In 1993 and again in 2000 I was able to go to Romania. I am not, nor can I ever imagine God asking me to be – a missionary. My talents are definitely elsewhere. The trips to Romania were not technically mission trips because I went with a group of teachers and our goal was to share “a curriculum of morals and ethics based on the life of Jesus” to their public school teachers. God called me to go and be what I was and am, a teacher. Romania’s revolution, the one that ousted the communist regime – bloody and difficult, happened in 1989. My trip in ’93 was only four years later, and life was difficult for the Romanians. There were a lot more freedoms, and I was able to worship openly in a small church on the Sundays I was there, but the freedom was new and tentative. The Orthodox Church, which had an iron hand on the people even when the communists were in power, wasn’t very pleased at evangelistic effort, and so we had to be careful. I remember being scared at the Bucharest airport when we landed because the law enforcement presence there was actually military personnel carrying big automatic weapons. I can easily recall the tears running down one of our guides faces as she described being in the square when shots rang out and killed several of her friends as she participated in the college student protest that became the Revolution. I stared at the bullet holes on the sides of those buildings and wondered how someone could stand up like that, or even survive that kind of oppression and terror.
I felt brave and empowered when I was in Romania, and I fell in love with the people and the place. When I returned home in ‘93 I ended up finding out about a ministry called Christ Commission for Romania, and began to support that ministry a little with prayer and money.
A really cool thing happened last week. The founder and director of Christ Commission for Romania, John Dolinschi and his wife Viorica are traveling in the US and they drove through Cheyenne. We were able to meet and have dinner together. This was the first time I’d ever met them and the evening was a treasure. You can read the details of John’s life at the CCFR website: http://www.ccfromania.com/styled-3/ but in a nutshell, John escaped from Romania before the Revolution, was put in a Yugoslavian jail, facing possible prison time or being sent back to Romania. Instead, the jailers recognized something genuine in John (God, of course!), and allowed him to stay. He eventually made it to the US and among other things, he became a US citizen and graduated from a Bible college in Texas. But here’s the thing… then he went BACK. Before the Rovolution! He wanted to take God’s love and Bible to his people. (He also wanted to return and marry Viorica!)
I thought I was brave when I went for three weeks to a country full of unrest. I went in a large group, I was assigned a personal translator who stuck by my side and helped me with a difficult language barrier, and I had all the proper visas and return tickets. I slept in a private room in the best hotels in Brasov and Ploesti. I felt courageous, but I understand now that my bravado was weak and prideful at best. I wasn’t brave at all. I sat across from John and Viorica this week, watching the sparkle in his eyes as he calmly described fear and risks I can’t even imagine. I heard about their life full of a love so deep that they don’t recognize or acknowledge the sacrifice and difficulty they face each day. When I read stories about ‘people like this’, I can close the book and walk away, filing the narrative away in the same spot I would a novel. But sitting across the table from John was different. Real. Now. I am humbled and convicted about my own importance and about my own courage. Thank you, God, for this encounter. Thank you, John and Viorica, for spending the evening with Karl and me. Thanks for going and doing what I don’t have the courage to go and do myself.
