Love for the World to See

Note: This is a legacy blog post; photos are not available

I am not sure where to begin this blog post, there are so many thoughts going through my head that I can't even begin to think of where to start. So forgive me if I dart all over the place, chalk it up to a combination of my jet lagged sleep schedule and poor writing skills.Leaving for this trip I did not know what to expect. I had images in my mind of what I thought things would look like, how things would go, ect. These were way off, as I somewhat expected. Trips like this are never how you expect them to be, and in this case....they were a million times better. Looking back on the trip there were relationships that changed between Day 1 and the final good bye that defined this trip.One thing that changed was the team's relationship with each other. We were all pretty close before the trip, stemming from the fact that many of us knew each other in some regard and that we had spent 8 months planning out the trip and its fundraisers together. A whole new dimension was added however as we worked 12 hour days together, played with the children together, and experienced many eye opening experiences along side each other as the two weeks went by. A new link was added between all of us, that can never be broken and that drew us all closer together.Another was my relationship with God. Obviously a very important relationship as one might deduce from the fact that this was a missions trip to show God's love to others. Seeing the conditions people lived in and how they treated each other astounded me. The beating of their children and forcing them to marry and have kids at such a young age was a very uncomfortable thing to witness. Then seeing the change as Rachel and Dave worked with those kids and those families by teaching them about God's love for everyone, helped me get a better picture of the authenticity of His love for all of us. This love is not just something we know about and realize that it exists, it is something that defines us. We act based on this love. We treat others, wether they are our friends, family, or strangers based on this love that we have been given. Seeing this love between some of the children at the house and between Dave and Rachel and the village was amazing.For example we'd be driving somewhere in the village and we'd stop at an intersection and you'd hear someone, or even a few people shout, "Chow Dave!". People all over this village knew Dave, but not just knew him as an acquaintance, knew him as a friend who cared for them. A friend who was worthy of saying hi to, and asking how things were going when they saw him even from a distance. That relationship stems from God's love that Dave has shown. The same can be said of Rachel and the kids, who all call her Mommy, even though they see her for only eight hours a day, five days a week.The most moving was my relationship with the children at the Isaiah Center, and one child in particular. Looking back on the first work day, my mind recalls a photo that my eyes saw and my camera captured of Abel in a tree, picking a fruit (apples I believe) that were no where near ripe. I thought: "This kid is a bit weird, I wonder if he'll be doing crazy things like this while we're working these next few weeks." I had viewed him as a kid that I thought would be peripheral to the work I would be doing while I was in Tinca. At the time he was no one extraordinary... to me, in my mind. I'm not sure when the change happened, I can't recall a specific day or time, but I know it happened before our first Sunday in Romania.Abel and I grew closer, maybe it was because he was fascinated by the video camera and getting to look through it and take video of others. This led to him spending time on my lap while I looked over his shoulder as he played with it. We began to dialogue with each other. His broken English, my minute knowledge of Romanian, and our fun hand gestures allowed us to communicate with each other. I began to look for him everyday, play with him when I wasn't working, and asking if he wanted to sit on my lap during team times. On one of the last nights in Tinca, he handed me a piece of scrap paper that had a picture of a house and the words, "Abel te iubesc". "Te iubesc" in Romanian means I love you, and it was a phrase that Abel and I used with each other multiple times a day by the end of the trip. A phrase, said with his voice and the smile on his beautiful face, is one of the things I am trying to burn into my memory and never ever forget.