Thanks to everyone who took part in our little feedback session on Life Changing Words. It’s great to hear your stories of how the Bible’s life words are part of your every day lives. Here is just a small sample of the responses we’ve been receiving: 

“Fantastic. Just the sort of prompt I need to focus the day on God when getting to work in the morning!”

“I love opening my mail and reading the word when I get into work…It is the perfect way to start the working day!”

“Since having to face a progressive neurological disease I have felt out of control and frightened.
God’s Word has given me the strength to go on, and I have found the Bible promises true and extremely helpful. Thank God.”

Don’t forget you can join in the conversation anytime on this blog!

Change is afoot in Romania. With European Union membership starting in 2007, the country is seeing good economic growth, and there is a sense of progress and optimism. Unfortunately not everyone is included in that progress, as Romania’s Gypsy community continues to be overlooked. SGM Lifewords supporters Florin and Marianne Oprescu are working to change that.

Florin and Marianne live in Pitesti, Romania, combining Christian mission with social projects aimed at breaking dependency and helping families to provide for themselves. This involves teaching the community how to make better houses or sewage systems, how to grow crops on their often barren land, or rearing goats for milk.

Florin and Marianne are particularly involved with the children, caring for some 600 children between three villages, helping them through school. Often there is real resistance from the parents, as they would prefer their children to be earning money than getting an education. Even if they are in school, teachers say Gypsy children are a challenge. They often have to repeat years, they don’t do homework. They know that as a Gypsy it will always be harder for them to get a job even if they succeed, so they lack the hope for the future that would motivate them to study hard.

Florin and Marianne are committed to speaking and being life words among the Gypsies, and are using SGM Lifewords materials to start conversations. Florin says: “We thought Bible booklets would be helpful, especially because we know each person that we are giving them to. We do Bible study and songs every week with a group of teenagers and we gave them each a booklet. Together with them we studied the booklets, with the Bible next to it, using them as a way to start discussions with the teenagers and explain some things in more depth. We see God at work in the children’s and teenagers’ lives. The progress is slow, but we have started seeing changes in their way of thinking and behaviour.”

Florin gives an example of a Georgiana, a girl of 17 who is orphaned and living with her boyfriend Bebe. She recently became a Christian and has started reading the Bible and praying with Bebe. However, Bebe does not want to commit his life to Jesus, because he makes a living by selling stolen wood, which he knows is wrong. He claims there is no other possibility for him to make money. “We are trying to teach them that God can provide in all things, if you trust in Him” says Florin.

• Join us in praying for Florin and Marianne and their work.
• Find out more about our range of conversation starters.
• Photo by Chrystel Rigaud.

My travels have taken me to many countries, where I have filmed stories that have amazed, moved, delighted and appalled me in equal measure. This is my blog from South Africa last year where I was filming stories of HIV/AIDS… it resonates still as it collides with the story of being life words.

Steve Bassett / Johannesburg may 2007

I close my eyes and see it still … a graveyard … the resting place of almost 1400 babies and small children … red earth graves upon which lay toys, teddy bears, Disney characters, broken memories, detritus of medication that did not work, empty babies bottles - the unbearable waste of the future unlived … the wind blows across the site, a pall across a theatre of war … red dust swirls in front of the panning camera lens … in one corner of the site a weeping funeral party watches as a grave is filled in, shovels glinting, turning the earth against the wind as the dear one is laid to rest so appallingly, tragically early … a lament strikes up, a woman’s lone voice guttural and raw but strangely beautiful … haunting … haunted … it is the only sound against the wind; the soundtrack of this devastating comment on the silent holocaust … 120 babies and small children every month buried, forgotten … until now in a small way I have to believe (or else I trample the hope that this sad sacred ground affords) that the camera gives a kind of voice, a kind of memory to give to a world that never knew them or even cared very much … this will stay with me forever, remain, lodge in my heart, take up residence in my soul … as will the compassion of the woman who cares for so many young lives, who stares at the scene and points way into the corner …”That’s where my first babies were buried; now, in just one year, we are here at 1350″… so everything has its place and we all have our pain, our search and our struggle … a final image … a broken blow-up plastic airplane is fixed to one small grave, a simple toy punctured and earthbound with broken wings … I look up and overhead a jet plane sails across the sky, white against the china blue, its vapour trail a comet of a thousand angel wings … oh they must soar, they must fly somewhere or else all above is silent sky and empty, unforgiving, vicious sun … and heaven unmoved as the children’s laughter falls ever more silent…