Loving Your Community

“LORD, I have heard Your fame;
I stand in awe of Your deeds, O LORD.
Renew them in our day,
in our time make them known;
in wrath remember mercy.”
-Habakkuk 3:2

Every time I am asked “How was Moldova?” I can’t find the words to describe the amazing 11 days we spent there. Until my best friend who came back from her two month mission trip told me about a one sentence that sums up your mission experience. This one sentence is supposed to bring all of your thoughts and experiences that can last for hours into one short sentence that explain it all. That sounds impossible, right? After a long time thinking about it I finally figured out my sentence:

This summer God showed me how to build relationships with my community to show the love of Christ with others.    

I am utterly amazed at everything God did in the 11 days and how many prayers were answered before we even arrived in Moldova. This team was uniquely and purposefully chosen by God and it was the best team I’ve ever worked with. We all became instantly close. It was an interesting team but God knew what He was doing when He chose the Americans and Moldovans for this team.

One thing God put on my heart this year was to embrace the culture and to simply be content and satisfied in every moment—to listen to their struggles as we built relationships with them all week.

 Moldovans are the most humble, hospitable people and they’re not even believers! They have nothing and they easily give all that they have. They are not believers and they are better at showing Christ’s loving servants heart than we are! They open their homes to strangers from America and wanting to do everything for us, not letting us lift a finger. When we get home late they wait up to talk, or with dinner, or with a bottle of wine, or boiled well water for us to wash up. And they give so much that when they are given something they do not know how to receive it without giving something back.

Friday after our last work day in the morning we piled into vans after lunch and went to the Nistru river between Ukraine and Moldova to swim and to have a team cook-out for dinner. When we drove back to the village around 6:30 the ladies in the village had prepared a Moldovan feast for us at the school. Even though we already ate dinner, we couldn’t say no. Even when they brought out dish after dish after dish. And that night when we went back to our host homes, my host home had prepared dinner. She had killed one of her chickens that day for my housemates and me to eat on our last night.  

Also, despite the fact that the country’s religion is Orthodox Christianity the people are searching for hope. And we’re not the only ones coming to Moldova to share our faith. Jehovah witnesses are big in Moldova. But do you know what separated our team from the Jehovah witnesses that came to Birnova before us? It wasn’t our words or our religion, or anything we said about the gospel because according to a lady that my teammate Christina and I talked to one morning we were telling her the same things the Jehovah witnesses had told her. What made us stand out from the Orthodox Church and the Jehovah witnesses was that we actively lived out our faith and served them. Because we worked on the well at the school, invested our time loving on the kids, playing soccer with the teenagers, going to their homes and meeting their needs and listening to them, to serving the ladies at the ladies tea and serving the 200+ Moldovans at the cook-out Thursday night we stood out from the Jehovah witnesses and the Orthodox Church. It’s not telling people about religion. Moldova has a religion. It’s about a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. It’s actively sharing the love and hope we have in Christ by outreaching in the community and building relationships with the people. It’s love that wins people to Christ, not religious traditions and rules.

It’s about serving wholeheartedly for the Lord and focusing on their needs and not about your comfort. When you focus on others and embrace their culture, you will be surprised at what you do to share the love of Christ. God will bring you out of your comfort zone and give you the words to speak, break your heart for the people, and maybe even do something as crazy as massaging your host homes back.

It’s not just in a foreign country that you have to outreach to a community either. God has you living in your house, your neighborhood and your city for a reason. Get out there and be the church. Win people to Christ by building relationships with them and loving them like Christ loves them.

All the glory to God,

Molly Rae Adams