First, I (Carrie) need to preface - Many of you know that I am a fabric artist/quilter. That has been a huge passion for quite a while. As I could sense that God was drawing us down the path towards the mission field, I asked God to take away this passion, since I probably couldn't use it on the field. He was kind enough to suppress it greatly before we made our decision to say "Yes, Lord".
A few months before we left for our survey trip, I was asked by our Area Leader if I would be willing to speak to a women's outreach at the church plant. I told her I would be happy to, what should I speak about? "The Lord will bring it up.", she said. "OK", I replied. So, a great number of subjects came to mind & I had my talk all planned out until the day before we left, when God asked me, "Do Hungarian women want to know about these things?" Hmm, I had planned for something general that traverses cultures, but I didn't "know" that their interests were in this path. Hmm, then God gave me an idea.
When we arrived, I thought I ought to ask more questions. "What does the outreach do?" I asked. "I'm not going to tell you!" she said. (with a gleam in her eye that came reflected in the rear view mirror, even in the dark). Oh, ok. We laughed. God's idea will work well:) "Well," I replied, "Since I don't exactly know what the women are interested in, I thought we would do a question and answer - well God inspired that after He nixed my talk." "Great idea!" She said.
So the next evening we arrive to the outreach. We walk in the building and You could hear the excitement and chatter of women who are enjoying what they are doing, and it was exciting to be with them tonight, even though I couldn't understand a word of Hungarian. I was to go first up the stairs. When I got to the top of the stairs, I burst out laughing - they were quilting! We mingled around and it was a delight to see the projects unfold as the ladies were working. Afterwards, we had the question/answer time.
"Why are you here?" It was the first question I was asked . It was asked much differently that Americans would have asked - this was forced, intimidating, interrogatively strong. After that question was answered, "What does God care about us?" asked in much the same manner. After that question was answered, "Why would he care about us?" also asked in much the same manner. Thus went the question and answer time... on and on, gloriously down to the final question, "Who is Jesus, anyway?"
You could feel the intenseness and leaning of the hearts of the 30-40 women in the room, and the anticipation of my answer. I looked at the leader, she leaned over & said, "It's your gig, go ahead!" and so I further answered, "Jesus is the Son of God, who came down from Heaven to take our sins away by dying on the cross for us. He lived a completely sinless life, but he took our sins upon Himself on our behalf. He died, but He rose again after three days, stealing the keys from hell and death, so that if we believe upon Him, we could truly live eternally!"
The power of the Good News is a force! There was not a dry eye in the room. Many were sobbing. These seemingly tough, hard hearts were cracking and, God willing, opening to His Life!
I was shocked, I guess. Well, this is an outreach - but in the states, we have outreaches and hopefully one or two unbelievers come. After we were done, I had asked the leader how many were believers in the room. She had said that there were just the seven of us that were known believers - the four of us included. Wow, seven out of 30-40!
Why are we still here? We are directed to be fully supported to be over there and not take a job, as we had hoped. The reason is simple - we are viewed as "Rich Americans", and to work over there would be considered as stealing a Hungarian's job! Then, the door to further conversation is closed. Would you like to help? Just click the support tab on the right. Let's get going!!
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