Update!
I just wanted to send you an update on how things are going here in Bulgaria. After returning from visiting with family, friends, and some churches in the States this past summer, I returned to discover we had an outbreak of violence in the Gypsy community here in Kazanlak. Several days before my return, there had been a hatchet fight between a father and son, I’m not sure what sparked the fight, but it left both the father and son injured. The father had been hospitalized with injures to his head and the son with injuries to his arm. The wife and mother is a faithful member of the church here, so I was asked to visit the family. Picture all of them living in a two room house with everyone sleeping in the same room! Upon entering, I saw the husband in the bed and a few moments later the son entered. I took a few moments to talk to both the father and son and then prayed for them and the family when the mom/wife fell to the floor under the power of the Holy Ghost. (I love it when that happens, they just kind of crumple!) The father is a Muslim so I shared Jesus with him, and we’ll see what happens there.
A few days later we had another hatchet fight - this time between two cousins. It seems one got a little too rough while playing around and the other got upset about it, so a fight broke out. Only one was injured in this fight, thank you Jesus! Just a few days after this, another dear sister in the church came informing us that her husband had been having relations with their daughter-in-law for several months. And she informed me that the son had wandered the village all night, totally distraught about the whole thing. Nothing is a secret in the village so when I went to talk to them, the village people saw me going to the house and many of them came also! I just sat and waited till they all left so that I might talk with the son and his mother alone. The husband moved out and the daughter-in-law went back to her mother’s home saying she would become a prostitute like her mother -- very sad. When I talked to the son and asked him what he was thinking and all he could say was “I have no father and I have no wife…” Very, very sad as they have one young boy about the age 3 who now lives with his dad but keeps asking where his mom is. I tried to set up an appointment to speak with the husband who is also an active member of the church, but I was unable. But now within the last several days, the father has returned to the village and it seems that the whole village has taken this very seriously and has totally shunned him, they won’t speak to him or even look at him and his brother-in-law even beat him up. Now he is saying that this is not true! So we are trying to get to the bottom of this tracking - down the original source. Please pray for all these people, you can only imagine what all these families are going through!
Now for some encouraging news, we are still doing a lot of outdoor evangelism! We held an outreach to a small village nearby and it was huge success. About 50 people from the church here pitched in and were able to take the local bus to this village. At the end of the evening it broke into one huge celebration with everyone dancing and celebrating. Immediately following this, Nancy Alonzo from New Orleans arrived in Bulgaria and I was able to spend some time with her in Sofia holding outreaches in the Gypsy neighborhood there. We had awesome time sharing Jesus and ministering to the people there and many were healed, but of course we did a bit of seeing the sights while in Sofia!!!! What great fun, we had several times of Holy Ghost explosions in the car leaving our driver not knowing where to go, and he was a local!!!! HAHAHA This was new for him, he had never been intoxicated with the JOY of the Holy Ghost before. Forever changing his life and that of his church!!!!! You can only imagine what it was like in that car, the cloud of Glory was so thick and over whelming………………..
Winnie, Ben and a friend of his were recently here also and we had a pastors conference for 2 days. And then we visited some other villages around the country. We had such Holy Ghost times! We went to one very small poor village just outside of Sofia, where some of the people live in tents as homes and many of the children have no shoes. There was a woman who came to me for prayer; you could tell she was very poor and very sweet. Towards the end of the preaching, Winnie felt impressed by the Holy Spirit to tell the story of the widow with only a handful of flour, and went on to say that maybe there was someone or perhaps the village as a whole that could gather an offering and to give it to another village and watch what God would do.
That same sweet, elderly widow woman I mentioned earlier was moved by what Winnie said and asked us to come to her house. Upon arriving you could see the intense poverty, but she was so eager to take us into her little room where she got down on the floor and started to rummage for something under her bed. In a moment, she pulled out her little treasures of 4 pumpkins and presented them to Winnie, Zhoro, myself and the Pastor who oversees this village. We all knew that God was going to pour out a blessing on her that she wouldn’t be able to contain and I look forward to finding out how this story ends! She couldn’t stop hugging myself and Winnie and kept saying that she loved us as if we were her own daughters! It never ceases to amaze me when I see God move on the hearts of the people and my heart is always over whelmed by it.
Now I am in the middle of working out the details to start feeding some of the children on a regular basis... We are going to start off small and see how it goes, feeding about 20 or 30 from the church, children who really don’t have any parents. They either live with a Grandparent or other family member, (there are so many in the village like this), but this is where we will start. Our plan is to bring them in the morning where we can get them to brush their teeth, wash up, eat, read a little Bible and pray before we send them off to school. We are going to only do Saturdays for a few weeks to work out details before we move to five days a week. We should be able to do this for $1.00 per child.
In November we will start feeding soup to several hundred on Sunday afternoons after church. In the cold weather we feed soup to those who are out of work, but this winter we are going to try something a little different. We are going to do it right after church where the whole church can stay and eat and fellowship, plus feed those in need. If any of you are interested in getting involved with any of these projects, please send me an email.
A few days later we had another hatchet fight - this time between two cousins. It seems one got a little too rough while playing around and the other got upset about it, so a fight broke out. Only one was injured in this fight, thank you Jesus! Just a few days after this, another dear sister in the church came informing us that her husband had been having relations with their daughter-in-law for several months. And she informed me that the son had wandered the village all night, totally distraught about the whole thing. Nothing is a secret in the village so when I went to talk to them, the village people saw me going to the house and many of them came also! I just sat and waited till they all left so that I might talk with the son and his mother alone. The husband moved out and the daughter-in-law went back to her mother’s home saying she would become a prostitute like her mother -- very sad. When I talked to the son and asked him what he was thinking and all he could say was “I have no father and I have no wife…” Very, very sad as they have one young boy about the age 3 who now lives with his dad but keeps asking where his mom is. I tried to set up an appointment to speak with the husband who is also an active member of the church, but I was unable. But now within the last several days, the father has returned to the village and it seems that the whole village has taken this very seriously and has totally shunned him, they won’t speak to him or even look at him and his brother-in-law even beat him up. Now he is saying that this is not true! So we are trying to get to the bottom of this tracking - down the original source. Please pray for all these people, you can only imagine what all these families are going through!
Now for some encouraging news, we are still doing a lot of outdoor evangelism! We held an outreach to a small village nearby and it was huge success. About 50 people from the church here pitched in and were able to take the local bus to this village. At the end of the evening it broke into one huge celebration with everyone dancing and celebrating. Immediately following this, Nancy Alonzo from New Orleans arrived in Bulgaria and I was able to spend some time with her in Sofia holding outreaches in the Gypsy neighborhood there. We had awesome time sharing Jesus and ministering to the people there and many were healed, but of course we did a bit of seeing the sights while in Sofia!!!! What great fun, we had several times of Holy Ghost explosions in the car leaving our driver not knowing where to go, and he was a local!!!! HAHAHA This was new for him, he had never been intoxicated with the JOY of the Holy Ghost before. Forever changing his life and that of his church!!!!! You can only imagine what it was like in that car, the cloud of Glory was so thick and over whelming………………..
Winnie, Ben and a friend of his were recently here also and we had a pastors conference for 2 days. And then we visited some other villages around the country. We had such Holy Ghost times! We went to one very small poor village just outside of Sofia, where some of the people live in tents as homes and many of the children have no shoes. There was a woman who came to me for prayer; you could tell she was very poor and very sweet. Towards the end of the preaching, Winnie felt impressed by the Holy Spirit to tell the story of the widow with only a handful of flour, and went on to say that maybe there was someone or perhaps the village as a whole that could gather an offering and to give it to another village and watch what God would do.
That same sweet, elderly widow woman I mentioned earlier was moved by what Winnie said and asked us to come to her house. Upon arriving you could see the intense poverty, but she was so eager to take us into her little room where she got down on the floor and started to rummage for something under her bed. In a moment, she pulled out her little treasures of 4 pumpkins and presented them to Winnie, Zhoro, myself and the Pastor who oversees this village. We all knew that God was going to pour out a blessing on her that she wouldn’t be able to contain and I look forward to finding out how this story ends! She couldn’t stop hugging myself and Winnie and kept saying that she loved us as if we were her own daughters! It never ceases to amaze me when I see God move on the hearts of the people and my heart is always over whelmed by it.
Now I am in the middle of working out the details to start feeding some of the children on a regular basis... We are going to start off small and see how it goes, feeding about 20 or 30 from the church, children who really don’t have any parents. They either live with a Grandparent or other family member, (there are so many in the village like this), but this is where we will start. Our plan is to bring them in the morning where we can get them to brush their teeth, wash up, eat, read a little Bible and pray before we send them off to school. We are going to only do Saturdays for a few weeks to work out details before we move to five days a week. We should be able to do this for $1.00 per child.
In November we will start feeding soup to several hundred on Sunday afternoons after church. In the cold weather we feed soup to those who are out of work, but this winter we are going to try something a little different. We are going to do it right after church where the whole church can stay and eat and fellowship, plus feed those in need. If any of you are interested in getting involved with any of these projects, please send me an email.
posted by SendTheFire at 12:51 PM
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