God Shows Up

Ministry in Romania continues to morph and change, but one thing still remains, We all need Christ! I’ve spoken, in many of my updates, about the fact the Romanian government continues to change the face of the orphanage system here. They are trying to move kids out of the historical large institutions into smaller “family” style locations. Any time change happens there are bumps along the way and one of the bumps of this change is what to do with teenagers? Most of the teens in the system that have lived their entire lives at one location do not what to be transferred to a new orphanage or foundation. They are resisting this change. The “family” style locations are reluctant to take on teens with their attitudes and pre-formed issues. So the solution? One of the government solutions is to find biological family for each kid and send them “home.” We are seeing many of our teens that have never lived with biological family suddenly returned to them. As you can imagine, most of these situations are not going well. If the biological family was a healthy environment the kids more than likely wouldn’t have been put in the orphanage in the first place. Where does Heart To Heart come in? Our staff maintains contact with kids that leave the centers. In some cases we’ve been able to go into the home and provide some support. But the biggest involvement has been through the Transition Program. We are often contacted by a teen and told things at home aren’t going well and they see that if they stay they have no future. Can they come to the Transition Program? Usually our programs begin each fall and go for a school year. But we are seeing are and more emergency cases in which they need something right away. I believe this is an area that H2H will be called to expand in and grow in the near future. Once in the Transition Program our job is to help transition them from dependent to independent. One of my tasks is to meet weekly with the students. We talk about everything from anger management, forgiveness, spiritual discipleship issues, conflict resolution, time management, interviews, money management and more. This past week, I was meeting with Carmen. Carmen began our program in the fall and has started to work in the last month. She has her first pay check coming on May 10th so we are talking about budgeting and money management. This week’s lesson was defining a need verses a want. As a teacher, most of my best lessons come about when the natural discussion and flow takes it in a way that I didn’t plan it to go. I think that its a God thing! During our discussion we were talking about people that shop just to shop and that that can lead to spending money on wants not needs and that can quickly get us off budget. The conversation morphed into motivation. Suddenly we were talking about what makes us happy. Everyone wants to feel happy and fulfilled and we try all kinds of things to get there. Shopping, food, netflix, activity. Things that aren’t bad but won’t provide true fulfillment. The only thing that will is our relationship with God and if that’s right then its easier to keep a budget, or a healthy lifestyle. We ended the lesson and I felt energized. I knew it was God speaking to Carmen and to me reminding us of a simple truth: God first and the rest follows. I love when God shows up in a conversation. I love that He very much loves and cares for kids that the system would rather just go away. He still has big plans for the orphans of Romania and I’m so thankful to get to be a part of it!