Our Dear Friends,
We wish you a blessed year for 2021. We are praying for America!!! Now, we want to inform you about the events of December.
Ildiko had a lot of calls from ladies who she helps spiritually. Outstanding among these was a woman, Ilona, whom Ildiko helped convert at the last Methodist Women’s Conference. She lives with her adult son and second husband far from Budapest. The two men do not come out with each other. There had been a fight between them before, which ended with police help. One day, Ilona telephoned Ildiko to say that her son had been hospitalized because her husband had struck her, and now she does not know where to flee from her husband. It took a long time for him to calm down. There were a lot of phone calls. A few days later, her son turned to God for help and even forgave Ilona’s husband. He also wanted to live in peace with them. From then on, the mother prays with her son daily. Ildiko tried to make Ilona a long-term solution.
Geza’s main goal was to find a Hungarian Brother-Church for each Gypsy church within the Baptist Union. Beyond the financial help, which is greatly needed for Gypsy Churches, Geza hopes that the connection will be a lasting human relationship including the exchange of the gifts of the Holy Spirit between the Brother-Churches.
Achieving this goal posed serious challenges, but by God’s grace each Gypsy Church got a partner except one Mezoladany that is in the N-E corner of our country next to the Ukrainian border. Geza decided that we would visit that Church, what we did on the 23rd. We travelled 500 miles, our car loaded with food, second had cloths, shoes, chocolates, Bibles, good Christian books for children and teenagers. The elders of the Gypsy Church at Mezoladany came together to welcome us, they were extremely happy. We hope that RoseGarden Church sooner or later will be ready to be the Brother-Church of them.
We also visited Tatarszentgyorgy – the village we have been going to for 7 years – on the 16th of December. Keeping the rules of social distance we did not enter any home, just met the people in their gate, had a short chat, prayed for them and gave our gifts.
We sent cca 300 wonderful books to Gypsy Christians by mail. These were novels written specifically for teen-agers by Christian authors. Two novels were for girls and one was for boys. There is a great need for Hungarian books (and videos) for the youth to introduce the gospel in an exciting story when you cannot tell looking at the outlook of the book that it is a Christian book. There are a couple of friends of us in Britain who decided to serve the Hungarians. They made a charity organization called 4H (Helping His Hungarian Heroes). The man’s name is Dr. Prof. Eric Barrett (space scientist), and his wife is Rosemary. They realized the lack of this type of literature, so they made a competition in Hungary of writing novels for this very purpose. The two novels written for girls, I mentioned above, is the fruit of this successful competition. But there was not book written for boys. So, Eric decided to write one. He did a wonderful job. The title is: What a save! (It is about a young soccer player.) It has been translated and printed Hungarian. In case you need English copies, let me know!
Experiencing this successful action Geza is thinking about calling a competition among Gypsy young people to let them write stories about they lives that we would pour into novel form and print them. The goal is to reach the teens among the Gypsy people. This is only a dream, yet.
Geza’s energy level is decreasing; he had to raise the dose of his medication. We are amazed that all these visits and organizations have been accomplished. The Lord has been so good to us.
We do realize that without your prayers and financial support we would not have been able to do this “angelic” ministry.
We celebrated the birth of Christ without our children and grandchildren but watched them via zoom. Yet, it was a great joy when they all came and stood under our balcony where we could sing beautiful Christmas corals together including Geza’s 96-year-old father. A year ago none of us had any idea what major changes were on the horizon. Yet, our mighty and loving God has carried us through. And He is and will be the same always!
This afternoon Ildiko’s sister sent us the following song, which I send to you also:
“Master the tempest is raging….”
We love you and wish you the presence of Jesus in the boat of your life,
Geza and Ildiko