The Incarnation

Artwork from www.morganweistling.com

(If you receive our prayer letters you'll see this in your mailbox in a few days.)

This year, as I look forward to our first Christmas in Bucharest, the Incarnation has become more personal.  I stumbled across this realization in the most unlikely of places - the middle of a long-winded lecture to my daughter.  She had disobeyed, I had corrected and she had made the mistake of telling me that she "just HAD to do it."  Her statement was true.  Raising two children has dissolved any doubts that may have lurked in the deepest corners of my mind about the existence of our inherent sin natures.  Her mistake lay in starting a discussion with her mother because her mother was in the mood to talk and launched into a very.long.lecture.  I touched on the aforementioned sin nature and the power of the Holy Spirit to help us obey.  And then, since I was on a roll and we still had a couple blocks left to walk before we reached home, I launched into a treatise on how God understands how hard it is for us to obey.  And that's when I realized ... He understands it all.

We moved here to Bucharest from Minnesota, where we lived with my family for a year and a half.  My children saw their grandparents and cousins daily.  In spite of the blessings of Skype and phone calls, we still miss them and Joshua's family in Michigan intensely.  Jesus left heaven, the glorious face-to-face fellowship with God the Father, to come to earth and spend His first few years here hanging out with a teenage mom and a carpenter.  Our move can't even compare.

Language study is challenging.  Every conversation in Romanian requires every ounce of mental capacity we possess ... and even then we still are misunderstanding and misunderstood.  Jesus, the Word, came to earth as a speechless baby.  If He had an ear infection in his infancy He just had to scream and hope that Mary could figure it out like every mother and baby the world over.  Then, when He could speak, He was never fully understood.  No one got Him. His closest friends needed His parables explained.  He spoke spiritual language in a land of humans. He knows how hard it is to communicate cross-culturally.

Some days I feel pulled in twenty a hundred different directions.  Family, ministry, language study, friends, team.  Everyone needs something from me and I can't make any of them happy.  Jesus was followed by crowds of thousands of people.  They seemed to show up at the worst possible times, when He was most exhausted.  And He chose to love them and still make time to spend alone with His Father.


I could go on and on, but you get the picture.  For ever frustration, large or small, we don't have to look far in the life of Jesus to realize that He gets it. He's been here.  He's lived it.  And He doesn't ask anything of us that He hasn't done Himself on an infinitely larger scale in the Incarnation.


For any struggles we have with out new life in Romania there are a myriad of blessings that come with it.  We are thrilled to be here, certain that this is where God wants us, and wouldn't want to be anywhere else.  Next month we'll write a year in review and let you know some of the exciting opportunities that God put in our path. 


Merry Christmas!
Kara (for the Dunckels)

Josh's Trip to Kiev

This summer I had the privilege to go to Kiev, Ukraine for a week to share in a short term mission trip with one of our supporting churches.  Here are a few photos from the trip and praise and prayer requests as well.

Praises...

• Praise God for the opportunity to go to Kiev, Ukraine and minister alongside a group of people from Oakridge Community Church. 
• Praise God for the work that was able to be done in repairing part of the hospital that treats children affected by the Chernobyl accident. 
• Praise God that no one was seriously hurt during the week of construction.
• Praise God for the connection that the young people on the team were able to make to with a number of kids at the hospital for treatment.
• Praise God for the good conversations I was able to have with the people I traveled to and from Ukraine with on a very long train ride.
• Praise God for keeping Kara, Noemi, and Isobel safe while I was away.
• Praise God for the time to reconnect and share with friends and supporters from OCC.  They encouraged me and allowed me to share with them in this time of ministry.

 Prayer Requests...

• Pray that God will grant the hospital favor in the eyes of the government inspectors to remain open to treat these sick children.
• Pray that God will continue to use Daryl to share the gospel with the children that come to this hospital for care.
• Pray that this trip will mobilize OCC for further missions involvement.
• Pray for God’s name to be praised and more would be added to His kingdom in the city of Kiev and Ukraine as a whole.
• Pray that God would raise up Romanian believers to go and minister the Gospel in Ukraine.

Kindergarten

Joshua is working with the Oakridge Community Church team at the children's hospital in Kiev this week. From the little I've been able to talk to him, things are going well and they're getting good work done. We'll have a post on the trip when Josh gets back to tell his stories.

I was looking forward to a quiet week at home, but it has turned out to be anything but. In a good way. Our days and lives are full of wonderful people here. Today the girls and I visited a Christian kindergarten for disadvantaged children run by a friend. We all had a wonderful time. I have to confess that I am one who tends to roll my eyes when people talk about going to another country and "falling in love with the children there", but these children were seriously precious. I can hardly wait to go back and see them again. I'm looking forward to volunteering there this fall. It will be a good chance to help out a great ministry, practice my toddler Romanian and give the girls exposure to Romanian language and friends. My job on today's visit was to take photos for fundraising materials, so I have tons of photos to cull through and edit. It's getting late, so tonight I am just throwing together yet another quick collage to give you some snapshots ... the brochure photos will look a little more polished, I hope.

Parcul Titan

Joshua is headed out to Kiev next week and I'm really looking forward to a quiet week at home. Living across the street from one of Bucuresti's most lovely parks keeps me from feeling trapped in the city in the summer. You can't tell we live in the most densely populated city in Europe from these pics, can you? If you look closely though, you can find a turtle:)

We're feeling very cosmopolitan lately...

We enjoyed hosting a family from Russia overnight last night. They came to meet a Romanian missionary to Siberia who is back here for a few weeks. They are a wonderful family who are dear friends of the Romanian missionary and his family. As far as we can tell, they are not believers. We look forward to seeing them again before they head back to Russia. It was a great opportunity for us to give a little help to a Romanian who has already been mobilized and sent out as a missionary. Noemi really enjoyed playing with their daughter until late at night and then again as soon as she woke up. Playing with toy animals on a pirate ship somehow transcends the language barrier


Joshua is really looking forward to meeting the team from Oakridge Community Church in Kiev next week to work in a children's hospital. It feels oddly normal for him to be travelling to a new country because it's just next-door (yet somehow takes 27 hours to travel by train).

It was a good day!

We have actually been having lots of good days. Joshua has a monthly pass for all the trams, buses and trolley-buses in Bucharest and is enjoying exploring and experiencing new things. Since that sounds like way less fun to me with two kids in tow I tend to spend more of my time in our neighborhood. I took a bunch of pictures of our neighborhood for another post to show you why I don't feel the need to get away from it all.

Romania just might be the most welcoming country to move to, as a foreigner. The people here are so incredibly patient and encouraging. That said, language and culture acquisition is still hard work. God has placed a lot of Romanians in our lives who are a great blessing to us in this process and I am so thankful for them! Today I met with a young mother in the park, who only speaks Romanian and I was so excited because, for the most part, I could understand her. She was really patient while I laboriously strung my words together into sentences. Even more exciting to me is the fact that she is someone who I can be a blessing to now, even with the limitation of my linguistic abilities ... or lack thereof. I'm farther down the road of motherhood and have the deep resources of a great God to draw on. She is home alone with a young baby most of the time and spending time with her in the park is something I can do with my children around. I have received so much here that I'm looking forward to being able to pour out grace as well.

The Visa Process in Numbers

# of visits we have made to the Visa office in the past two months: 7

# of Visas we have in hand: 2

# of ice-cream cones bought to appease children tired of waiting at the visa office: approximately 6, but who's counting

# of visits to the visa office before they actually give us cards for Noemi and Isobel: anybody's guess

# of months before we get to turn around and do this all over again: 10.5

That said, it's totally worth it to be here in Romania.