We woke to a bright and sunny day in Novi Sad, which is in northern Serbia. We had several administrative tasks to take care of through appointments with business associates we had only emailed with up until today. Jim and Rodja started the morning with an appointment with one of the translators who has been working on lessons and presentations from English to Serbian. She does an excellent job, and is very timely, and we really appreciate her work.
The next two appointments overlapped, both in time and in topic. First was Igor, who had in mind a project near and dear to Jim’s heart — the creation of an e-library of Christian resource books in Serbian. Talk flowed from that subject to storage of those books so that our partners in Serbia could access them. And that involved our next associate, Zoran, who is our web developer. We discussed resource storage, database access, and then details on the creation of the website for linkingpartners.org. We had productive discussions and great fellowship, too. Looking forward to continuing to work with these three fine partners.
We left Novi Sad and headed northwest. We met Sasa and his associate Dragan in the town of Vršac. We heard all about the work he is doing among the Roma in that region of Serbia. He told of feeling led by God to help to feed the Roma in his community who had no work and no food during the winter. He felt very strongly that he was to start with what he had, so he rounded up his family, and started preparing food. After three days of feeding hungry people, his resources ran out. And on that very day, unasked by Sasa, people in the town started to come forward and offer food. A bag of onions from a neighbor. A bag of potatoes from one restaurant. A large, fine salami from a meat producer in town … on and on it went, until they had met the needs for several weeks. At that time, he was visited by a group from Holland, and one of that group told him, “I will provide your food needs for the rest of this season.” Many people came to know the love and care of Christ because of the love and care Sasa showed to them during this time. We hope to be working closely with Sasa going forward, and will always count him as a respected brother in faith.
Finally, we headed east, to meet up with Pastor Bora. Recently Linking Partners was blessed to be able to provide Bora with a car so that he did not have to ride his bicycle on the highway between villages, or take the bus at great cost to himself and his home churches. We heard from him of groups of Roma where only about 5 in 20 of the adults in the home church were literate. What a blessing that we have picture Bibles available for him to use in these gatherings! We were able to see his new car and also delivered clothing for Bora’s church members, collected by Rodja’s wife, Natasha.
We arrived back at Rodja’s flat, met up with Natasha and the girls, and had a treat of palačinke — both apricot and nutella — before relaxing together and talking about our day.
We got news that our flights from Munich to the States have been cancelled because of a pilots’ strike at Lufthansa. We were able to contact Meghan, who called our travel agent and found out he was able to reroute us so that we will still arrive home on Thursday. Some of our connection times are VERY tight, so please pray that we make it home as planned.
Tomorrow and Wednesday will be spent near Belgrade, relaxing and sharing fellowship with Rodja’s family before we return to our families in the States.