The last couple of weeks...

God has certainly blessed me already in 2009. I have never seen His hand move in my life in such a short amount of time than just the time between Christmas and now.

I made it through Christmas, like I said, without any major crises. He was truly good to me. And then He blessed me with a fun relaxing time with friends, which I posted about a couple of weeks ago.

Soon after that, He handed me some friends here in Bucharest.

I finished language last week. I scored 100 on my evaluation, which is crazy. I had never tried to learn a language before now, since Spanish comes as naturally as English, and I learned both of those at the same time. Romanian has come easier to me than I expected, and the great advantage of having Spanish is that it helps immensly with my pronunciation as well as understanding concepts in the language that don't make sense to those who speak only English. For example, I understand the concept of masculine and feminine (though it threw me off when they threw the neutral in there), and I understand the conditional form and how it is to be used, as well as the subjunctive. Some lessons, my teachers would tell me that Americans have a hard time with this, and it usually doesn't come until the next book (which I wasn't going to get to), but they would teach it to me anyway. More often than not, my response was, "we have that form in Spanish, so I know what circumstance I need to use it in." Now I don't have any excuse not to use my language. I'm thankful for this gift.

On Friday, I heded East to Galați (pronounced Galats), on the border with Moldova and Ukraine to see what's going on out there as far as ministry goes. I came back so encouraged. The team out there has a very specific plan that has cost a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to get off the ground, but after almost three years is picking up momentum. I was tempted to stay there and not come back to Bucharest because it got me so excited for what's going on out there. Major props to the Galați team. I think I can honestly say that after catching their vision, my life and thinking of how to do ministry in Romania, and Europe in general has completely changed. Not that I had any thoughts on it before, but I will say, I have seen the light. Check out their website if you have time here.

Now I must be off to run errands. Have a great rest of the week, dear friends!