From the Black Sea to the Mediterranean sea...

My weekend in Romania was taken up mainly with preparing the message that I shared on Sunday evening at the international church of Constanța. Based on an Old Testament story, the theme of the sermon was "Godliness under Pressure" - how to respond in godly ways, even though we are facing impossibly difficult situations where the enemy is really threatening and intimidating us. There was a good response to the word, and I was able to pray with several people afterwards. Then it was time to finish packing my suitcase, as I was leaving early on Monday morning for the long trip back to Spain. The journey went very smoothly this time. I caught a shuttle bus for the 3½ hour journey to Bucharest airport, where I checked in for the 3½ hour flight to Barcelona. There I met up with a friend, and together we made our way into Barcelona by train and underground. It was after 10 pm by the time we reached our accommodation for the night - a little flat belonging to the King's Kids/church planting ministry in Barcelona.  The flat was on the ninth floor, and we were able to see across the city skyline to the Sagrada Familia church - one of Barcelona's famous landmarks.

I did take an hour at the weekend to walk down to the beach in Constanta and check out whether the Black Sea was a good temperature for a swim. I knew, though, that I was on my way to the north of Spain, where Carmelita and I would be staying in the holiday home of a "friend of a friend." Yesterday, we made the two hour train journey to the northernmost part of Spain's Mediterranean coastline. Llançà is just a few miles from the French border and almost everyone we've met since arriving here has been either French or German speaking. I can officially confirm that the sea is much colder here than it was in Romania, and we weren't brave enough to go in for a swim yesterday.... but perhaps that's just because the weather was rather overcast. We'll see if the water temperature improves in the course of the week.

Romanian weekend

My week in the Child and Youth Ministry School came to an end today, and it was encouraging to hear the students share that they'd found the teaching very practical and feel it will serve them well when they leave soon for their outreaches with young people in Moldova and Romania.
I've been asked to speak in an international church service on Sunday evening, so I'll be taking time tomorrow to prepare for that. Then, on Monday, I'll make the long journey back to Spain again. I'll leave early in the morning for the bus to Bucharest airport, and it'll probably be around 9 pm before I finally arrive at my accommodation in Barcelona.

Romanian memories...

Yesterday afternoon, I was able to go into downtown Constanța with the PCYM leaders, Paul and Stephanie, and their two year old son, Arran. (Yes, he's named after the island on the west coast of Scotland.) We strolled around the old town, seeing some of the old church, mosque and museum buildings, as well as the casino and lighthouse down by the Black Sea, before going to a restaurant to have dinner together. Back in the 1990s, when Paul was just eighteen years old, he was a student on a PCYM that I led in Paisley, and he took part in a King's Kids outreach that went to Austria and Italy. Stephanie was one of the young people in our Firestarters year-round discipleship and outreach ministry. So it was an encouragement and a privilege, fifteen years later, to chat with them about their own experiences as first-time PCYM leaders here in Romania.

Today I borrowed Arran's "first words" book and tried to teach myself some more Romanian words. The easiest ones are the words that sound slightly like French or Spanish ones, even though the spelling is very different.

Tomorrow will be my last day of teaching in the PCYM. We'll be wrapping up the topics of pre-teen strategies and programme development, and the students will be doing some practical application of this material in class time.

Design and develop...

Over the past two days, I've been teaching here in Constanța about principles of developing programmes and curriculum for our ministry with young people. The students in the PCYM here are all working with children or teenagers in Romania or the Ukraine.
Today we're moving on to a new topic, which is about developing a strategy for pre-teens (10 - 12 year olds) which will give their lives a strong foundation in a Biblical Christian worldview - before they enter the teenage years and face all the change and turmoil that comes at that time in their lives.
Then we'll go back to the topic of programme development and the students will be working in class to design their own creative programmes that could be used in their ministry situations with pre-teens or teenagers.

I'm in Romania...

Teddi, Tobi and Tamba began to suspect that they were in the process of being abandoned. After Ada and Gabriela headed out the door on Thursday evening with six suitcases between them, the cats began to hover in my bedroom, looking balefully at my own suitcase as I filled it. When I left home at 4 am on Friday morning,  they were perched on the bookshelves, looking accusingly at me. Three different friends will be checking on them over the coming weeks while Ada, Gabriela and I are in other parts of the world.

My trip to Romania on Friday seemed very long. Arriving at Malaga airport around 5 am, I checked in for my early morning flight to Barcelona. Once I got to Barcelona, I was shocked to discover that my onward flight to Romania wasn't listed on the departures board. Fortunately, I worked out that I had to catch a bus to another terminal in order to check in for my flight to Bucharest.

The biggest challenge, though, came when I arrived in Bucharest. I was supposed to catch a 5 pm bus to Constanța, but no one seemed able to tell me where this bus could be found. After half an hour of wandering around and being directed from one side of the airport to the other, I was not only running out of time, but was beginning to lose hope of finding the elusive bus. No one seemed to speak English and no one had heard of a direct bus to Constanța. Then I happened to meet a Romanian tour guide who was waiting for a group of tourists to arrive from Spain. What a relief it was to be able to speak Spanish, and this wonderful lady made phone calls and asked around for me until we finally discovered that my "bus" was actually a land rover that would drive me into the city centre and drop me at the bus station there.

In the end, I got to the bus station in time, but the bus was running late and heavy traffic caused long delays as we were driving out of the city. It was 10 pm before I finally arrived in the Black Sea coastal town of Constanța, and was met there by my hosts, a Norwegian family who had attended the LDC in Spain last year. I spent the weekend in their home, and went to church with them this morning. The Romanian church service reminded me a lot of our church back home in Alhaurin, as it was completely bilingual, and the words of the worship songs were projected in both Romanian and English.

After church and lunch, I moved to the YWAM centre in the city where the child and youth ministry school is being held. It's just a stone's throw from the Black Sea, where Romanians were enjoying a sunny afternoon at the beach. I met most of the PCYM students at dinner time, and tomorrow morning I'll begin my teaching with them on the subject of programme development. Thanks for your prayers.

Briefly in Alhaurin

After visiting family in Scotland, I'm now back in Alhaurin for a couple of days. I've had a day of meeting with my team mates here who worked with the LDC, but mostly my time has been taken up with working on the computer and preparing materials for teaching in Romania next week. (See previous post.) My house mates are also leaving today - going to spend two months in Peru - and so we'll be having our last lunch together at home, before we all head off on our travels. Three different friends will be looking after the cats while we are gone. Thanks for your prayers, as we all travel to our different destinations.

June's journeys...

It's June, and it will be quite a month of travelling for me. In fact, this week alone I'll be passing through four different airports: Edinburgh, Málaga, Barcelona and Bucharest. I'll leave Scotland on Monday to travel back to my home in southern Spain, but I won't be there for very long before it's time to pack my bags again. At the end of the week, I'll be flying to Romania, where I'll be teaching in a Principles in Child and Youth Ministry (PCYM) school attended by students from central and eastern Europe. Because the direct flights from Málaga arrive in Romania in the middle of the night, I've chosen to take a morning flight to Barcelona and then an afternoon flight from there to Romania's capital, Bucharest.

After arriving in Bucharest, I'll take a three and a half hour bus journey to the city of Constanța, on the Black Sea coastline, and it's there that I'll be teaching in the PCYM training course. I'll be speaking about curriculum writing, and how to develop creative programmes for ministry with children and teenagers, I'll also be talking in particular about how to develop materials for 10 - 12 year olds - that critical stage of development where they don't want to be treated like "kids" any more, and need excellent input in order to prepare them for growing into their teenage and adult years.

I'm wondering whether being in Constanța will bring back any memories. We passed through there in 1979 when I was on a family holiday in Romania with my parents and brother. All I can remember of Constanța, though, is its iconic casino building on the edge of the Black Sea. Of course, there have been many social and political changes in Romania over the past three decades, and so I can imagine that things will be quite different now from what they were like in 1979.

After ten days on the Black Sea coastline, I'll catch another bus back to Bucharest and will fly from there to Barcelona again. I won't be returning immediately to Málaga, though. Instead, I'll be meeting up with a friend and we'll be taking a few days break in the little seaside town of Llança, which is right in the north of Spain, on the Mediterranean coastline. A friend of a friend is allowing us to stay in his beach house there. Although Llança is in Spain, the town is French-speaking, and the French border is only ten miles away. After our seaside break, I'll be flying back to Málaga where our Villa Rehoboth staff team will be having a few days of prayer and planning for the different training courses and retreats that we'll be offering there in 2013. Thanks for your prayers during all of my travels this month.