bit about something I am praying and working toward doing this year:

    Many of you will remember that last year, a group of eight young men and women from our church (including me and my sister Rachel) and a friend's church traveled from Virginia to Arad, Romania. We visited various Romanian churches over a period of 12 days speaking and singing, helping Pastor Ioan Zaharia and his son Cristian with their ministry. We also spent time interacting with many young adults around our ages and were able to mutually encourage one another—far more than I had even hoped. God truly blessed our time and changed me through it, giving me a new love for God's people across the world, and inspiring me to live daily in the joy of the Gospel. We have been invited back this year to participate in this ministry to the Romanian people. This year the team will travel to some new locations as well as revisit some of the previous churches; I am excited at the prospect of getting to minister farther into the mountainous areas and to see again my sweet brothers and sisters in Christ with whom we left a promise to return. :)

       As always, I would ask that you pray for our team, that our hearts would be right as we prepare to go, that God would prepare each person we are going to meet as we go, and that all the details would work out according to His will. I'd also like to ask for prayer in regards to provision of funds for the 2014 trip. The cost for airfare, lodging, food, and travel expense while in Romania is $1, 625 per person for two weeks. If you feel led to contribute financially, to this years mission to Romania, you can mail in a check (in the memo box please write my name so they can keep donations organized) to 

Trinity Mennonite Church, P.O. Box 473,

 Prospect, VA, 23960. 

Or you can donate online by going to Trinity’s missions web site: www.tmcmissiontrips.blogspot.com . You can also keep up with planning, team members, and specific prayer requests from this site. (Trinity is the other church with whom we went last year and they are taking over the organization this year, so if you don't recognize the name it is because it isn't my church specifically.)  We are hoping to nail down the specific travel dates as soon as possible. We would like to be able to purchase the tickets by March 10, 2014. This will allow the Romanian pastors to make our church/speaking schedule, as well as other travel arrangements. 

Thank you for praying with us and I so look forward to telling you about how God worked when we return!

If you have any questions or would like more info, please leave a comment!!! :) 

Meet the Team!

Pictures from Romania 2013 Trip

In Christ,
Sarah

{time travel: my way}

It happened. 

Tonight on the way home from Benj's first scrimmage of the season, on a long and dark country road.

The night was clear, the Big Dipper was sparkling and the evening was just beginning to cool down.

I rolled down the window. All the way. Cuz, why not?

The wind blew my hair in every direction at once, and I let it go.

I closed my eyes to enjoy the moment, and for one tidge of a second I was transported.

I was taken 5000 miles and four months back.

Back to a similar night, with similar stars and similar temperature.

It was a night that I'll never forget, and will always cherish.

The ride was fast---much faster than tonight's. 

The laughs were many, the screams were present, and the road was long.

For just a moment I was taken there.

Right back to the maiden-voyage of Adventura.

-Sarah

Romanian Style

(all photos courtesy of Amy Edmonston, Daniel Tate, and Matthew Walker)

Romanian Adventures Part 2.

I'm going to start categorizing so we can get through this in some semblance of order! Today will be the churches! :)

One of the first churches we went to was a Gyspy church. This was the church with the kids that stole my heart. :) 

I loved the kids at the other churches too, but there was something about this group of kids that got at me; maybe because I had more time with them than some of the other groups... I'm afraid I caused a rumpus and taught them wild hand-games and made them far too loud....but it was all in good fun, and they loved it as much as I did. Besides--hand-games like thumb-wars, and the slapping game and Down-By-The-Banks--don't require much translation, which was a boon as I didn't want to bother Cristi and they didn't speak much English. :) 

This was also the church where Matthew earned the nickname "Justin Bieber". Every tween-aged girl in that church wanted their picture taken with him...and only him. Cristi and I came up with the nickname almost simultaneously, and it stuck for the rest of the trip! Here is the evidence of that night:

Hahahahaha. Oh m'gooooodness. We had so much fun teasing Bieber about that night!

The churches we were working with (and staying with) are Baptist churches, and I found the depth of passion for Christ in these places extremely inspiring/challenging. It isn't easy not being Orthodox, as the Orthodox church is the one that the government supports, yet the believers in these churches are so joyful and faithful...some of the most courageous people I have ever met. 

We were staying in apartments in Pastor John's own church, which was really neat. It's a huge echoing building all built of tile and cement and glass (they don't believe in wood construction because they don't last long enough) so we would go stand at the very top floor and sing down the stairwell. Our favorites were "The Misty Mountain Song" and "Pentatonix: Somebody that I Used to Know". Such fun. We even got some of the songs on recording, which is pretty neat. The guys loved to play around with photography on the various levels of the church building in the evenings! They are really good with the cameras and effects if I do say so myself. (Credit for all these photos is going to Daphne Edmonston, Daniel Tate, Matthew, and Justin Wright.)

Arad was a beautiful city in it's quiet, patient, turbulent, long-suffering way. :)

Each night we would visit a village church. (if we weren't at Bethel) Some were near to Arad, others we had to drive a distance. I think we visited 7 different churches, all told, some more than once. We made lots of friends this way, and I loved going around to all the different towns! That is one thing you don't usually get to do. The people were so hospitable, and always prepared a meal for us and served us: they wouldn't let us help them do a thing. So sweet. At one village we even got to eat in the mayor's office...Christi enjoyed his momentary prestige. ;)

          

I enjoyed every village for a different reason...some for their natural beauty, like Cladova, others for the people we met. :) The last several churches we visited were overseen by the same deacon, so we got to know he and his family a bit. His daughter is an Audrey Hepburn lookalike, I think! :)

Her name is Bianca, and she speaks far better English than she gives herself credit for, and she's an excellent translator! Actually, her voice is so nice and clear that I found myself often thinking she'd be perfect for a How to Learn Romanian computer program. :D Wow...me and my mind. 

Christi or Pastor John would start off the services with a prayer and a bit of speaking, then they would pass the torch off to us, and we'd do songs and testimonies for the next hour or so. :) It became a daily challenge to try to remember which songs we'd done at which churches, trying not to repeat ourselves too often. At the churches where we did two services, we sometimes had to rearrange so the same group of people wouldn't have to hear the same songs twice. :D It was definitely a mind-game, and toward the end we stopped caring. ;) After all, poor Christi had to translate many of the same testimonies/ mini-sermons over and over. Actually, it was a funny sensation, having the opportunity to retell the same stories of God's faithfulness in my life over and over...I tried to word things differently each time, and ended up gathering several testimonies to rotate so the whole team wouldn't die of boredom. :D 

Christi liked to make us laugh in the middle of services (or would accidentally do so) so we all learned when it was safe or perilous to look at him up there at the pulpit. Once or twice he would be listening to us and translating, and we'd give a spin to our story that he wasn't expecting, and he'd bust into laughter... like the time I used the same opening I had been using for my usual testimony, but launched into a story of God healing my terrible temper as a kid...he gave me this brief, hilarious, befuddled look and then busted out laughing. :D Thankfully it was just a children's service in a tiny church so no one minded. :D

Ahhh....good times. Good times.

All right, then. There you have a post about the various churches. Stay tuned for tomorrow's post about Touristy-Things! :)

Romania, Part ONE! :)

In Dulles, waiting for departure

Wow. Before I went on this trip, I had always majorly scoffed at everyone who came home from a mission's trip and said they had been "changed". Honestly, I had no patience for it. But coming home from two weeks in Romania, I can say in perfect truth that they were two of the best and most impacting weeks of my life. So much happened, so many iron bonds were formed, and my heart underwent so many changes, I'm finding it difficult to choose where to start....that being said, I shall start at the very beginning because when all else fails, logic is on our side. A quick warning: these will be long posts full of pictures, stories, and tid-bits, so sit back and enjoy 'em! You wanted updates, I give you updates!

Ahem.

The flight from DC to Paris was long and completely strange. We left DC at 10 PM American time, but somehow as we crossed the Atlantic and various time zones, we ended up in Paris around 11:30 their time which was like...6 in the morning American time? At any rate, we were awakened by the flight staff for breakfast at what felt like 3 a.m. Definitely an exotic sensation! We were flying Air France, and believe me, I delighted in hearing all the accents! Yes, I gloried in actually being in Paris...until I had to sit in the stuffy, overcrowded Charles de Gaulle (Sharl dee-gull) airport during the layover. Dan Tate was our voluntary Facebook-Quote-Keeper (and took most of these bombdiggity photos), and has me down as saying, "It felt like a greenhouse, and I was growing way too fast." Pretty much...yeah. :D I did not enjoy Paris as much as I hoped to. But then of course I didn't get out of the terminal. The toilets were nasty, and that soured my whole impression.

Because everyone eats while in Paris, right? 

From Paris to Budapest, Hungary, the accents got thicker, the plane got smaller, and my heart got thumpier. We landed in Budapest and I felt for certain how utterly American I was. My travel-journal (religiously and awesomely kept) describes the moment:

"From Paris, we took a tiny, disagreeable plane to Budapest where we were unceremoniously dumped and made to feel entirely foreign by the total lack of anyone speaking English. We gathered our luggage and wandered to the front door where I then began to second-guess whether Pastor John had or had not got my email with the information of our flights. Oh, it was a rotten moment."

^Yep. Accuracy there. {One quick note about the travel-journal: I became the group historian, and kept the thing so closely that when I left, I found my page-count at something like 104 pages, complete with illustrations. *high fives all round* This means y'all get first-hand impressions from the excerpts: things I would likely have forgotten or described differently had I waited till I was home to write them. Enjoy!}
But Pastor John was there eventually with two drivers (Branson and Mr. Frederickson) and we piled in and were soon acquainted with one of the hallmarks of the entire trip..."Verrrrry bad roads." :D Another spot in my journal is ornamented with a drawing of a car zig-zagging down a skinny, pot-hole-pitted road and the description:

"But the ROADS! Oh my gosh. If you are going to drive in the opposite lane, why not just change the law and make it legal? If you saw our van's footprint from any given stretch of road after the main highway it would look like this: (insert illustration) Absolutely bonkers. (our driver) appeared to be fully confident that driving in the left (wrong) lane to pass 4 eighteen-wheelers was a perfectly normal thing! We seemed ever to be in immediate danger from head-ons or fender-benders. I was happier asleep, while at the same time enjoying our peril."

Yep, this pass occurred at about 80 or 90 kilometers an hour

The road-terror was the first thing about my impressions of Romania to change: by the end of the trip, the "potty roads" held some of our fondest memories. Roads in America are so terribly boring. Adventura would never have been born were it not for the terrible state of the village roads...but that belongs in another story later on. :) Suffice it to say, I love dirt roads full of reckless potholes and reckless-er drivers.

We arrived  at the church and were installed in our apartments and fed the first of our legendarily enormous meals. Our chef was a fellow who, before he became a christian and cooked for God's people, used to cook for the last Dictator each time he came to Arad. This means that our chef could cook like nobody's business. Poafte Buna! ("good appetite")

The first night I wrote my slightly-homesick, disgruntled entry in my journal, which is why you get the first two excerpts above that don't sound overly enthusiastic. The next day was Sunday, and were immediately dunked into life as Pastor John's sidekicks which included three distinct services on Sunday. We were blessed to have a translator part of the time, but for the majority I just listened to the sermons in Romanian, and sang along with the songs as they came in Romanian on the screen. That was so much fun and excellent practice: the tunes were easy, and I could practice my Romanian pronunciation without the inconvenience of everyone else listening. And let it be here recorded that our dear Pastor John speaks way more English than he ordinarily lets on! We got on swimmingly through the first day of church-work! For some reason I neglected to write anything about that first Sunday (probably too exhausted) so I can't recall if we actually shared testimonies and music...at any rate, that was the kick-off day to what became three weeks of playing the VonTrapp family: our main source of ministry in Romania ended up being going around to a different village church every day of the week and conducting a children's service, and then eating dinner, and then conducting an adult service.

                    

We would sing loads of songs (often accompanied by a borrowed guitar) and then give testimonies which would be translated to the people. I'm just giving you the basics now, because later on I will elaborate on how terribly special these times became. *sniff sniff*

I think perhaps my favorite aspect of this trip was the fact that we weren't on a "Tourist Mission's Trip". Pastor John isn't your typical missionary with houses to build and wells to dig and chickens to distribute. He is a pastor and his son, Cristi (they deserve their own entire post later on) is a pastor, and they have a sprawling area of ministry (Cristi travels all over Romania and Europe to preach) and we plopped right into it and followed them at a breakneck pace. Truly, we were able to join into Romanian Church-Life on a local's level which was brilliant and unusual and perfection.

Monday morning we met Cristi (he'd been driving over 1500 miles that weekend, preaching in several places) and before the day was out, we knew we'd met someone really amazing.

 Cristi fit into our group with the ease of an older brother or an uncle or something. Seriously, we adopted him and swallowed him whole into our band of merry men. He is so much like a mash-up of all my hilarious male-relatives that we felt a deep kinship right away. So with Cristi to translate for us (and to make us laugh in the wrong moments) we began our daily schedule:

• 7:00- wake up
• 8:30- group devotions
• 9:00- breakfast
• 10:00 - 1:30- touring sites with Cristi or exploring Arad with the Bales
• 2:00- lunchtime
• 3:00 - 4:00- group practice/prepare testimonies
• 4:30- leave for villages
• 6:00 -children's/youth service
• 7:30- dinner in the village
• 8:00- Adult service
• 10:00- arrive back at the church
• 10:00 - 12:00- loaf, sing, laugh, go to bed

This is the daily schedule, and I will elaborate as time goes on. For now, enjoy this first peep into Adventura: The Romanian Trip Part One! And stay tuned for daily updates from now till we've exhausted to subject! :D If you leave comments with any questions you have, I can be sure to include my answers in the upcoming posts!

World Traveler

......Recently I've come to crossroads with the reality of selfless love. The love that exists and goes on no matter what the cost to the love-er. The love that has no limit, that has no conditions, that is never in question. The courageous love that will go to the end of the world with no fear of heartbreak, rejection or being wrung out hard........

Excerpt of a guest post I did on Casey's blog. Read the rest of it right here

There are sooooo many things going on in my life right now, but toppest in my mind is our upcoming European excursion! We will be eating crepes at a cafe in Paris in 2 DAYSS!!!!! (haha, I wish!) No, but really---Rach and I are both about to split with excitement/nerves and will be good and ready to board a plane Friday evening. Our team will be gone from the 5th through the 19th and we would all appreciate prayers for safety, for effectiveness and for health while we are in Romania. I'm looking forward to all that God has in store for us with this experience and be assured that we'll tell you ALLLLLL about our time when we return!

And now I'm brought to a super exciting point of this post---in our absence I have lined up some guest posts from some *gorgeous* friends of mine! You guys are in for a HUGE treat. So make sure you come and stop by to peruse the charm! ;)

Thirdly, and lastly of all. I have an apology to make. Remember that brainchild of mine? The one I was so inspired for and promised to do weekly? (Pshhhh. yeah right.) Well, I don't blame you if you have forgotten about it entirely. For I had. Til like yesterday. :P Yep, it's a pretty awful thing on my part, but I'll just have to lay the matter aside for when I come back to the States. Just thought I'd update you on that. 

And now I leave with with a fun, whimsical, and inspiring song for you by the great Andrew Peterson:

La Reverdere!
Sarah

Cafe En Romania!!!

It was a blast.

It was exhausting.

It was a success.

It was a strain.

It was, in short, the thing God used to pull us through the last $700 dollars of fund-raising to victory in making money for Romania!! 

Josie came down to spend Thursday-Sunday with us and be an extra pair of eyes and hands...she was awesome and helpful and so darling.

The rest of you came and spent money and made over $200 at the coffee night!

Others came to the yard-sale the following morning and bought more coffee and spent more money and made another $600+ dollars.

In short, God provided enough and a bit past enough to finish sending Sarah and I and six others to Romania in under two weeks!!! I cannot believe it is coming up so soon. It seems unreal because I have dreamed of this time for the past two years. Two of our team members went early and just got back last Tuesday and came home with such stories as to make me more excited than ever!! 

We rearranged all the furniture, too down all preexisting decorations, and redecorated the house with coffee-shop flair. It look phenomenal when we were finished! 

There was also The Pioneer Woman's Coffee-Cake, which was heaven-come-down.

Thanks to everyone for coming and helping push us through this last hump! It was a really cool fun night even without the fact that we were raising money for Romania. :) Wish many of you who didn't come could have, because it was amazing! :D We will be writing another post about all of our decorations and the fact that they were accomplished without spending a red cent, but for now enjoy this update and again, thanks a million! <3

In the Throes of Travel Planning......

Most of you have probably heard, but our church is planning a missions trip to Romania this spring. We're in the prep stage of applying for passports, raising funds (and lots of them) and scheduling plane flights.

Arad, Romania

Rachel and I both feel the Lord leading us to be a part of the team going over there, and are looking forward to Him working in amazing ways through the whole experience! Personally, I'm really psyched to participate in something like this! I've never been out of the country and am hoping/praying on my eyes being opened to the diverse world outside my cozy little circles.

I know we would all appreciate your prayers as to the details of this big trip, along with the overwhelming topic of funds. Basically a round trip plane ticket is close to $700 during the spring. That doesn't include the money needed for train transportation, food, or emergency stashes. :P For a young, unemployed person like myself, that is a bit like beating a dead horse. 

But.

I know that as the Lord has given me peace and led me here, He will be faithful to provide everything for this to happen. I'm trusting the Lord to lead us in profitable ways of fund-raising and praying fervently that He would take care of all the gazillions of details. I know this because of all the amazing ways He's already worked; giving us several different connections in Romania to churches there, a friend who's family has been serving in Romania for years (and who "just happens" to be going this spring as well;) and various other ways. 

Romania looks to be very beautiful and I'm very interested to meet and serve the people there. :)

gypsy family

boys in a gypsy village

Bucharest, Romania

Oh, and apart from the wonderful ministry, I'm excited to see a whole new culture, different ways of living, and the awesome architecture there seems to be there! :D

So, that's what's in bold, 72 pt. font on my prayer list right now. 

Until Later,

Sarah

p.s. I got back Sat. from a week spent at a ball and working on a media project of last year's DOD camp with great, fun, and hospitable friends. More on that later. :)