Miracles

2.14.08

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY! This was officially the best Valentine’s Day ever! No lie! :o) It started off pretty normal, made verse valentine’s for my roomies, send e-cards to my family whom I miss to pieces, and had my morning class, Mission Training, which was all about prayer and the effectiveness of a praying man and women on the mission field. It was really wonderful, as usual, but fairly normal in the scheme of what my day was looking like.

Came back to my room and chatted with one of my room mates who is a PK in Washington and comes from a divorced family as well. It was a blessing to be able to share our similar stories and see what God had shown us through it.

After lunch, a group of us left the college to head into town an hour away to apply for our resident permits. While we were there, one of the guys’ passports gets flagged. Because he had been here the semester before under the old law of needing a visa, he had a three month visa. However, over the past several weeks the visa requirement was lifted. Since James had a visa, he was not permitted to apply for the residency permit until AFTER the visa expired. Well, over the past week, the laws changed again, and now the visa was required if he had been here 90 days, in order to keep him legally in the country while he applied for the permit. His expired four days ago! The officials at the office told him that if he wrote on a piece of paper that he left the country and came back, then they could submit the paper work requesting the permit. James came back to our group and called one of the guys aside. They came back in the building and he went over to the desk. A few min later, he walked back over to our group and explained that they wanted him to lie and that He felt so wrong in his spirit to do that. The other option was that they would call the police, arrest him, and then deport him from Hungary….with little chance of returning.

Of course, we prayed. We petitioned for wisdom, discernment, loop holes, intervention. You name it, we prayed for it. In the middle of the prayer James got up and went over to the desk; we continued to pray. The women behind the counter asked our translator, Dia, to tell her what we were doing and saying. As she told her, the woman was amazed and surprised. James told them that he would not lie to stay in the country because he was a Christian and God had told him not to. One of the women behind the counter (now there were four officials gather around James’ paperwork) began to cry. Which led to Dia crying, because she had been working with this woman for several months and knew how hardened she was. And here, this situation brought her to tears! It was a blessing to see.

As James spoke with them and told them of his decision, we continued to pray that there would be a way that would not involve him needing to be arrested. After a while, they ended up deciding not to call the police, but rather had the boarder patrol police come and interrogate James. The interrogation lasted several hours in the basement of the office. Finally, they all emerged with James waving a 30 day residency permit which would allow him to be legally in the country while he traveled to Serbia (former Yugoslavia) to cross the boarder, leaving the country, and then return and apply for the extended permit! PRAISE GOD! We left the offices praising God and in awe of His provision! He is so good! After leaving there we were all chattering about what God had done and retelling the story. James then yells out, “Who’s going to Serbia with me?” LOL Several of us decided to go with James on Saturday and do a mini outreach while we are there….taking what Satan may have meant as a deterrent and using it for God’s glory!

We ended up stopping at a grocery store and buying a whole bunch of food that we shared on the ride home….a van full of 15 people, laughing, sharing, and basking in how awesome our God is. Today, we saw a miracle!

Romans 8:37-39