Romanian Youth

The time has nearly come for my squad to move on from Romania and on to Albania. We are currently in a stretch of unstructured ministry in Bucharest in our teams. As we look to share the gospel and serve people here in Bucharest I have had a lot of time to sit and reflect on our time spent in Craiova with Hope Church. I’d like to share with you some highlights from the past few weeks and how they have shaped me as a person. To do this properly I should start with what the Lord has called me to in the last few years.

My calling in life and from the Lord is to pour into one of the most lost and confused people groups in our world today, youth! This is the reason I decided to be a teacher when I started college and why I was so eager to get to work in Craiova. One of the main focuses at Hope Church Craiova was Youth Ministry. Granted, most our time in Craiova was spent organizing closets or passing out packets containing the Gospel of John inside of them. While this work was vital for the survival of the church we were working with, its not what excited me. What pushed me to get out of bed and into the streets everyday was inviting kids to our youth events we held every Saturday and on a few special days of the year. I was lucky enough to be on the youth committee with four other amazing members of P squad. Our main responsibility outside of street evangelism was to plan and execute Saturday youth events. 

While this might sound like a drag to some people, it reminded me exactly why God had called me to work with teenagers. The over dramatic, awkward, shy, weird, snarky, and strange personalities we find in people from the ages of 12-18 sounds quite off putting to most people. To me, its exciting! You never quite know what your interaction with a teenager is gonna look like. They could think you’re cool and become super interested in whatever it is your saying, or they could decide you look weird and want nothing to do with you. This is the audience we faced every Saturday night at 6pm.

We would plan games and activities all week long in preparation for our Saturday youth nights. My favorite night that we planned was our minute-to-win-it night. We played games all night long and had a blast connecting with all of the kids during one on one conversations. Towards the end of the night I shared a brief portion of my testimony and a message on why it is important to find our identity in Christ.

Although I enjoyed planning and executing the events, the moment God reminded me why I need to work with teens came from a small moment with a very quiet kid. He would come every week, participate in the activities and then sit quietly and listen. When it came time for our last event something out of the ordinary happened. One of our quieter kids approached me after we had closed in prayer and took me aside. He told me that I had changed his life. It’s one of the few times in my life that I’ve been speechless. Changed his life?! All I had really done was played foozball and thrown cookies at him (don’t ask, I looked up youth group games.) It was in this little moment though that I realized exactly how I had changed his life. I had showed a genuine interest in his life. Asked how he was feeling, what he liked to do, and even discussed Jesus with him. It wasn’t just foozball, it was picking him to play with me and having conversations with him. The same goes with a number of games we played over the past month I had picked him to play. I had believed in him. I along with my whole squad had genuinely cared for this kid and quite possibly had been the first to do so. When I put myself in his shoes I too realized how life changing these small moments and actions could be.

I’ve now sat with this moment everyday and reminisced on those small moments in my life. The teachers who asked how I was doing, the youth pastor who bought me lunch, the friends who decided I was worth sticking around for. Its these moments that form us and give us our perspective on the world and everyone in it. I count myself beyond lucky to have had these moments in my life and am so honored to have been a moment for the quiet kid who decided he wanted to come to a random youth event at a random church in Craiova. 

So while most days in Craiova were not as exciting as Saturday youth events, it will forever hold a special place in my heart. It served as the city in which God reminded me that He was gonna use me to give many more “life changing” moments with many more kids. 

Much Love and God Bless