Hello Blog Readers!

This is Jimmy Bero writing here, and I (along with an incredible team) am leading this year’s trip to Romania. This will be my fourth time as a leader on this trip. But I don’t want to talk about me right now. (At some point everybody on the team will have an opportunity to introduce themselves to all of you blog-readers. Get excited. It’s a super amazing team).

What I do want to talk about here is hope. Author and theologian CS Lewis describes hope like this:

“Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.”

The story of the Bible is not primarily about a way to go to heaven when you die.
The story of the Bible is all about the union of Heaven and Earth; how they once completely overlapped, how they were driven apart by humanity’s sin, and how God is bringing them back together again through Jesus and His Holy Spirit.

In the quote above, we see that the fuel for a Christian life is hope; hope in the promise that God will one day make all things new. Hope is directly tied to salvation through faith in Jesus and hope is the ultimate thing that propels us to live lives of purpose and mission. Hope is what has led each of us onto this team.

God invites us all to participate in a really cool mission with Him, a mission that is focused on bringing “pockets” of heaven to earth. When Jesus taught his followers to pray he told them to say, “Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

And that’s what this team humbly wants to be a part of. We want to be used by God to make the love, grace, and beauty of God real to the orphans in Romania. God is a good and perfect Father who is making all things new, bringing beauty where there is brokenness, and healing where there is sickness. We believe God can use us to bring pockets of heaven to earth, in this case to Romania.

We hope you follow our stories on this blog. We hope these stories reveal who Jesus is to you. We hope we get all the support we need to go on this trip.

But more than anything, we hope God is able to use us, alongside our incredible Romanian partners, to be a part of creating pockets of His presence in Romania this summer so that people may experience Him in real, eternal, life-changing ways.