Dear Family and Friends,
It makes me cold just to type that it has not gotten above freezing in one month. It is supposed to get up to 40 degrees this weekend and everyone here talks like that is summer temps. Daniel made this snowman almost one month ago and he is still standing in our courtyard! He has hung around so long that Daniel named him “Joy.” Here is Daniel with Joy right after the bottle cap nose was put on.
My North Carolina blood just doesn’t mix well with the Romania winter we have experienced and I fear I have complained far too much for my husband’s Ohio blood!! Daniel has done a fabulous job of keeping our house warm with our wood furnace and keeping the driveway shoveled. I have done a fabulous job of running from one warm place to the next insuring I am never very cold for more than 3 minutes. J For the first time in my life, I shoveled snow today. Daniel had to run into the house for something right before we were leaving home and I told him I would take over shoveling. When I told him it was my first time, he HAD to take a photo to commemorate the event! So, here I am (in approximately 32 layers of clothing) shoveling snow for the first time.
Our ministry has been very busy expanding again but, this time, to a different city in Romania. We welcome our new missionary, Jodie Davies, to our ministry!
Jodie has been working in Arad, Romania for almost two years and contacted me last fall about coming under the umbrella of our organization. She went through our application process and our board voted to bring her on in December. Jodie is from Nottingham, England and lives in Arad which is about 1.5 hours south of Oradea. She shares our heart for abandoned babies and works in the Children’s hospital in Arad caring for almost as many abandoned babies as we have in Oradea. Thanks to the support of a family in Indiana, our ministry will be hiring a Romanian caregiver to work along side Jodie in the hospital since there are really no other ministries working with the babies there and they will be our “Arms of Mercy - Arad” project. Please remember Jodie is your prayers as she tries to fight the hospital administration to allow her to feed and care for little lives.
Daniel and I will be traveling to England from March 3rd-13th and visiting several areas including our friends in Durham county, Bolton, and Nottingham. After we fly back to Budapest, we will be driving to Vienna to visit with the International Ladies Bible study that sponsors us as well as saying good-bye to our friends leaving Austria. We will drive back to Oradea on March 17th. We ask for you to please remember us in your prayers during this time of travel.
We also ask for you to pray for the adoption process of “Miracle Maria.” As many of you already know, the Romanian government has not allowed her adoptive family to legally adopt her because they shut down international adoptions as part of the EU requirements. Our Romanian ministry was recently contacted about her case and asked for lots of information and paperwork to be done so they could open her case back up for adoption. This is a huge step in the direction for Maria to finally be adopted. Please pray for The Lord to continue to give us favor to get everything done quickly so the adoption process can be officially opened in the court system.
Our ministry would like to thank all of you who gave recently. It was an answer to prayer to have funds coming in to cover our monthly budget needs. Please continue to pray for The Lord to provide funding for the upcoming months. I have started writing some grants to Christian foundations in the USA and so have two of our supporters. If any of you know an organization we should contact for funding, please write and let me know. It is a huge chore to write most grants so I want to make sure we do have a chance to be awarded funding if I invest the time.
May The Lord bless and keep you warm!
Basking in the Son,
Michelle
Posted on February 19th, 2006 by Michelle
Filed under: Michelle's Journal