Mission’s 102-Exploration

In any business venture you really need to explore all the possibilities before you make a decision. So it was with my journey into missionary trips. I first had to take the baby steps into exploring the field I felt God calling me—which really happened through my husband.

Tom was involved in pro-life ministries here in the states and his layman’s work involved exploring areas to begin crisis pregnancy centers in Eastern Europe. His first country was Romania. I did not go on that first trip but came at a later date after a couple of the centers were already started.

On my first trip in 1999 I was introduced to a ministry that served abandoned children in a government-run hospital in Bucharest. Going with their leader into that hospital literally changed my life and redirected my heart for 4 ½ years. I entered rooms with little ones rocking back in forth banging their heads on their cribs. They had soiled cloth diapers and blank expressions. They did not expect to be picked up because that was never what the nurses did. They had terrible diaper rashes and sores on their bodies. They hardly cried because they knew it wouldn’t make any difference; they would remain in their beds. The lack of baby-noise was deafening to me.

The way they handled the process of drawing blood from these little ones was pretty much too disgusting to tell here. It was inhumane in many ways. After that first trip we began bringing medical supplies to help train the nurses with smaller needles and a better process.

The nurses were non-pulsed with these children and literally abandoned them in their cribs to feed themselves. Small newborn babies were propped up in bed with a scalding hot bottle of milk to gulp down alone. All of these things literally moved me to tears for days. In fact, I never quite got over everything that happened on that first trip. I know that’s what God used to change me from a selfish, indifferent person to who I am today.

I was an adjunct instructor at a local Christian college and was lead to ask our mission’s leader if they would ever consider letting some of our students come to Romania with me and help this fledgling ministry working with abandoned babies. His immediate answer was, “When do you leave?” I was floored! Oh no! It was really happening. I was becoming a missionary!