“It is the duty of every citizen according to his
best capacities to give validity to his
convictions in political affairs.”

- Albert Einstein

Patience and I are now safely back in hot and sticky Garden Valley, TX.

The preliminary results of the ministry that we are involved with in Romania are very promising. Every day, our two teams went to two different parks and put on a Vacation Bible School for any children who were there. That means four different parks and four different groups of children. After the first day the children were waiting for our teams to show up and there were more children each time. Over the course of the four days the gospel message was presented in a progressive way beginning with what God had made, progressing to how man had sinned and been separated from God, and then to what Jesus did for us, then to what God now requires of us. At the end, on the last day, the children were given the opportunity to offer their lives to God. Many, many of them did.

What will happen now is that Salem church, with whom we have been working, will send teams of people back to those same parks one day a week to meet with the children and continue teaching them about Jesus. Their hope is to actually find an opportunity, at some point, to visit each child's home and invite them and their parents to church. What a marvelous thing it has been to be involved in the very beginning of an outreach like this.

Last March or so I stumbled upon this webcam while doing some online research on Oradea. I made it one of my favorites and occasionally I would open it up and just look at this city that I was going to eventually visit. Today I decided to not go with any of the ministry groups, but, instead, do the tourist thing. My goal was to find this area of the city and see if I could locate the bridge and intersections I could see from this webcam. My sense, from our bus ride to the church here, was that if I headed west down the main street near the church I would eventually come to the river that I could see from the webcam.

I took my ticket and got on a tram going in that direction. I kept a close watch, making sure that the tram didn’t veer off, but kept following that main road. If it turned any other way, I was going to get off because I didn’t know anything about this city and didn’t want to be lost here. It didn’t turn and I started seeing buildings that looked more and more like the ones I had been looking at for five months through the camera lens. When we stopped and I could see a bridge just ahead I hopped off. This area looked very familiar to me, even though I have never been in this part of the world. What a strange sensation. I walked across the bridge and suddenly realized I was on the very bridge that was in the camera’s view. What an amazing coincidence, because there are many bridges that cross this river. The busy street that I have been on every day to buy bread and run other errands is the very one that runs across the bridge I had been looking at.


The camera is attached to this building.


The camera is in the dark recessed area with the arched top, just under the clock.

Here is the view the camera sees, only in this case, from street level.





This whole area with the lovely old architecture is called the city center and these are government offices. Across the river is a mall like the Nicollet Mall. I walked quite a ways on it until I came to this building.



I turned and began to make my back, stopping only to buy pastries and coffee. The pastries were wonderful but the coffee is always a disappointment.

As I wound my way back to the intersection where I had left the tram I realized I didn't really know which one would take me back. It would make sense to get on a tram with the same number, wouldn't it? Did the color of the tram mean anything? Did I have to get on a #3 blue or would a #3 of any color suffice? Should I just walk? It must be miles. The places a tram stops are listed on a placard in the window. Why didn't I memorize the name of the station where I had picked up the tram? Finally, I chose to get on a red #3, believing that the number must be more important than the color. Sure enough, it followed the main street all the way and ended up at the station where I had caught it. Thank God. I'm not hopelessly lost in a country where I can't speak the language.

This same apartment building can be seen everywhere.



Here are a couple of photos of Romania. It doesn't all look this bleak, but the effect of the communist era is still very apparent. The factories and apartment buildings built by the communists all look the same. I saw this exact architecture when I was in China in 2005. The factories are built entirely above ground, including any pipes for moving any liquid, sewage, etc. The landscape is now bisected by these enormous, ugly and decaying pipelines. Instead of taking them down, the Romanians have simply built new houses and stores around them. Romania is still fairly poor, trying to recover from the communist years and the ten years following when the communist leaders remained in power, but called themselves socialists. They do not have one lei to spend on urban renewal.

Romania has recently joined the European Union and will soon be changing their money system from the lei to the euro. They think that this change will bring prosperity to their nation. My personal feeling is that their economic salvation does not lie in aligning themselves with much of the rest of Europe. But nobody asked me.

If we can bring the light of the gospel to Romania and cause them to desire to serve God in spirit and in truth, then the prosperity that comes with that will follow. Here are some photos I took last evening as the team that Patience is on performed their VBS skits in a dirty park surrounded by communist era apartment buildings.


Romanian children have come to VBS.
The taller ones are part of the ministry team.


Matthew acts out being stuck in sin with 'the sin chair'.
Patience has come to tell him how to get free.




Two photos from a skit called Ragman
which is an analogy of the gospel.