Let's pretend....

... that I haven't neglected this blog for a year and a half.  Let's pretend it's filled with all the exciting, hilarious, and sometimes embarrassing stories of our first two years in Bucharest.

Our Year in Review

As we look over the last year and the incredible changes that have taken place in our lives we are amazed at the goodness of God.  We've been in language study for most of the past year, so talking about what we have done would amount to a boring jumble of articles, nouns, tenses, cases ... but don't fall asleep yet.  We're not talking about those things.  We'd rather write about what God has done over the last 12 months.  It's way more exciting.

January:  He brought our family of four and all our luggage safely from frigid Minneapolis to (relatively) balmy Bucharest.  He gave us a warm welcome and lots of help from our team.  He made children's bodies in wonderful ways so that, in spite of moving half-way around the world in a day, they can recalibrate and eventually stop waking up in the middle of the night to play...for hours.

February:  He provided us with our home -- a perfect fit for our family -- after only two weeks of apartment hunting.  He gave us a landlady who would be the girls' Romanian grandmother if she lived in Bucharest.  But she doesn't, so they're not getting too spoiled. He also provided our Romanian language teacher, who has been an immense help to us in so many ways.

March: As our family adjusted to our language study schedule God gave us an amazing babysitter which allowed me to study.  Since she found a 'real' job she had remained a dear friend.

April: 'Harul' means 'grace' in Romanian.  It is also the name of the church God led us to last April.  The people of Harul have truly been gracious to us.  We are thankful for our friends there and for the pastors who shepherd their flock with truth and love.

May: We both passed our 3 month language assessment.  Considering how clumsy our tongues felt at the time, it had to have been a work of God.

June: We have been joking for years about vacationing on the Black Sea, and finally, in June, we were able to spend a weekend there with a friend.  It should have felt surreal to see it finally happening, but it just felt right.  God brought us exactly where He wants us ... and it just happens to be a 6 hour train ride from the beach.

July: He gave Josh an opportunity to attend the wedding of some friends from church.  Not only was Josh able to celebrate with our friends, he was also able to ride several hours to and from the wedding with one of our pastors and his wife.  They had such a good time getting to know each other.

August: God gave Josh an opportunity to spend a week with a missions team from our Minnesota church to help a struggling children's hospital in Kiev.  God gave Kara a much-needed week at home with her girls.

September:  Kara's father came to visit.  We cleared our schedules and enjoyed a quiet week in town with him.  We were amazed at the generous gifts sent with him by Oakridge Community Church. We now have children's tylenol to get us through the winter.  Thank you, Lord!

October:  We met our future teammates from Brazil when they came on a vision trip.  We are excited to see what God will do in and through them in Romania. 

November:  Our first Thanksgiving in Romania!  We had so many things to thank God for this year.  Just making the list for this letter was difficult because of all we had to leave out.  God has been so kind.  It doesn't fit on the page.

December: Our first Christmas in Romania.  As you read in our last letter, this year we have a fresh understanding of Jesus' Incarnation.

Grace & Peace,
The Dunckels

Mos Nicolae

Today I went to a craft fair at the Peasant's Museum here in Bucuresti.  Artists and artisans from all over Romania came to display and sell their handiwork.  It was fascinating and beautiful.  I brought some of the beauty home with this painting and with beeswax candles to fill the house with the scent of honey.  Noemi and I are prepared to fend off hungry bears because it smells so delicious.

Tomorrow is St. Nicolas's Day so, in the words of Wikipedia...

In Hungary and Romania children typically leave their boots on the windowsill on the evening of December 5. By next morning Nikolaus (Szent Miklós traditionally but more commonly known as Mikulás in Hungary or Moş Nicolae (Sfântul Nicolae) in Romania) leaves candy and gifts if they have been good, or a rod (Hungarian: virgács, Romanian: nuieluşǎ) if they have been bad (most kids end up getting small gifts but also a small rod). In Hungary he is often accompanied by the Krampusz, the frightening helper who is out to take away the bad ones.

Here's what the girls will wake up to tomorrow.  You can't tell, but there are tiny pottery dishes tucked in there for the stuffed animals to have a tea party.

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:)