I've been in Romania for almost a month now, which is crazy by the way, and I've gotten to experience some pretty awesome things. Through the good and the bad, God's been here with us the whole time. Let's walk through a few of those “God with us” moments.
My time here has been amazing. Don't get me wrong, the work is hard, and the schedule changes about as often as the tide, but it is so rewarding. Oh, and the people I've gotten to work for and with are an absolute highlight. So far, I've hung out with more then 60 orphaned or abandoned kids in 6 cities, gotten to help put together a transitional housing project for struggling single moms who are getting out of bad relationships, hosted a several day long vbs, and I'm helping out with another one at camp next week! That's all really cool, but I don't think that just saying that something happened is nearly as powerful as actually telling the story of how God was working through thoes things, so for the rest of this post I'm gonna focus on just what I did last week, and quite the adventure it was.
Last week we did a VBS in Rosiorii (pronounced Row-shi-ore). Rosiorii is a small village in what has been explained to me as "the forgotten part of Romania." It's called this because it is just a little bit too far away from everything. If you look on the map linked below you can see that Rosiorii (the little red dot) is in the southern part of the state. But what you can't see in the map is that Rosiorii is to small too have a train stop to connect it to Bucharest, too far away from Craiova (another infamously poor city about 100km west) to get a lot of missionary support, too far from the border to get any money from people crossing into Romania, and too far from the black sea to get any money from coastal imports. All of those things put together mean that Rosiorii, and the people there, just don't get a lot of support or love from anyone outside the city. That's why it was so awesome that I got to help with a vbs there. We support the kids, show them some fun and Jesus for a few days every year, and lives are changed.
While there, we had everyone ages 2 to 17 singing about Jesus and having a great time. The kids seemed genuinely invested in the lessons, and really welcoming to me despite my really poor abilities to speak Romanian, which was awesome. We gave away dozens of Bibles, and I got my butt kicked in soccer a fair few times. It was fun all around and the kids were thrilled to hang out with us, play games, and get some free food.
But, this VBS didn't go without it's hangups and hardships. It started raining pretty hard at the end of the second day, so we packed up quick and headed back to the nearby village where we were staying. It had not rained in a while, so the roads were real slick, and as the local pastor (Sandell) was rounding a steep corner, someone coming from the other direction didn't see a stop sign, and when he slammed on his breaks, he just kept slid across the slippery road, straight into the front of Sandell's car.
Like I said earlier, God has been with us the whole time. Not two minutes earlier Sandell had the premonition to tell everyone in the car to put their seatbelts on, and when Sandell tells you to do something, you do it. So at the time of the accident everyone was buckled up safe. With the only real injury sustained by the person sitting in the passenger seat of our car, who got some whiplash from the impact, but she's alright.
When we got back to the church we were staying in and clamed down I had the really amazing opportunity to talk with one of the kids who was helping us run the vbs about God's provision amidst tragedy. I prayed with him and it is still one of the most beautiful and profound things I've gotten to do in my time here. What could have been tragic, turned into a great story of God's protection and power.
And this is all within the last week! I've learned so much about God and seen so many wonderful things He's doing in and through the people serving Him here. So, If you are remotely interested in a profession in ministry, or even a short term mission trip, I can't recommend going to Romania with Stepping Forward enough. God is working here, and it's truly wonderful to get to play even a small part of it.
Keagan neely, August 5, 2025