Summer 2017--Living Water--Under the Sea

John 4:14  "but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life."

Whew!  This summer was a busy one!  We ran 11 camps between the Bucharest orphanages, the Rosiori orphanages and the Alexandria orphanage.  We had over 70 volunteers serving our kids and teaching them about thirsting for a living water that only Jesus can provide through eternal life.  The kids sure had a lot of fun listening to stories, making crafts, playing fun games, creating fun food, acting out fun skits and especially swimming in our pool--all based around an Under the Sea theme!

I think he is going to be safe in the pool!

 One of the things that I love to do is to create fun food to go with our theme!  This Under the Sea theme made it very, very easy along with my handy helper of Pinterest!  The kids pretty much loved everything they ate!

I had the privilege of teaching a food art class at our special arts camp that we ran this summer!  I had two girls in my class and we had a lot of fun creating even more Under the Sea themed food.  The last day was our grand finale and we made octopus pizza and a watermelon shark!

I always love it when kids have birthdays!  Well, it just happened that my girl, Alexandra, was celebrating her birthday on one of the days that she was at camp.  So, I obliged and made her a cake!

 I was, also, highly involved in getting our transition boys acclimated into living in the city.  One of the things that takes a bit of time is helping them with a budget, learning how to spend their money and what groceries they should buy!  I spent a lot of time in the grocery store, not just with the boys, but also, shopping for the teams and camps that were at our house!

Heart to Heart was chosen by Hume Lake Christian Camps to be their featured mission organization this summer.  My brother works at Hume Lake and so one of the things we did to promote that was that I FaceTimed into his Hume San Diego camp once a week!  I loved the response and energy these kids had during our phone call each week.

Finally, we really had only one major injury this summer...and it was me!  I tried to cut my finger off opening a bag of candy.  The cut was pretty deep, but, within two days it was healed shut thanks to quick bandaging with butterfly bandages, Neosporin and keeping it clean and dry.  No stitches were needed for this girl!

April and May 2017

April and May had times of being hectic and times of calm!  At the beginning of April, we had three teams here all at once!  One of those teams was a team from Hume Lake Christian Camps and my brother just happened to be on that team.  They were here to do some filming because we were chosen by them to be their featured missions organization for their summer camps!  They did some amazing work while they were here and am excited to see what the Lord will bring from this ministry that they have with the students that come to camp!  They all did a great job portraying what the ministry of H2H is all about!!!!!!

We celebrated Easter with our H2H family gathering and of course we had the golden egg again this year!  Nicu Perghel from this year's boy's house found it high up in a tree inside of another egg!  We are going to have to come up with a better, really good hiding place next year!

We celebrated Marian's birthday on Easter Day!

7 out of 10 H2H grandkids....They don't all know how to look at the camera yet!!

And, of course, we had some spring teams!!  Busy, busy, busy!!!

The Hume Team

The Mission Possible Team

The CCC Team

The Biola Team

Diamonds

When I was home in the states in January, I heard the song, "Diamonds" by Hawk Nelson.  I was introduced to it by my niece and nephew.  They were singing along to it in the back of the car.  Fast forward to the beginning of summer and I can't seem to shake this song from my head, especially with all the wonderful things that had been going on here in Romania.  It comes on in our car on one of the CDs we have.

The lyrics to the chorus kept running through my head:

He's making diamonds, diamonds

Making diamonds out of dust

He is refining in his timing

He's making diamonds out of us

Jesus takes each one of us--weak, unable, feeble, unwanted--and makes us into something very precious--a diamond!  Something that takes a lot of time and energy. 

This made me think of our kids and how much time and energy, like a diamond, Jesus puts into refining, molding, teaching and making us who we are!  We are Jesus' diamonds and it is His joy to take us from ashes and make us into His treasured possession!!

While I was home last January/February, four of the six boys from the transition program accepted Christ!  Jesus had been working in their lives for many years--taking these "diamonds" from where they were, caring for them and refining them into Godly young men--beautiful,polished diamonds!  They were baptized in June and continue to grow leaps and bounds in their faith.

This year, we had an extraordinary group of kids in our transition program--kids that we had been investing in and refining for a long time!  We graduated seven out of seven this year!  These are our kids!