Bucharest Week 2

What is this place where I’m living right now? A place where I sometimes wake up to Manale music, where both children and elderly people beg on the sidewalks, where stray dogs ride the city bus (not even kidding), where in the midst of car horns you can also hear the clipping sound of hooves and the wailing yell of “buying old metal, sell me your metal,” the rich and the poor are in clear contrast here. Some things are just uniquely Bucharest, but in some ways the old way of life still exists here and the mindset of communism still affects the way that people live. And yet people remember 1989 - there was a demonstration here on May 19 (just after I arrived) – and between 30,000 and 50,000 people showed up in the center of Bucharest to send the government a message: we are Romania. The government, as of today, is reducing the help that they provide to people like that 80 year old widow who barely survives as it is and their financial help for the children who go to school at the same time that they are raising taxes. In 1989 many more people sent that same message and ended communism here, not peacefully, not quickly but it ended. But the message sent back by the government this time was “Who cares?” But today there are more demonstrations – the teachers are striking and there was a metro strike this morning that left the city’s streets crazy with traffic. We walked to the church this morning – it was by far faster and more comfortable than crawling through traffic on a bus.

It is in the midst of this that I am here and it is not the politics that have drawn me here. Why I am here is the question people ask me most often. I tell most my level one response: “I like Romania,” which many of them find hard to believe. One man asked if I liked the politics, a woman in a store asked what would bring me here. Almost everyone asks when I’m going back to America. “Nu stiu,” I tell them – I don’t know for sure. I am open to possibilities and open to the Lord changing my plans – which is linked to my level two response: for some reason my Lord decided to put in my heart a love for this country and its people and a desire to be here and tell people about Him and has opened the doors for me to be here now. The reason that’s level two is because I haven’t figured out how to say it in Romanian - it’s a lot more complicated than “Imi plac Romania.” Come to think of it, my answer would be better put with “Pentru ca Isus te iubeste si el a spus sa ma duc.” ("Because Jesus loves you and He told me to come.”) That may not be perfect Romanian, but it’s my best effort without doing a spell check.

Right now is a learning time and I am learning something that I didn’t realize I needed to learn – kindness over fear. In my past traveling, there was always one rule that I lived by: there is nobody that I have to talk to (except police and customs officials) and there is nothing wrong with simply walking away. I may have lived by that rule too often and I know that there have been times when I overused it. Much of the time I would say that I was running from what I didn’t understand, that I was afraid to stay and try to understand or that I just couldn't be bothered to do anything else. Occasionally there was a reason for running. That’s being challenged here. It’s been challenged before a bit, in a job that brought me to face many people in hard situations and be reminded that they are first people, regardless of anything else. But here I see it every day in a different way. It’s not me representing a company or an organization although I am here with a church. First of all, it’s me before God and how I live my life here – how do I respond to the people around me? Do I reach out to others or run away from things I don’t understand? From the children who beg outside the supermarket, from the empty stares of people like the man who gets high breathing who knows what from a paper bag on the street corner by the park? It will take wisdom to learn when to reach out and pray and when to keep walking and pray. And I know these are not problems that are helped by simply throwing money at them.

Spending a lot of time with Rebecca (the American missionary who has graciously let me move in with her for the time I am here) is teaching me kindness – through gestures I wish I’d thought of… offering fresh bread to a gypsy lady selling flowers outside of a bakery we had just visited, giving a child in the homework program a leu (about $.30) to give to an elderly man begging on the sidewalk, to a little girl who was begging she said no but called her “draga” (my dear) and spoke with kindness. After we passed that little girl she said to me, “That’s where all our kids would be if they weren’t in school.”

What does it mean to choose kindness over fear? Does it mean extending past my comfort zone for the purpose of alleviating someone else’s suffering? I remember reading that kindness is a bridge between two islands. One thing I’ve been thinking about today is what it means that Jesus must increase and I must decrease. I think one thing it means is that I listen when the Spirit speaks and I reach past my comfort zone regardless of how uncomfortable it makes me to do something that brings glory to God and to step out of the way to give God all of that glory. I’ve been thinking about Amy Carmichael and Mother Teresa and others whose stories of reaching out to the “untouchable” and the defenseless have touched the world - people by whom the world can see that there are those who truly love God. I hope to be more like that as each day passes.