We rented a car and traveled to Transylvania last week! Jeff faced his fear of driving in Romania and it was my first time outside of Timisoara. Timi is on the plains and very flat, so it was nice to spend some time in the mountains. It was partly work and partly vacation for us.

We met up with a squad from The World Race  with Adventures in Missions in the city of Brașov. They served in Romania for a month and were doing their 8th month debrief. We went to see how their time was here, answer questions about long term, and hoped to encourage them. I think they encouraged us more by having a time of English worship and prayer. Right now, most of our time in Church and bible studies are just trying to process the words in Romanian. It also spurred us on to learn Romanian, because worshiping and praying in our native tongue rejuvenated us so much, we understands what it means for us to pray and speak about God in Romanian here.

We then traveled to Sibiu and meet up with some friends of ours living in the capitol. We had a wonderful time seeing the city with them, encouraging one another, and visiting. We also stayed at another missionary couple’s home who have been in Romania for 13 years, and we enjoyed hearing their wisdom. We also visited another city for the day called Sighișoara. It was amazing to see churches and buildings that were hundreds of years old.

We ended the trip with our friends’ wedding in Hațeg. The bride is Romanian and the groom is American and Jeff meet them both here in 2010. We have been blessed to meet up with them here and in the states and we were so excited to be at their wedding. It was my first Romanian wedding! There is a beautiful tradition where the groom comes the bride’s home and gets the families blessing to take her to the church. There was a prayer for them before they left for the church and a processional of cars honking through the village to let everyone know they were about to be wed. They we had 7 or 8 courses of delicious food and lots of fun games and socializing.

We feel refreshed and rejuvenated from our trip and we loved seeing more of our country! Check out the pictures from our trip below (sorry there are a lot).

-Lauren

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