Day 1: The Adventure Begins

I never thought I would be one for blogging, but considering my circumstances, I'm going to give it a try. :D
Katie and I are finally here in Romania after two long days of travel. We got to Rhegin around midnight last night. By God's grace and because of His incredible plan we made it here. I don't know how much of the jetlag I am feeling or if it is just apprehension about what the next nine weeks hold that is so tiring. I know that there are adventures and experiences waiting for us that we cannot even fathom and it is hard not knowing. This trip is going to be life-changing; Katie and I have known that since we started to plan, but as cliche as it sounds, after today I can feel huge things in our future.

Today we went to Apalina and surprised our children with our visit. They have known we were coming this summer, but Attila did not tell them exactly when. The girls ran to us and hugged us immediately, but several of the boys were a little reserved at first, and just shook our hands, but soon warmed back up as they had last summer. :) I may have embarassed my "son" Alex at first by running and grabbing him in a huge hug, but after about an hour when we were outside, he was the first child to pick one of the many flowers of the day and brought it to me. I of course told him that I loved him and he grinned and responded, starting a chorus of other voices asking if I loved them too. I am not one to throw around that term "love", but I can honestly say I have never experienced love so quickly as I did when I met these children.

After singing and playing games with the children, we went out to a huge field above the village to run around with them and at some point they found some place Katie and I never did see that had beautiful pink and white flowers. They ended up picking us more flowers than we could ever take back to our apartment. Those children must have picked us more than 200 flowers. Isn't Florin precious in this picture?? I am guessing with my very small knowledge of flowers that a few of them might have been peonies, but I'm really not sure. Once again, I was blown away by the beauty of these people and the overwhelming eagerness to love and to try to show it however they can. They love us, simply because we love them. And isn't that exactly what we're called to do?

Being with the children again made me long to be able to speak freely with them. I can understand a little bit of what they are saying; just single words here and there, but my heart hurt everytime one of them would rattle off a long sentence full of unknown words and look questioningly into my face. I was constantly reminded of this barrier that we have in our language differences and I long for the day when we can speak without having to translate every word. My goal is to have at least one decent conversation with someone in Hungarian before we leave, even if we have to talk about the weather!

Tomorrow we have four meetings for church, and I assume Katie and I are expected to speak/sing at each one, so I should probably start to prepare.