Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Day 7 – The Egypt Files Continue

Getting back to my room last night I checked for mosquitos and did see one but could not catch him or her but that was it. Feeling at ease I went to sleep and slept well. Apparently that mosquito ate well. It seems as though she (because only the female bites) walked up my right arm where I have 21 bites, she then jumped over to my left arm and got in 8 bites before she was either full or I woke up.
This morning we headed over to Varfur for VBS while the Puciosa and Fieni teams did their things. On Monday some of the team had headed over to Varfur to hand out flyers for VBS but we had no idea how many kids would turn up. How many kids would turn up ended up being the least of our problems. At first the vice-mayor wanted to put us in a derelict run down building. Now call me a sissy but I wasn’t going to step into a building that should have been condemned. The fact that the building was falling down was probably reason enough that it was derelict and for those who have seen Romanian construction know how solid their foundations are. Option 2 – we were going to be given a scythe to go and cut the grass in a field. I was starting to get the feeling the vice-mayor was looking for some cheap labor. Option 3 – at the end of the government building there was a patch of grass we could use. We didn’t have any electricity which wasn’t the end of the world but we didn’t have any furniture at all. Now the kids were able to find a dry spot on the pavement but we had do everything on the wet grass. Worse than that I was supposed to do my egg trick today. I thought for a few minutes how I could balance the glasses and eggs on Hunter’s back but I am not sure he would take the broom being whacked into his rear end. With some improvisation we found some construction concrete molds that looked like they were going to be used to build a drainage ditch. We had the bottom one just like it would be in the ditch and then the second was turned upside down and balanced on top. Next we had to do our best to even it out. I will come back to what happened.
By the time we had set up in Varfur we had 21 kids and 1 mum. This was a great turn out for only having one day of notice. It was also good to see some faces from the Church in Puciosa. The churches in Puciosa, Fieni and Magura are starting to grow their outreach. The one good thing of being outside was we could do some games where we could run around. We played a game called sticky tag which involves one person chasing another and then having the ability to switch places with someone else. Hunter did his best impression of a baseball slide on the wet grass and ended up on his back side. Then as he was chasing I tried to get him to take it easy on the little kids. Well they were a bit better than I thought and Hunter was running for about 5 minutes straight. At one point I heard him run past me saying “I can’t breathe”.
Back to the egg trick. I had set up everything as usual but noticed the pan the eggs were balanced on was not even. I tried to compensate but I was not sure how it would turn out. Well as you can see in the photo the eggs didn’t work exactly to plan but it’s still quite impressive how it ended up – two of the eggs were split but balanced on top of their glass.
Everyone met back up at church and had lunch. It seems as though Puciosa had the same number of kids and Fieni had grown to about 50. After lunch we all split up – some went to Fieni for some street evangelism, some stayed in Puciosa to help lay the concrete which was only 3 days late and my roving team headed back to finish VBS in Magura. Today we had over doubled to 10 kids which was great.
Tonight the church had once again arranged for us to go to dinner at someone’s house. We went to Daniella’s house who lived in Magura. We spent a while with Daniella as we ate and she shared about her husband and 2 sons all of which do not go to church. The stories we hear over here about people’s lives rally make me appreciate what I have but more importantly convict me to be a better husband and a better father.
Philippians 3: 7-9 - “But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.”

1 comment:

  1. Can you say FLEXIBILITY :)! What a day. Looks like God provided in the midst of it all. I will continue to pray that God's word would go forth touching hearts and changing lives. Sara

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