When I worked at Coyote Hill I had 2-year-old who LOVED the movie Hotel Transylvania 2. Every time I was with him he would want to watch it except he called it Monsters. Now this same 2-year-old also had a VERY short attention span and he would get bored with Hotel Transylvania 2 easily. About the same time Sharkboy and Lavagirl was added to Netflix as well. So whenever this boy would get tired of Hotel Transylvania 2 I would switch it over to Sharkboy and Lavagirl, which he called Shark and he also LOVED that movie. At one point last summer we watched the 2 movies ALL of the time. One day I showed up to work and he asked if we could watch Shark Monsters. It was at that moment that I realized that this 2 year old thought there was a movie that had vampires and Sharkboy and Lava girl in it…
Your probably wondering why I am telling you this story? Well this month I am in Alba Iulia, Romania. Alba Iulia (kind of sounds like alba ulia) is in Transylvania County and Dracula’s castle is not far from here!! We are hoping to tour Dracula’s castle at some point this month. If you would have told me last summer when I was watching Hotel Transylvania ALL of the time that in a year I would actually BE in Transylvania I would have not believed you!! But here I am!!
This month my whole squad is together. All 45 of us. We are staying in this really nice, big, brand new mission house. We are the first WR teams to stay here. We are essentially their genuine pigs this month. Raul, our ministry host this month, has had WR teams come to the southern part of Romania for 8 years but this is the first teams in Alba Iulia. Ministry this month looks a little different for every team. Since there are 45 of us we will be doing ministry with our teams. Raul is the pastor for Hope Church Romania and works with the organization Partners in Evangelism International (PIEI). PIEI is looking to reach the 70 Million people who live in the Balkan countries and share the gospel with them. PIEI Romania is looking to reach the 95% of Alba Iulia who are not Christians. So this month each team has been assigned a specific area to help this number shrink. This can look a number of different ways. From evangelism, after-school programs, church planting, administration, and media ministries just to name a few. My team will be in a small village about 20 K from Alba Iulia running an after school program and helping the local church with their church programs on Sundays. I’m not really sure what this looks like since we don’t official start that ministry till Tuesday.
This last week we left debrief (another blog coming on that) moved into this wonderful building and started doing some evangelism ministry. They split our squad up into our team and sent us out into the city with some translators and asked us to prayer walk around and talk with people if the Spirit leads us to. So the last two days we have been doing that in the afternoon. We have met a lot of interesting people, gotten their contact info, and connected them with our ministry hosts here in Alba Iulia. Also this month since our whole squad is together we will be doing some squad teachings throughout the week. So also these past few days we have been having squad worship, prayer, and teachings about Romania.
I am excited to start our ministry next week and I will share more once I know what our day to day looks like. If you would like to support me on this adventure feel free to click the donate now button up top. I am so close to being fully funded!!
