St. Giles Evangelical Presbyterian Church

Devotion:November 10-17 by Eric Newman, Elder

The Faith of Laura of Romania

In my travels I have met many wonderful and interesting people. I have learned that God has pre-arranged appointments for me, if I am paying attention. Several years ago, I was traveling in Argentina and some new missionary friends offered to give me a ride on the long commute between the domestic and international airports in Buenos Aires. They needed to take a detour first to the Youth With A Mission missionary base in Buenos Aires, which I was happy to do. On the way in the car, I received a clear impression from the Lord that He had a special appointment for me waiting at the mission base.

At the base, I began looking for that appointment, and I met several young people who had connections with people I knew as far away as Australia, as well as in South America. But after making those connections, I knew I’d not met the Lord’s appointment. It was as though He was saying “not yet–there is someone else I want you to meet.” While waiting for my friends, someone offered me coffee. Sitting nearby there was a young woman of short stature and slight build who spoke English, and we began a conversation. Her English was very good, but her accent didn’t seem to be Spanish, and I asked her where she came from.

Her name was Laura, and I quickly became interested in her story. She had grown up as a child under Ceausescu’s Romania, the communist dictator who ruled Romania during the Cold War. Ceausescu was a monster of a man and imposed unimaginable misery on a whole nation of people during those days. In the 1980’s, I worked a little with an organization that tried to help persecuted Christians and Jews and knew something about the suffering and persecution in that country (Richard Wurmbrand became famous because of his book, “Tortured for Christ” describing 14 years of torture in Ceausescu’s prisons as a Christian). Ceausescu had deliberately starved the nation of food and denied its people heat in its bitterly cold winters so that he could export foodstuffs, clothing and anything of value to enrich his treasuries and glorify himself with delusional projects. Many Romanian couples didn’t want to have children because of the misery of life and the birth rate severely dropped. Laura, like most children in Romania at that time, almost never saw protein, meat or cheese in her young life. Once, a man gave her and her sister lumps of cheese, the first she had ever seen. When she brought it home excited, her parents refused to let them eat it because there were cases of agents in the regime giving poisoned cheese to children to discourage any distribution of food outside the government’s control. It broke her young heart not to eat that cheese and she couldn’t understand why her parents refused it and threw it away.

Later, when she arrived in Argentina at about 20 years old, she told me she had gained more than ten kilos (more than 22 pounds) in a short time. She said her Argentine doctor told her that her weight gain was integral to her bones and internal organs, and the Argentine diet of meat and milk was the perfect antidote for a lifetime of nutritional deprivation. So, Laura and I became good friends that day and in later trips to Argentina, I arranged for her to fly from her base to churches in the northern part of the country where our ministry was based. She spoke perfect, unaccented Spanish and excellent English, and was a wonderful public interpreter for me. The churches I introduced her to in Argentina fell in love with this tiny vision of faith, spiritual might and lone courage. We believe she was the first missionary actually sent out from her country after the end of the Cold War. When in Romania as a teenager, she didn’t know where Argentina was on the map, but believed God was sending her there. As with other missionaries, she had to provide her own support, but she didn’t know anyone in the western world or in South America, and had no means of support. She lived every day in absolute faith for her daily provision and tested the promises of Jesus every day, which was the condition I found her in. God never failed her any day in those years.

Beyond her story itself, something she said to me is the basis of this devotional. During one of her visits to us in northern Argentina, she described to me how she trusted God for her life and her provision although she remained without support from known sources. But she told me, without any trace of pride or irony, that she had become bored with trusting God only for her daily provision, and she wanted a greater challenge to trust God for. In other words, she had become so accustomed to the supernatural daily provision of God, it seemed entirely routine and natural to her. She was not trying to impress and didn’t grasp the magnitude of her statement, but it filled me with awe. I knew what Jesus felt when he said of the Gentile woman, “I have not found faith like this in all of Israel.” He stopped the presses and called time-out to hold the Gentile woman up as an example to his disciples of the woman’s profound faith discovered in an unexpected person.

So I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you about Laura of Romania, who believed God to do His work in her when it was not possible for her to find a way to a country of which she had no knowledge, and who trusted God for her daily survival with no visible means and no safety net. And when this became so natural to her as to be routine, she asked God for more to believe and trust Him for.

The last time I saw Laura, she had just finished speaking to a mesmerized Argentine church as my guest. She had to leave the meeting early after speaking that night so she could catch an overnight bus to her base. The people had fallen in love with her and marveled at her, literally surrounding her with prayer and blessing. We wept that night as we prayed together before she left, and through our shared tears she called me “father” and I called her “daughter.” We still communicate maybe once or twice a year by email, as she has moved on to other countries and callings. But I wanted to introduce you to my friend Laura who taught me about living by faith.