January 2009 Update

Romans 8:28- And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.The end of 2008 brought us back to the states for a visit. To say the least it was a fun but interesting visit this time. If you didn't know, Cynthia and I decided that she and the kids would go back to visit 6 weeks before I would make the trip back. This would give them time to visit with family and friends while I stayed and worked on finishing some projects up that needed to be completed. But Dec 16th came soon enough and I was able to make the trip back to the states. This is where all of the fun begins. While I was flying back there was some really bad winter storms coming into the Oregon. I managed to fly into Portland in between the storms. After being in the states for about 17 days; we were traveling in Oregon with my dad's van and stopped to celebrate a birthday party at Chucky Cheese in Salem, Oregon. While we were in the restaurant our van with all of our stuff, including the new computer equipment we had just recently purchased, and 9 of our 12 bags was stolen from the second row of parking in front of the restaurant. We walked out into the parking lot and found an empty space where the van should have been. After making some calls Cynthia spotted the van across the parking lot. What had happened as best as we can put it together is the following. They broken into the van and moved it, then went through our stuff. What was an amazing thing about all of this was that the only things that were stolen were the things that were easily replaceable. They left all of the bags with the kids clothes for the next 2 years and only took the computer stuff, a duffle bag of clothes for church the next morning and a large bag that was on top full of new pajamas for the kids. Everything else was left intact. The funny thing was, I was supposed to teach the next morning 2 services at a church and had lost all of my presentation pictures on the laptop. So after dealing the police and driving to my parents I started to work on my presentation by scavenging photos off of old emails. I finally went to bed wondering how all of this was going to work out. Church went great the next morning. What was really cool was that I had a peace about the whole thing after the initial shock of having stuff stolen.  God is so good, Monday I made a trip up to Seattle because I needed a new passport (that was in the stolen computer bag). And it turns out since my brother-in-law bought the computer stuff for us and we paid him, his renters insurance covered the loss of everything. God is so good. 

The next thing that happened was on the way back from Boise to Oregon. We started to have problems with the van that we borrowed. about 5 hours out of Portland Oregon. It was in the middle of nowhere so we just kept going until we were doing 35 mph on the freeway coming into Portland at 12:30 am. We called my brother-in-law at this point and he said he would drive up and help us. 45 minutes later we received a call from him stating that he was 10 minutes from us but that his car had broken down as well. So a 3rd car was coming for reinforcements. By now it was 2:00 am and we started looking at the van to see if we could figure out the problem. We decided to try to make the 40 minute drive to Woodburn, Oregon with them following us to see if we could make it home. We had no problems with the car until we pulled of the interstate into Woodburn.  After returning to Romania my dad wrote me to let me know that we had traveled 400 miles in a van that had a fuel pump that was on the verge of failing. God is so good.

We came back to Romania only to find that our troubles had not been just in the states. The heating system in the church had frozen up while we were gone. So we were without heat in the church. The first Sunday I was teaching we were running electrical heaters in the church to heat it up and we lost power 2 hours before service because we blew a fuse. We managed to get that fixed before service and service was great. We are now working on eradicating a large family of mice that moved in while were were gone and are currently on execution number 15 in 3 days. 

I share all of this to point to how great our God is at taking care of everything that happens to us. He gets the glory because he is the one who works things out. And while he is doing that we get to be stretched and challenged in ways that are sometimes not fun but afterwards are always worth it. I including some pictures of us celebrating Christmas and visiting family.

Praise report:

The church heating has been restored.

Prayer Requests:

Pray for us to continually look to the Lord for all of our needs.

Prayer for the Lord to provide workers for the harvest.

Pray for the health of Cynthia and the baby which is due on March 18th

Pray for Cipri's father as he has leukemia and is not saved.

Prayer for Patri's health, she was in the hospital again with pneumonia