Spring Time in Romania!
Spring is in the Air! Spring time is my favourite in Romania. The village comes back to life after the cold winter, the air is crisp, the gardens are ready for planting, new animals are joining the community (our neighbours just birthed a calf last night and others have baby chicks hatching). It’s such a beautiful time where we see the richness that comes with new life! Praise God that we each can experience this in Christ! Over the past month we’ve been able to reach a lot of young people throughout Romania, Hungary and even the Ukraine. We just got back to the village after spending the week in Hungary/Ukraine with Youth For Christ Hungary/Vancouver. YFC Vancouver through Sam Rowland and my dad (Eric Ens) have partnered with YFC Hungary to run evangelistic conferences in schools and churches throughout Hungary. Yes even the schools! This is the fourth year we’ve been able to join this ministry and it is always such a blessing to see young people come to understand the Gospel through these programs. From the trip, 2000+ young people were reached and many accepted the Gospel. At one program, out of the 200 young people present over 120 of them stood up to follow the call that Jesus had for them. Incredible!
Near the end of this trip we popped over to Ukraine with the YFC crew to visit some missionary friends who are working in impoverished Hungarian villages there. We had the opportunity to get a closer look at the work going on in Ukraine (only 2 hours from us in Romania), we were able to speak and lead songs at a youth event and spend time encouraging local village ministry leaders. Our trip concluded with a 6 hour wait at the Ukraine/Hungarian border!!
Over the month we were able to be apart of 2 larger youth/young adult events. The first was in the big city near us called Cluj. This event was primarily for university students. Paul was able to preach a passionate message about calling and we were able to lead them through some worship and reflective time. There were about 60 young people there all of whom had great English, which allowed us to connect with them further after the program. The second event was in a larger village called Simleu. This was a province wide event where over 150 young people came out. Paul had the opportunity to share about what it truly means to dig deep roots and how to find your calling in pursuing Jesus.
Camp work continues in full steam! The team is extremely busy at the camp with the on-the-go projects. The farmhouse renovation is nearly complete. This building will allow us to host staff and volunteers for our summer camps. Other smaller projects that were completed this month were renovating a potato shed into a storage building, constructing a wood shed and installing railings around our main building’s retaining wall.
As a team we feel we have been called into a season of stepping out in faith. We feel God prompting us to push ahead to officially open the doors this summer. To accomplish this we need to build our water and sewage system as well as 2 duplex cabins. We are working hard right now to finalize all of the paperwork and permits for these projects. This past month we saw God work miracles in this permit process. We were able to complete step 1 of the 2 step process in record time. One man who works at the government office said in the 40 years that he has worked there he has never seen a permit approved in 1 day as usually it takes weeks. Yet this happened for us! Praise God that he is in control and greater than any of us could imagine! Please continue to pray with us for this season, that we would see the doors open this summer for camp programs. Pray for: -the final permit process to be completed this month -for funds to continue to be provided for these projects -for more local workers to help us complete these projects Thank you for all your prayers, support and encouragement! We could not do this with out all of you. Tanya and Paul
