Family Retreat

Our weekend at the resort for the family retreat was very nice, definitely not my idea of roughing it for a missions trip. The families were very welcoming and the kids were really cute. 5-year-old Iris sang "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and "Are You Sleeping?" in English. After the message, Karen and I met with the women for questions about marriage and parenthood...which I was supposed to answer. With the Holy Spirit's wisdom (and a little channeling of Super Nanny), we got through it. I made a triangular origami box to illustrate how our 3-way relationship to God progressively gets us closer together. How's that for using one's little gifts!

Today (Sunday),we had breakfast, a morning session where Steve gave a very good message, and then lunch. We drove back to Sibiu in time for Karen and I to get to Connie Fortunato's International Music Camp introduction. That's where we'll be this whole week from 9am- 2:30pm. There are about 200 students from 10-14 years old. Connie started right in with learning music, so I had to dig into my memory for the Curwen hand signs for do-re-mi, for those of you who know what that is. Unfortunately, I also had to jump into the "spit out the gum" and "no talking" mode from junior high, too. We're going to have a concert on Friday afternoon with a full orchestra.

We had a 10-minute walk back to the church from the school where the Music Camp is so that we could leave for Roşia, a gypsy village about 30 minutes away by car. On Saturday night, Rich asked Karen and I to sing a song at the church, so we decided on "How Great Is Our God" because the chords are simple and the chorus was simple enough to sing in Romanian. Now, remember the marriage seminar, and the fact that Rich and I were married the longest of anyone there? Well, we're still working on our mind-reading because I thought I had asked Rich to write the words to the song because we didn't know both verses. So as we're in the car on the way to the church, I asked Rich for the words and he didn't have them. I pulled out the paper with the Romanian words and started writing the English words as Rich played the song on his iPhone. Fortunately, Emma agreed to sing with us to reinforce the Romanian chorus, but she also sang the English with us, even though I only wrote the beginning words of each phrase. God uses His servants when we totally give Him the outcome, as we did for our song. It was Jerry's turn to give the message, and he did a very good job as well.

Upon returning to the Betania Church, we found the table set with potatoes, cabbaage salad, chicken, bread, and dessert in the refrigerator, plus our coldcuts tray had been replenished and new loaves of bread were on the side table. They are very generous here!

I think it will be nice to have a regular schedule for the upcoming week, but Radu has plans for us to see Sibiu also, so I'll still be blogging about new and interesting things. Although I have every intention of keeping it short, the descriptions just take time. You'll just have to come to Romania one day to experience these things yourself.

Thanks for reading, and keep praying for God to use us in these everyday things that we're doing!

Joanne