As I pulled up my chair next to the Gypsy lady I saw that she wasn't reading her notes. I wondered if they were the English ones so I offered her a Romanian version. She said no thank you and that's when I thought about the possibility that she couldn't read. I later found out that the lady they called "The Gypsy" was named Maria. She couldn't speak English but I was amazed by her desperate need for God. She had traveled many hours to our retreat. We came to learn that most of the south side of Romania is very poor and filled with many Gypsy's. (Did you know they are descended from India?) Most of them have very large families and children and struggle to put food on the table. However, Maria was not just living among them as a poor mother and wife she was also the wife of a church planter. She had a desire to minister to the women of her village and surrounding ones with the limited means she had.
She was one of the recipients of the free massages one of our team members was offering. She had won this prize by randomly being given a blue ball point pen. As she came to her massage she revealed wounds on her stomach from an intensive surgery she was recovering from. You would have never known she was carrying around such physical wounds. However, it was clear she had deep wounds from the life she lives out there in her own barren land. After her massage she clutched her blue pen and asked if there was another one she could have for her daughter. This pen seemed like the biggest and best prize she had ever had. Cheryl asked her how many daughters she had and she said "5". Cheryl reached in her bag and found exactly 4 more blue pins and as she handed them to Maria you could tell she was so touched and excited to bring gifts home to her children. Maybe she was holding onto the hope that her children would rise above her to learn to read and write. As the retreat ended I packed up and went to the lobby to meet our team. I was so proud of how I had packed for a 3 day trip and fit it all in my back pack with my sneakers clipped to the front. As we left I saw Maria get up from a couch with all her possessions wrapped in a hankerchief. She had a couple of containers with liquid in it (probably for their journey) but as I said good bye to her tears began to fill my eyes. She had so little in her hands to offer the Lord and yet she was going back to impact her community with the "fish and bread" in her hands. I was challenged to think of what was in my hands...what resources has God given to me to offer him? If she had so little and she could still offer it to him....I surely had more. The words of a song came to my mind: "Maybe the last ones are the lucky ones, the ones who've got this whole thing figured out. For when they go looking for something beautiful they go looking from the inside out"....
