Roma Diary
(Extracts From My Journal)
January 21 2006
A few weeks ago a man from a village about two hours away came to our Friday night meeting. He was obviously moved and prayed a prayer of repentance at the end of our time. This last Friday he came back again to the meeting, which I could not speak at as I was sick for a while. God used the time for this dear man to open up his heart to Nedelko. The man is quite wealthy and has made his money by Kamata, which is high interest loans backed up by violence. He would like to walk with Christ but realizes what it will mean for his business. This is very encouraging to see someone of this type touched by the Holy Spirit. His brother is the head Bayash man in the whole country so there are lots of implications.
We have now formulated an outline for the new organization we are going to launch called the Roma Bible Union. Please write and request a copy of the outline or you can read a copy at the Blog. We are praying about how to position this new entity and have had an offer from a bigger US mission to assist us with the US administration and act as a covering for this new project.
We have been wrestling with some ideas for a few months now about starting a multi ethnic fellowship here in our city Varazdin. The idea of this would be to create a stronger more stable Antioch type Fellowship here to act as an outreach base and a training center for the Bayash. There are a core group of believers who come together for this and a Croat Pastor who has been a friend of ours for many years is praying about joining with us as a partner in ministry for this venture. It will be thrilling if this can be made a reality in the next couple of months. I will do most offo the preaching and teaching but the actual load of pastoral care would be resourced by this pastor and some of the other mature believers.
It is so brutally cold here at the moment. It is probably the same cold front that has killed so many in Russia this week. It is hard to imagine our Bayash friends living in their small one room shacks in this kind of weather. There are several new born babies in the community and these are not good days for their care. We estimate that the average Bayash village has about 1 square yard of living space per person. In the winter that space gets very crowded with lots of obvious problems. There are no easy answers but there are answers. We need a spiritual revolution that will energize change as a result of being touched by the Gospel of reconciliation.
February 27 2006
We had our first meeting of the Turnovec Fellowship this last Wednesday and it was truly wonderful. All testified that the oppression from the evil spirits had gone after their conversions last Sunday and they were excited to be meeting with hungry hearts for the scriptures. What is so interesting about this group is that they are all High Class Bayash and the home we are meeting in is very nice. It will be interesting to watch to see if this is a trend. I was laying in bed this morning thinking we must never forget the truly poor.
Our Sitnice Fellowship starts the new series of meetings this Friday as an outreach to the region and the topic I will speak on is money lending, usury and interest. This is one of the biggest problems we have in our villages and contributes largely to the poverty here. It will almost certainly create a reaction and I am seeking the Lord for clarity.
We have just received 8 tons of shoes, blankets and school supplies plus 4500 Christmas boxes from our dear friends at SMILE in the UK. Now comes the task of sorting, creating an inventory and matching it to our database of the villages. Busy days ahead.
Nancy is breaking through the sound barrier as she pushes on with her Bayash dictionary and is trusting to go up to Pecs in Hungary to meet with a Hungarian Bayash professor there to talk things through.
Talking of Hungary. We met a woman in a store in Hungary a few weeks ago who heard us speaking English and wanted to kow what we were doing in the area. We shared with her and she said she knew the the head of the Bayash community in Nagykanisza which is just north of us here over the border. We have just received an email from her saying that he wants to meet with us to discuss the Bible translation project. This could be a really solid introduction into the western Hungarian Bayash community.
May 3 2006
I sensed great evil in Trnovec tonight as we had our meeting there. All the new believers are under pressure from the rest of the community and there is a tense atmosphere there. As we came out into the night the sound of loud Gypsy music was all around but the only people we encountered were a group of teens who seemed quite friendly. I nearly got Nancy and Anita to move away from the windows in the van as I sensed something was going to happen but either I was mistaken or God protected us as we drove out without incident. My heart aches for this little group as they are so fresh and precious yet the stress from the community is pressing in on them. We decided tonight that starting next week we will begin a 36 week study that will take them through the whole Bible. We sense we need to build a comprehensive view of the Bible and the plan of redemption as we are writing on blank slates.
In both Donja Dubrava and Sveti Durd we will also start a Chronological Bible teaching series with our dear friends from Zagreb. We are trusting they will be able to take over these two villages in the next months so that we will not have to be directly involved.
Our Sitnice Fellowship has all but collapsed and we are now reviewing the way ahead. Drunkenness, immorality and general compromise has overcome in the current round. But there is a difference between the battle and the war. We have lost this battle but not the war. The Wounds of the Lamb of God are not so easily dismissed. We are thinking of lying low for a few months to pray more fervently over the village and then start the meetings again in September.
The Varazdin Fellowship is proving a great sense of joy to us all and we are now thinking of this as our «Home Fellowship» out from which all our ministry will flow. We are beginning to serve the poor as a group and it is really helping to give us a sense of identity.
June 6 2006
Sometimes there are moments that make life so wonderfully fulfilling in this type of work. Yesterday I was in three different villages and there was a general sense of peace that hung over all the visits. Last night we sat together in a big village about 15 minutes from the house. There were six Bayash believers, four of them who have come to the Lord in the last few months. We are going through a study of the whole Bible that will take 6 to 9 months to complete. They were like open books eager to learn and hear from the scriptures. There was so much laughter and genuine joy, actually innocent joy. These were all people who had seen murder and moral suffering first hand in their families yet these were not hardened street wise people, they were new born, childlike, open and gentle.
I was recently in another village so that is so bad. I saw a young woman with a her face cut bruised and grazed. I thought she must have been beaten and so I gently went up to comfort her and softly asked her what happend, she burst out laughing and said she had been drunk and fell on her face. So much for concerned fatherly counsel and understanding.........
I sat in a terrible hut where two women, a child and a baby all sleep on one small bed. The husband of the house was in prison and I sat down to write a letter in Bayash from his woman as she was iliterate. I thought lets try something different, so I called the prison on my cell phone and with as much authority as I could muster I said, « This is Bob Hitching from England here I want to speak with Josip Orsus» I then heard shouting scurrying in the background as they were calling the prioner as someone from England was calling, Josip came and I gave the phone to his woman and they spoke for a few minutes. Half the children in the village were in the hut and the delight for everyone was enormous. But for me what was interesting was as I stepped back to observe the whole scene I noticed that several of the children were pressed in against me, a little 9 year old girl was leaning on my shoulder, a little boy was leaning on my knee. The sense of trust and closeness was both beautiful and humbling. The innocent closeness of the children, the trust of the adults in the midst of what is frankly, filth and degradation gave me just a sense of how Jesus feels when he lives inside my heart, He wants to be there, why only He Knows, it is dirty run down place, but He is there to bring my heart into conformity with the sanctified wholeness that is mine in the heavenly places.
July 9 2006
I was standing in a village the other day. The heat was dreadful and the sense of despair was apparent everywhere. Children who we have clothed and had given shoes to were now naked and filthy. An old broken filthy looking man came up to me and made some terrible jokes that were so awful that it is hard to imagine any mind capable of such foul creativity. Bits of dead animals lay around on the ground mixed with human feces, as children in bare feet walk over them. An old women viciously beat a lovely little nine year old girl around the head who ran off crying. My heart was deeply moved as I then saw the little girl holding a little baby whom she then went on to hit around the head. What struck me was that this place was so desolate that there were no wild dogs here, they would be embarrassed to be seen in this place. The men were drunk, the sun beat down and I gave myself to much thought and reflection.
I came home and Nancy had been re-ordering my office. Everything was neat and tidy. She smelt like a woman not a piece dead meat that had been laying in the sun. We sat and talked together and there was so much hope in our conversation about life, music, herbs and spices, something she had been reading in the scriptures and the beauty of the architecture in our Old City Region which is just ten minutes walk from our house.
I gave myself to more thought and reflection.
The goal of Satan is to turn the whole world into a place that looks and feels just like the village I had come from. The will of God was to see earth look like heaven..... we pray often may it be on earth as it is in heaven. The Gospel is the transforming agent that has been granted to us to the be the central element in this great cosmic conflict.
The war is real. We can sit quietly in comfort and mutter all kinds of theological affirmations about the sovereignty of God but the Sovereign God has called this a war and the Bride of the Blessed Son of God is His army. Our goal is not to bring the enemy to surrender but to destruction. We do not negotiate, nor parlay; rather we use the Word of God as a sword, prayer as sanctified napalm and personal purity, as we are seated in Christ, as the secret weapon for attack and counter attack.
When the trumpet sounds and the final judgement falls may there be Bayash village after Bayash village nestled in the safe and secure place of God's Mercy.
Mercy will triumph over Judgement......... but it is a war, and the war is real.
August 12 2006
We have come under intense pressure over the last week. Our group was thrown out of one village where we had already received threats of violence and curses. This is the second time in the last month that violence has been threatened by different people. The good news is that the safest place on earth is in the center of God's will so macho noise does not bother us too much.
More seriously, our Trnovec fellowship in the last few days has come under such pressure in the village that the believers have asked that we discontinue the meetings for the foreseeable future. Some ugly things have been said against the believers and it has really hurt their children. We are praying over this next week to seek God's mind. In short, we will not turn back but we need wisdom in how to sort this mess out. It may mean meeting outside the village. Even worse things have now come to light in the Sitnice Fellowship and we are going to have to confront and exercise some kind of discipline which is going to be very very emotive and difficult.
We are not going to react quickly to these very hard sets of circumstances but will be giving much of the next week to pray over these issues whilst we are in Hungary again for intense language study.
We agreed tonight as three of us met to talk things through that the level of Witchcraft and pervading evil is far more complex than we perhaps had realized and that we need to prepare for a more intense fight. The battle of course needs to be waged in the realm of the spirit. We really need to raise up an army of people to pray with us for this wretched darkness to be turned back.
The good news though is that we have now launched the drafting of the complete New Testament and are going to seek God to see this finished faster than we had thought before. The Children's Bible just had all the graphics come in this week and the Mini Bible
( 42 select chapters from the scriptures) continues to be prepared for checking and editing.
We had one of those wonderful Bayash experiences just happen the other day whereby a dear family of seven who live in a leaky one room shed heard me tell someone that I wanted to fix their roof. They preceded the next day to tear the roof off and move the whole family into a space about the size of two living room tables under a canopy. I told them I could not afford to fix the roof yet and that they really should not have done it. Well the rains have started early and it is dreadful here at present. In all good conscience I could not let seven people stay in such terrible conditions and so we decided to cut back on everything and get this roof on. It was finished yesterday. But now I have a vision of roofs being torn off all over northern Croatia in Gypsy villages. The moral of the story........ around here if you think out loud.....you pay...........
September 4 2006
When times are dark, God often opens up the heavens and sends shafts of light to show something of His Glory just as a reminder. So it was today.
It is nearly midnight and I have been thinking back over the day. In front of me is the first printed draft copy of Mark's Gospel in the Bayash language. It is hard to express my emotions. This "is" the Word of God in Bayash. God now speaks this language to this people. It is deeply moving.
Earlier today I had one of the most wonderful times in the one of the worst of villages.
Tomorrow is first day at school and ten children will go to school from this one village. Needless to say they do not have shoes or any school supplies. Our partners in England SMILE have supplied us with a store house of materials and so today I went down to outfit these ten children with both shoes and socks plus pencils and paper and crayons. It was so precious to be able to wash the children's feet and then put socks on them and then fit them with beautiful new shoes.
There is nothing on earth like washing dirty Gypsy feet. It heals ones soul, it makes sense of the warfare, it brings deep spiritual intimacy with the people that God has called one to, it is not a burden it is a privilege. I have seen dear Nancy doing this and observed the joy it produces in her but today the joy was mine. But then the joy was compounded as the whole gathering of people gasped at the new shiny shoes that the children had. A few simple sounds of joy coming from the hearts of the most downtrodden and despised people in Europe must have brought saints, angels and elders to stand to attention in heaven and caused them to cheer. I could not hear them but I am sure they were there.
Then one of the mothers came to me holding something in her hands. She is a worn out soul with home made tattoos on her chest and arms. Broken teeth and skin like worn leather. Her husband is in prison and daily life is filled with suffering. She then reached out and gave me a present of a shirt and a pair of jeans that she had found somewhere. I kept repeating, "a present for me, for me". She then gave me a dollar store ( UK pound shop) set of earrings and a necklace. Something you would give a child in a Christmas cracker. She was sending it with me to Nancy. As I stood holding these "treasures" I was moved beyond words.
You know, this last week we have had the stuffing kicked out of us emotionally. Thoughts of picket fences and clean churches with people singing in tune have not been far away. But today, oh what a day. We would not exchange this for the world.
September 24 2006
At the moment the warfare has intensified even further as our former Bayash partner in ministry has turned against me. I knew it was going to happen but it is still painful when one so close turns against us. We meet tomorrow with the leaders of the Trnovec group and will try to salvage what we can there. I am not optimistic that we can see this group put back together again. It was interesting this week as when I was driving home from yet another confrontation I found myself thinking I wished my Mum was still alive so that I could talk with her. What is interesting though is that we were never close in the sense of sharing and yet the natural human cry for a mothers understanding at times of sorrow seems embedded in us all. I walked into the house and collapsed into dear Nancy's arms and wept. A mothers heart so often is found within the love of a wife.
So how do we respond in the face of this kind of war. Firstly, we need new orders, secondly we need to ensure our supply lines are intact, thirdly we need to set a strategy and then make an inventory of our weapons and just simply take another run at the cannons.
We sense that we have new orders in that we are going to seek to grow our Varazdin Fellowship into something a little different than our original plan. We want this fellowship, which we started 6 months ago, to be the organ for planting Bayash house fellowships in our central Western Bayash region. It will be like a mother church that plants small offshoots. I have been studying and wrestling through issues and have been wonderfully blessed by such writers as Charlotte Yonge, James Orr and of course our hero Abraham Kuyper. Here in Bayash land we live in the 19th century so it is good to get some input from these giants. Charlotte Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe is the best book I have ever
read in my life.
Supply lines means prayer and we have been moved beyond words to know that people have prayed for us. I never actually believed people in fact prayed any more except for parking spaces and relief from indigestion from overeating at Church suppers. There are about 300 people praying for us now on a regular basis. We want to get that number to 1000. We also are going to have a day of prayer and fasting for the Bayash on October 1. If you would like to join with us in praying on that day let me know and I will send a detailed list of prayer topics.
Let me close with this quote from Kuyper which puts into words our feelings :
We are not concerned with the seeming victory of the moment but with the final triumph. With us the question is not what influence we can exert now but what power we can exercise 50 years hence, not how few men we have today but how many will arise out of the younger generation who will be men of our principles. We know how to practice patience. We know that the fruit cannot be plucked before the harvest time has arrived. Yet we also know that the hour of victory will some day come.
October 8 2006
I was with a young Bayash man today who cuts himself. It is common among our people for the men when they get drunk to take a knife and slice wounds into their arms and chests. Usually after the event they claim it is sorrow for some sadness in their life. It is much more than that. The other day one of the women in a village was angry with me as I have not been able to get a wood stove for her and the cold weather is now coming on us. She came towards me screaming and shouting but what was interesting was that she started hitting herself on her head and face in frustration completely out of control.
It seems strange to people in countries like England and America but my sense is that what is going on is a strange pagan reaction to their tragic circumstances. There is never a blaming of God, no fists shaken towards the heavens nor an angry outpouring of why God has chosen to curse them with life. What happens instead is a defilement and punishment of the image of God, that is themselves. Self hatred and the self mutilation that follows is some perverse form of penance or payment for the sin of their existence. It is not easy to be angry with a people as tragic as this.
Back to the young man who cuts himself. He had about five fresh deep wounds that had become infected. I applied some antibiotic cream on the wounds that were too filthy for me to clean right there in the village. As I was putting the cream on I counted about 50 scars up and down both arms and on his chest. The infection created a dreadful sight and it will not be long before maggots start to live in these infected cuts, then it will become really awful.
It is late and the house is quiet now. I am thinking of the wounds of The Lamb of God. They also were afflicted as punishment not for His sin but mine. I do not have to hate myself, punish myself by acts of service or despise myself for my sin. The sin has been cleansed and I would be no different than our beloved yet broken Bayash if I try to do anything to pay for or purge myself from sin that has already been banished.
Oh that God would impress upon us more and more the true freedom that we have and may we in return honour the Wounds of the Lamb of God by the way we live in love not fear to a God who is a Father and no longer a Judge.
October 13 2006
The pressure has been too much for dear Daniel who has just finished the draft of John's Gospel. He told me this week that the pressure is so intense that he has to quit from the Bible translation project. We need to pray him back into the work and see him empowered to walk by faith even when it gets a little on the tough side. I have plenty of work to do on creating an editing team for the revision and redrafting but we do need him drafting again as his work is beautiful and such a high quality.
On the personal relationship side of things it is hard to explain ones emotions when one is sitting a room late at night in a Gypsy village and one sees a man on his knees weeping and pleading for forgiveness after pointing the figure at him and declaring him guilty. It is even harder to understand, explain or even comprehend how the same person shortly afterwards is angry and potentially violent.
Somehow this mercury based emotional context is the one that God has called us to. I think what is even more fascinating is that whereas most of my friends think of me as being an emotional and subjective person here in this culture I am considered reserved and unemotional. I guess it is like the other day when we went swimming as a family there was a dear old woman who was absolutely enormous, actually a monster, someone suggested I should go and sit next to her so that I could feel thin.............The mystery of it all.
Wonderfully and in answer to prayer the money has come in to get all the pregnant girls whose husbands or sons are in prison, in Sveti Durd under roof and behind doors and windows in the next few weeks before the real cold weather comes through. We have been crying out to God over this and our joy is multiplied greatly in that we can do this. The relief is great, the joy is great and the gratitude we experience is enormous.
We are now getting involved in the village that is experiencing the greatest damage over the catastrophic betrayal and lies of our dearest Bayash friend. I thought the doors to this community would close but it seems the reverse is happening. It is as if a cancer has been cut out and new life is being born in peoples hearts. We are trusting God that He will rub this failure into the evil ones face by turning that which Satan worked for evil and turning it redemptively into something that uplifts and glorifies the Lord Jesus.
We need a break as we have been involved up to our necks in the most profound evil for weeks on end. I have at least 80 emails that I need to reply to plus tons of other things that glare at me and mock me from my desk. But these are troubled times in this region and the war is a real one. But the tide is turning and we all sense that the power of God is being revealed.
October 26 2006
I have just finished reading "The Dove in The Eagle's Nest" by Charlotte Yonge which has left me with a sense of awe at the power of innocence in the hands of God to change a culture. It is innocence through Holiness that comes from the Blood of the Cross that we so desperately need among the Bayash.
We visited the head of the Sexual and Domestic Crimes Unit at the police this week. She told us that the unit would not exist if there were no Gypsies in the region and that almost their total work load was sexual crime in the Bayash community.
The village of Sitnice is calling for a Globa. A Globa is a Gypsy court where the leaders of the village demand parties who have accusations against them to come forward to give evidence. If a person is found guilty they have to buy beer for the whole village. The amount of beer depends on the severity of the crime. The Globa is demanding that the young woman who has been victimised by our former ministry partner, appear in the center of the village and answer questions by whoever wants to interrogate her. This week I am going to try and sort out this mess and try and work out a some kind of deal with the Globa so that she can be spared this madness. She stays at her school during the week and with us or other Christians on the weekends.
We discovered this week that a woman who we love and has been coming from time to time to our meetings is a paid Witch and Fortune Teller. I find it strange and even ambiguous to say, "we love a Witch". May it be on earth as it is in Heaven. She was always uncomfortable in our meetings but somehow she could not resist coming and told someone recently that when she sees dear Nancy she sees the face of God.
We so long for the innocence of the ""face of God" Gospel, to penetrate deeply into the darkness and cause the light to clean out and banish the darkness.
This week I had an overwhelming sense of what our mission is here.
It is to bring the Bayash people into a place of worship of the True and Living God.
I am not talking about a group of people singing praise songs translated into Bayash. Rather hearts bowed in adoration and wonder with an outpouring of love and devotion to God Himself.
It is in worship that true spiritual innocence is born. True worship is a response to the Holiness of God. Holiness is sinless innocence. Sinless innocence is not attained by working, it is imputed or granted to us through the Blood of our Precious Redeemer. It is in worship that our holiness, given by God, bows in awe and meets the Holiness of God .
It is spiritual innocence born in true worship that will create the basis for personal, family, community and cultural renewal. All my human strength of will and strategic planning stands silent in the face of this truth.
Nothing can nor will stop that which is born of God in this way.
November 22 2006
Oh what a week! There is a huge garbage dump about 20 minutes from our house. It is full of gypsies who scavenge though the trash. I have thought it would be a good place to have meetings with a flannel graph board. I went down with some bags of garbage and Nancy hid some refundable plastic bottles in the black trash bags so they would find them when they ripped the bags open. Sadly, as I was driving over the trash one of the Gypsies managed to open the back of the van and pulled everything out before we could establish any order. The really sad thing is they stole my tool bag with all my tools. Still, next time we will try and have a meeting.....maybe I will do it at gunpoint and that will get their attention...... There is nothing like action to stir the heart.
The great news is that the houses we are building in Sveti Durd look set to be completed in time. Everyone is very excited in the village. Then everything started going crazy. Ivana's baby died in her womb and her husband was put in prison for four months for stealing fire wood to heat their house. Nancy prayed with the women in need there today....it is quite wonderful to see the Gospel lived into their experience in this way.
Mirriana contacted us as she had her twins 2 months premature and her husband just got sent to prison on the same day. She was sent back to the village after only one day. Nancy is trying to find some way of helping her as there is no place for her to go the toilet and she is in real risk of terrible infection.
Luba sent a message to say there was no food in the village and so we quickly responded. It is incredible how far $100 goes when you buy bulk. When we arrived at the village today we realised that Bozilka is loosing her baby as well and her husband is still in prison.
We had a great Children's club that went on for over two hours. As I looked around I realised every child's father except for one was in prison.
We had our dear young friends from Zagreb to run the children's club. Before we left we had a season of prayer and it was powerful to see these young ones kneeling on the floor weeping over the Bayash.
The saga of madness continues with our former ministry partner and things have really degraded into threats of murder and destruction. It will not be long now before God intervenes I can sense it strongly.
December 22 2006
Today a woman came running towards me in a village crying that her baby was not breathing. The baby looked dead and we jumped into the van and drove at high speed to the emergency room in a nearby town. The baby had choked on milk. The baby and mother had to be transferred to another hospital and were put into an ambulance with the agreement that I would follow in the van. The mother was a short scruffy and dreadfully dirty young woman. She was so afraid and crying all the time in a despairing agonising way. She then reached out to me crying and saying "don't leave me, come with me in the ambulance". She was afraid and needed someone to speak with in Bayash.
It was if time froze. This same woman some months before was known to us as a very dirty person who was always drunk, vicious and breaking up our Bible story times with the children. We never knew her name but we just referred to her as being the hard woman who was so dreadfully dirty. Now she was a scared little girl who needed to be loved, held, prayed with and made to know that we were with her and would care for her no matter what. I picked up Nancy and we went to the hospital and Nancy held her in her arms as she cried. Then we all held hands around the baby with the IV drip going into her head and prayed in the Bayash language. I put my coat around her as we walked away from the hospital and she cried again. Nancy came to me later and said that I could not wear my coat as it smells so bad now and that we would have to air it out for a couple of days. The truth is that smell of sweat and filth is precious to us both because it belongs to someone we have learned to love so dearly.
The stable in Bethlehem smelt bad but the one that was there was so precious.
January 15 2007
Our former ministry partner kidnapped his wife by putting her into the trunk/hatch of his car and then drove into the forest and beat her terribly. When he returned to the village the police were waiting for him. He was put into prison and this morning despite all the history he was able to convince the judge that he was sorry and the judge gave him just five days in prison. Everyone is traumatised as it seems he is getting closer to killing someone soon..... probably a woman or a child. To make things even more complex I just got a message today suggesting that this whole violent situation is my responsibility. The demonic pressure that is growing is very profound with several of those close to the situation having terrifying dreams. My own feelings are anger right now and I find it hard to imagine God allowing this tragic man to live much longer. The damage done is inestimable.
We had some great news that the victim daughter in this situation met God in a deep way this week and has committed herself fully to the will of God for her future. The ups and downs of the work with the Bayash are such. I have been reading John Owen on sin, the biography of Johnathan Edwards and the biography of Hudson Taylor. The richness of these lives has humbled me and led me to desire to go deeper with God. It seems that the answer to the bondage of the Bayash is to be found in a deep work of God rather than more succesful techniques.
What we do know is that that light shines more brightly in the dark places....... may it shine and may those who walk in darkness see its light.
February 17 2007
Yesterday I picked up a young Bayash friend who has just been in prison for six months to take him to his village. As we drove we talked about our local prison that has 300 prisoners. 150 Bayash are currently inside for a variety of petty crimes. It hit me so much that we cannot care for all the families of these prisoners. We must see spiritual transformation in the lives of the men in the villages. As usual my mind is swirling with ideas, Nancy wants to start a literacy class in the prison.....Oh to convert these ideas into action.
In one of the villages we are involved with, a woman disappeared two weeks ago. We sent food for the family, a grieving husband and seven children. The local Witch told the people that she had hung herself and was hanging in the woods and the people were afraid to go into the woods to look. Nancy and I said if she was dead that we would go and try and find her body. Yesterday, a neighbour in the village found her body in the shed. She had in fact been killed by her own husband. This is going to be hard on the children as they will now be taken and put in an orphanage........ Oh to establish a Christian orphanage for unwanted and neglected Bayash children.
I went to Sveti Djurdj twice this week. As I walked into the village with Zlatko to take some windows and doors I had to keep shouting out "urschirpt, urschirpt " which means wait or hold on. Everyone had a report or request.......15 year old Velimira has just given birth to her baby, she could not remember its name, the father is her uncle. Luba's face was all smashed and grazed..... she said she had fallen off her bike but was it really her son hitting her again........... Smillijana's roof was leaking and her wheel chair has collapsed........ I was able to tell her we had a new wheel chair given and that her roof was next on the list...... Dragica had taken back the very bad man who beats her and the children so badly...... she lied and said he was not back with her........ Stojanka's husband Daniel is in prison, she showed me her baby with a rash that was so terrible I took her to the store to buy some pampers.....I could not resist adding meat, cheese, eggs and milk. I came home and told Nancy that I am not strong enough to not give these vulnerable young mothers food.......... BUT the faces and the attitude of the children is changing. These were like wild animals a year ago but now the Gospel is taking root...... three of them are regular in school and the monthly children's club is the highlight or their lives....... Oh to have these children's meetings weekly for the sake of the next generation.
We spent about 8 hours as a leadership team praying and planning the future of the Fellowship and how we can expand. We finished our time with Communion and as we broke bread together we realized that the task is too great for such a small group...............
April 10 2007
The major incest situation that we have been grappling with for over a year came to a conclusion a few days ago when Nedeljko was sentenced to 2 years and 2 months in prison. Our goal now is to see him restored to the Lord in the prison and for healing to be the experience of his family, which we have taken on the responsibility to support whilst he is away. I will be writing to him in the prison seeking to build bridges that will lead to repentance, forgiveness and restoration.
It is very unusual for a successful judgement of incest in the Bayash community and this case has now sent a clear message into the community. We are praying to see this cancer cut out of our community.
It was great to visit two widows and take food for Easter dinner the other day. I confess that I was thinking in advance about the fact that Dragica was going to kiss me with gratitude in rather moist and excessive ways. She did and it was.......... moist and excessive that is. What a joy to be able to bring food to those in genuine need.
Tonight Nancy, Anita and I drove through the dusty yet energetic streets of Trnovec to visit the Bayash believers who have disbanded as a group due to the stress over the Nedeljko situation. It was a wonderful time of real healing and bridge building. It was great to pray with them and sense God is working. They will all come to our house next week and we sense that God will bring this group together again to meet in the name of the Lord Jesus.
As we talked with them tonight we came to the conclusion that our fourfold enemies in the Bayash villages are Witchcraft, Incest, Usury and Alcoholism. We pray the power of the Gospel will eliminate these and bring transformation in their place.
Our Varazdin Fellowship had its first Easter service on Sunday evening and was a great joy to us. We start our leadership training programme in the next couple of weeks which also thrills us as we plan.
Dear Nancy is so tired and misses her family so much in America. It has been a genuine battle and sacrifice for her coming back. Today she played her violin at a big public Easter meeting. Pray for her as she adjusts again to European life. I'm cool and glad to be back.
May 12 2007
Someone called me and said that a Bayash Christian girl, whose husband was in prison, was without food and had no money to pay her electricity bill. I dropped everything I was doing, left dear Nancy laying in bed unwell and rushed off to the village about 30 minutes drive away. I gave our sister food and money and prayed with her and her children and then left. She told me there was going to be a big party in the village at the weekend but she would take her daughters away as these times are so un-Godly. I was greatful that there was the evidence of Grace in her life and happy that we could support someone in need in this way.
At midnight on Sunday I met Daniel the Bible translator at a bus station. He greeted me with the news that he had videoed the party in the village and did I want to see it on his camera. We sat in the car and then on the video there was the sister who I had been with, with her daughters dressed and dancing in public in such a terrible a way that I nearly broke down. I got back home and wept in such bitter disappointment.
It made me doubt myself. I am so easily taken advantage of by a people who are so good at taking advantage.
I then had set up to have two weeks of therapy on my neck and back which meant loosing about 3 to 4 hours everyday. This is time that right now I cannot afford. My reaction was a sense of failure as the end result of the first week was such unbelievable pain that yesterday our friend Anita had to drive nearly an hour round trip to a doctor to bring back something to stop the pain as it was out of control. I am someone who has had a lot of pain with my neck but it was too much for me. I felt I was breaking under the pain and frustrated with myself for trying a rehab programme in my third language.
Very few missionaries are able to go through these periods without self doubt and thinking that they are not being good stewards of the money that people send to support the work. Circumstances then conspire to confirm our failures. Our sending Church sent the confirmation letter that they have had to cancel their total missionary budget indefinitely due a financial crisis. The loss in support is nearly $1000 a month.
So where do we go at times when everything seems so hard. The answer came in the most unusual way. Our family dog was sitting at my feet. Due to some kind of sick British humour I thought I would play with the dog by my making growling noises and then bark. Astonishingly, the dog seemed to understand and then I started making a mooing noises like a cow, then a pig and then as I really got into it like a monkey. The poor dog was utterly confused. I feel pangs of guilt even as I write. Then it hit me. Confusion never comes from the Holy Spirit, neither does self doubt, nor does the false guilt of not meeting up to our own prideful goals and expectations.
I may have felt betrayal from a sister, foolishness for not getting the therapy right, in pain and financially stretched yet again but......... but the throne of God is not moved, the doctrines of Grace do not rise and fall on my subjectivity, the goodness of God's people is not measured by the number of "sales" I make. And most of all I am beloved of God as much when I cannot feel it as when I can feel it. All of this from a confused dog and sick British humour........such is the kingdom of God.
June 4 2007
I worked a little with Natasha yesterday going over the Children's Bible and we think that a long day of working on the text will finish it up. I have been doing all the structural work on the alphabet and some basic textual stuff but I think in a few weeks time it will be finally ready to go. I found myself weeping when I was going through it the other day. To think that these children will have these Bible stories in their own language for the first time ever in their history. One almost humorous issues was that in the translation when Moses was given the ten commandments the only word the translator could come up with for commandments was Zapovijedurljesce. No wonder Bayash society is lawless no one can say the word so it is best to ignore the concept all together. Then Natasha said lets use Zakon instead…….I did not argue.
Daniel continues to defy the imagination as he is now confident that he will finish the draft of The Acts of the Apostles by the end of this week. I am not telling him but we are ahead of schedule now……..for the first time ever.
There is much going on in our Varazdin Fellowship which now has a name…. Oasis……A woman came to Christ in a visit this week and yesterday, as there is every week, there were complete outsiders who were visiting us.
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