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Happy Easter!
We hope you all had a blessed Easter time with friends and family! This past Easter, we were able to connect with a number of different villages to celebrate the holidays together. In the midst of the many church services we attended, we decided to host a Passover dinner with our young adults, where we shared a traditional Seder meal, complete with lamb provided by one of our local shepherds. As we ate together, we talked about the significance of the Passover meal and how it related to our Bible study on the suffering of Christ. It was a powerful time to connect and further dig into all that God has been teaching us this past season.
After Easter, we hosted a construction mission team from Alberta led by Chad and Joanne Merrifield. The Merrifields have been leading teams out of Alberta for a number of years now in order to build deeper relationships between farmers in Alberta and Camp Falcon Rock through the Farm to Field initiative. This year, the team included a farmer who both farms and used to own a landscaping company. With his skills and a team full of young energetic teens, we were able to take on the massive project of building our campfire. The campfire project has been one that we’ve wanted to complete for the past decade. In fact, we started the project just before Covid, but we were unable to see it through at that time. Because of the expertise on Chad’s team and all of the young, eager helpers, we were able to construct an incredible amphitheater to give us not only a campfire spot but also another meeting space. We are so excited to see this area come to be, as we know God will continue to reach young people with his gospel through our campfire times this summer.
While the mission team was with us, we ran a number of youth and young adult programs. One program included organizing a youth day at the camp, where we invited a number of the youth who usually come to our summer camps to come up for the day for a connection program. We wanted to create time for us to check in with campers during the year to continue discipling them. Having the mission team with us allowed us to be able to have over 40 campers up for a day program at the camp, where we ran some classic camp games, made a craft, worshiped, and heard a message. It was exciting to see all of the teens’ appreciation for the camp ministry and their excitement for the upcoming summer!
We are now stepping into our preparation time for summer camps. The camp is fully booked from mid-June to mid-September with groups coming to use the camp facility. We will be running our own camps for the month of July, and so we have a lot of work ahead of us in the coming months to plan for those programs. Would you be praying for us and our team as we determine this year’s theme and work with local pastors to sign up kids for the summer camps. We are encouraged to see the many young people already signed up – those who have come before and those who will be experiencing Camp Falcon Rock for the first time. We’re also ex-cited about the summer team that’s coming together – including a number of local volunteers, international young adults, a mission team, and the Smith family, who will be returning. Please pray for us as we finalize all the details regarding summer camps, as well as pray for the camp team as we work toward completing a number of construction projects before camps begin.
Thanks for your continued love and care for the ministry here in Romania.
Grace and Peace.