Moldovan Meanderings: February 2020

Friday 28 February 2020

Friday 21 February 2020

It seemed like the much-anticipated moment had finally arrived.

Ben spied out of the corner of his eye a figure moving towards him. It didn’t take much for him to realise that it was Nina. She was a tall, dark haired young lady of much beauty. Ben speculated that it wouldn’t be long until she was married, and he had made his own hopes of who she might want to marry. Indeed, he had prayed many a time for and about her and had even attempted more than once to approach her and talk to her but to no avail. She constantly slipped through his fingers. It looked now though like things were going to be different.

Ben was standing next to the refreshment table as people mingled after the end of the church service. Ben wasn’t accustomed to doing much mingling, so he stood alone enjoying the atmosphere and waiting to help with clean up once people had enough of socialising and began leaving.

However, things were now changing and as a long-awaited moment approached. Ben had been unable to enter of his own initiation into a meaningful interaction with Nina, but now it appeared that after much prayer she herself was moving towards him. Ben allowed himself a brief glance as she came closer, lapping up a little of her considerable beauty, but the more he looked, the greater his heart began to pound. What would he actually say when she arrived in his presence?

This dilemma was though short lived. Nina came within a whisker of him, causing Ben’s emotions to reach fever pitch, however they were quickly diffused as Nina veered to the right to avoid collision with Ben, then opened her hand and tossed the waste paper that she had from the snacks that she had consumed onto the refreshment table, finally heading onwards and exiting the room without saying a word to Ben, not even giving him a glance of recognition.

This experience made Ben review his marriage plans!

Marriage is indeed a tricky issue. There’s the old adage that who you will marry is the second most important decision you will make (for some it might even be the first, but from a Christian point of view the decision to accept and follow God’s plan for our lives could well be considered the most important decision). In a cross-cultural setting the complexities increase as different cultures have different perspectives.

The place to start is singleness because everybody is born single and lives for at least a while as an unmarried person (even if they are betrothed!). In the western world this can be seen as a good thing as it allows the person freedom to enjoy life and invest time and energy in career and friends. In other places such as Moldova this is not the case. Here singleness is not generally viewed as a good thing and there is a lot of emphasis on getting married from a young age. This is maybe at least in part due to economic reasons as there are not many opportunities to develop a career here, so it is seen as better to invest in forming a family and it is also easier to get by as a couple, especially if agricultural work is the order of day. In addition to this, due to economic migration, the country’s population is declining, so it’s important for families to be forming and producing children to maintain the population level.

Of course, marriage is not just about practical concerns and the importance of values, companionship, love and romance probably also play their part in making marriage a prevalent aspect of a society.

In Moldova, something else that probably plays a role in attitudes to marriage is the influence of religion and faith. Christianity at both a traditional and living level is very active and widespread and it’s clear from the Bible that God’s plan is for people to live in families of one man and one woman. Admittedly, and tragically, some churches may well promote the importance of marriage as they have something to gain by it, whether financially or by affiliating an outsider to an existing church member. However, once again, beyond such practical concerns there is a Biblical teaching that God created us to have companionship and, as it says in the much-quoted words of Genesis 2:18 ‘It is not good for the man to be alone.’

In the New Testament, Paul echoes this idea at the beginning of 1 Corinthians 7, where he talks about the fact that it is good for husbands and wives to come together regularly as a way of protection from certain temptations and for unmarried people likewise to get married to avoid burning passions. He throws though something extra into the equation. The first verse of this chapter contains the words, ‘It is good for a man not to touch a woman’ and later on in verse 7 ‘For I wish that all men were even as I myself. But each one has his own gift from God, one in this manner and another in that.’ Thus, we understand that he is not promoting marriage as the only option.

In the Old Testament, marriage was very much the thing as the world needed to be populated and indeed, it was God’s plan for his people, the descendants of Abraham, to become ‘as numerous as the stars in the sky.’ By the time we reach the New Testament though, this need has already been fulfilled and the perspective begins to change.

In Genesis 1:28 God tells humans to ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it,’ however in Matthew 28:19 Jesus says, ‘go and make disciples of all the nations’. Hence, the emphasis from the Old to New testament has moved from being on physical to spiritual reproduction.

The result of this is that a Christian’s main goal in life (or at least should be!) to spread the gospel so that people convert and become disciples of Jesus. Christians can be meaningfully involved in this work, whether they are single or married thus the issue of getting married or not is more to do with our calling, as God’s plans can be served in both states, than other practical or personal considerations.

Thursday 20 February 2020

Prayer

‘Hello! Can I interest you in a personality test?’

Ben had only been out for an afternoon stroll along the High Street and certainly hadn’t been looking for any deep internal retrospection. However, the solid, middle aged man who was now standing before him didn’t look like he was going to take no for an answer.

‘It’ll take just twenty minutes and it is absolutely free,’ the man insisted.

Ben, not being one to turn down a freebie, agreed. The man gleefully beckoned him to follow and took off done a side street. This wasn’t quite what Ben had expected and so he was taken slightly aback. The man turned, realising Ben’s uneasy about where they were headed and reassuringly encouraged him with a pleasant expression and a summoning hand motion.

Ben felt strangely captured and couldn’t resist. He followed until the man stopped, opened a door and ushered Ben in. As he entered, he glanced the words on the door ‘Church of Scientology.’ This raised some questions in Ben’s mind, but it was too alte to turn back.

Once inside, Ben discovered a well laid out facility with a central table area surrounded by bookcases and side rooms. A bit like your local library. A few other people were milling around, perusing various resources which at least created a more friendly atmosphere than if Ben had been alone there. The man showed Ben a seat and put before him a couple of pages which were full of all sorts of questions.

‘I’ll wait in my office until you’re done.’

So, Ben plonked himself down and got on with it. There were all kinds of questions about Ben’s behaviour in different situations. In conflict situations I always…… give way and get myself into problems thought Ben!

Ben wasn’t one to beat around the bush, so he polished the questions off in just under the aforementioned twenty minutes and then handed them in to be graded. He then spent an uncomfortable further twenty minutes waiting for the result. At last, the man called him into his office.

‘You are very bad at communication and that’s not good because communication is life,’ was the man’s rather blunt verdict. ‘But don’t worry, I have a selection of books for sale on how to communicate better.’

Ben understood that communication is important, although it seemed a but much to say that communication is life. Surely, it’s just an important aspect that facilitates our relationships? In any case, Ben was already aware that he wasn’t the best communicator. Handy, that the man had some books for sale on the topic, but also somewhat suspicious.

‘Thanks, but I am reading my Bible and some other books at the moment.’ Was Ben’s polite refusal.

‘Well, I also have a seminar on how to communicate better next week.’ Ventured the man, not giving up.

‘Thanks again, but I’m a but busy at my church.’

This would have been the end of the matter except that the man obviously hadn’t gone to the trouble of catching Ben in order to easily let him slip away. There followed a twenty minute remonstration as the man tried to convince Ben of his need for his services and Ben doing his best to convince him otherwise. When the man had first talked to Ben, he hadn’t mentioned these other twenty-minute periods, a bit amiss of him, but in any case, Ben held his resolve and managed to escape spending any further twenty-minute periods in his presence.

Communication is life may well be an overstatement but nevertheless it is clear that it is an important aspect of our daily lives. This explains the popularity of mobile applications such as Whatsapp, which has over 5 billion downloads.

If we read the Bible like Ben, we see that communication has been important since the very beginning. Many people view God has a distant force, who maybe set the universe into motion but now isn’t involved in anyway. Others see Him as a force that pervades throughout nature. However, on the first page of the Bible we see God creating the universe and using words to do it! He said and it was!

After this, He then communicates with His creation. He talks to Adam and Eve and indeed Cain. Even after their exile from His presence, we still see that this is not the end of communication between humans and the divine. In Genesis 4:26, it is mentioned that after Seth’s son, Enosh, is born people began to call on the name of the LORD. In other words, we could say that they began to seek to re-establish the connection that they had lost with their creator.

This idea is also reinforced in Ecclesiastes 3:11 where we are told that God has set eternity in human hearts. Often people live like this world is all there is but in reality we have a longing deep down for something more, beyond the material that we see around us and hence all the different religions and philosophies that have developed as humans have sought to make sense of the world we live in.

So, in one, simple sense, we could define prayer as trying to communicate with the divine. Throughout the Old Testament we see that God communicated with His people, so knowing, consciously or subconsciously, that God is a personal God makes it logical for us to try and interact with Him.

Over the centuries, different people have approached this communicating with God in different ways.

Simeon Stylites was born in what is now Turkey around 390 A.D. Like any young man he made plans for his life, although in his case his plans were a little different to most youngsters. At the age of 13 he decided to dedicate himself to Christianity, which he understood to mean spending his time in self denial and prayer. For example, he is said to have spent at least a year and a half shut up in a small hut, much of this time spent standing in prayer. Eventually, he moved onto a new method which was to sit atop a column that he found amongst some ruins of an old building. It is said that he spent 37 years sitting atop such columns, spending his time in prayer.

Alternatively, a lady from Romania made the observation once, ‘In the hospitals in Romania everybody prays!’ This could be taken not just as a negative comment about the standard of health care in Romania but also as a remark that reflects the human tendency to turn to prayer when we have a serious problem. It’s interesting that whenever something bad happens, celebrities often put messages on the internet which include the icon of two hands clasped together in prayer.

For Christians, the person who is our example of how to live is Jesus Christ. Thus, if want to know how to pray, we need to learn from him. In the gospel of Mark 1:35-39, we see an example of when Jesus prayed.

The first thing we learn from here is that Jesus prayed! Even though he was a part of the trinity, he still needed to pray, and if He needed to pray to maintain His relationship with God the Father and Holy Spirit, how much more must we, imperfect human beings, need to pray to keep a good relationship with God.

Indeed, we know from our own human experience that by communicating with people we develop relationships and that we suffer when we don’t communicate with those we love.

Henry Martyn was a missionary to India just over two hundred years ago. In order to go out on the mission field, he left his girlfriend behind, hoping that at a later stage, once he had assessed the scene, she could join him to be his wife. Shortly after arriving in India, he wrote her a letter to propose marriage. He had to wait fifteen months for a response, and it was negative!

One can only imagine the suffering of waiting those long months for an answer. It’s natural that we want to communicate with those who we love. Thus, as Christians who love God, it’s normal that we should desire to spend time with Him in prayer and if we don’t desire this, we should start thinking about why.

The second thing that we can take from this example of Jesus is that even though He was very busy, He still made time for prayer. We see in verse 34 of this first chapter of Mark that many people were coming to Jesus for healing. Indeed, towards the end of the chapter we see that so many people were looking for Him that He couldn’t enter towns anymore. And in the beginning of chapter two there are so many in the house listening to Jesus that the men can’t get their paralysed friend through and have to take him up on the roof and lower him through the ceiling!

In the midst of all this busyness nevertheless we read in verse 35 that Jesus got up early, when it was still dark, to go to pray. This shows that it was a priority for Him. A great Christian leader of the past is quoted as having said, ‘I am so busy that I need to pray for three hours before I start the day.’ We tend to think differently, something like ‘I am so busy that I only have time to pray for three minutes.’ However, we usually find time for the things that are important to us.

Recently, at a Ski camp with Moldovan students, I decided spontaneously on the second day to go skiing (having rested on the first day). This meant I was slightly delayed as I got my equipment together. I felt that this wouldn’t be a problem as Moldovan students are not renowned for their punctuality. However, as I came out of the chalet to go to the bus, I saw it already pulling away and leaving for the mountain. In other words, usually tardy students, were right on time when it was about getting the bus for skiing!

Hence, if prayer is something important to us, we will make time for it.

Thirdly, we see that through prayer Jesus clarified God’s will for Him. Jesus is Himself also God, but He nevertheless submitted to the Father’s will (Mark 14:36). When Simon and His companions find Jesus, they are probably expecting and hoping that He will return with them to get on with work in Capernaum, but Jesus has other ideas. He informs them that His plan is now to move on to ministry in other places. This plan seems to have formed after His time in prayer. Thus, prayer is one way in which we conform our wills to God’s and discover His plans for us.

More so, it also shows our dependence on Him as instead of getting on with what we think is best, we stop and seek His guidance. Indeed, in the busyness of life, just as Jesus took time out here before making His next step, it seems like a good principle that sometimes we need to withdraw to deserted places to be free to reflect and search for the way forward.

George Mueller is a great example of some one who depended on God in prayer. He was from Germany but became a minister in Great Britain. He opened one and later other homes for Orphans. It is said that he never directly asked for money but trusted in God’s provision. One evening he confessed to a visitor to the orphanage that although 2000 orphans were staying there, they had no food for the next day’s breakfast. He began to pray. The next day they found that the necessary food was there! How? Over night a Christian in the city hadn’t been able to sleep and had felt that God was prompting him to get food and bring it to the orphanage, something that he did. Indeed, it is said that he provided enough to last for a whole month!

Assuming we understand the necessity of prayer, another question would be what should our prayers contain? There are different ideas about this, but a basic model would have four points.

The first would be adoration. To adore someone means to be focused on their qualities and to give them glory for them. How often do people for example give praise to a footballer for scoring a great goal that helps his team win the cup. Being there in the mountains of Romania it is hard to not to be in awe of the God who created it all.

Next there is confession. This is where we recognise our weaknesses as human beings and openly say in our own words what we have done wrong. A well-known Biblical example is Psalm 51, where David confesses his sin after having committed adultery.

Thirdly, comes thankfulness. This is similar to adoration, but it focuses on what God has done for us, rather than on who He is. In Ephesians 5:20 Paul tells us to give thanks for all things.

Finally, there is supplication or requesting things. In Matthew 7:7 Jesus says to ask and we will receive, although this needs to be understood in the light of what has been said above about seeking God’s will in prayer thus what we ask for might not be according to God’s plans so we might not receive it!

Five Italian cheeses

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Tuesday 18 February 2020

Moldova

History

‘So, where do you live?’

Ben’s face sank. He looked incredulously at the jolly, rotund face that was staring back at him, waiting for an answer. Usually, you would expect such a simple, basic question to receive an equally straightforward response. However, not in Ben’s case. His living arrangements were complicated to explain and as such, he liked wherever possible to avoid the question. Nevertheless, it had been asked, so as always, out of politeness, Ben was going to answer.

‘Moldova’, straight away bracing himself to see which of the varied responses he was going to get this time.

A blank expression followed by a slight smirk was this time’s offering. ‘Oh, I was expecting you to say somewhere like Coventry!’

‘No, I’ve never ever even been to Coventry’, said Ben, glad at least that there had been no comment about never having ever heard of Moldova or further inquisitions about its location.

‘I’ve never heard of that. Where is it?’

Ben had jumped the gun with his gladness. He did at least have his stock reply prepared. ‘In Eastern Europe, sandwiched between Romania and the Ukraine’.

He hoped that this would be enough information. It usually was, most people having some sort of idea where those countries are, and the mention of Eastern Europe was thrown in to sure things up.

Ben had been attending his aunt’s church for a short visit and conversing with a plump young man at the end of the service. From Ben’s personal experience most people, except for those who are fans of the Eurovision song contest or European football, are not too hot on their knowledge of Moldova. Indeed, questions such as ‘where (or even what) is that?’ were frequently encountered. This young man obviously didn’t fall into the category of Eurovision or football lovers.

So, for the uninitiated, Moldova is a small country (relatively speaking as a population of around 3 million could by some standards be considered as medium sized), located geographically in Eastern Europe, although politically it has been torn between different empires.

Historically, it would appear that since well before Christ people lived in the area which includes modern day Moldova. There are various archaeologic signs of different peoples and cultures. However, this land is in an area which separates East from West and so there was much squabbling over the years as different groups invaded moving in one direction or the other.

The first signs of a more established settlement are from the 1350’s. At this time, a Vlach (the precursor people to the Romanians) ruler called, ‘Dragoș’ came with some of his people and took charge of the area forming the Principality of Moldavia, a territory which included what we now call Moldova but was much larger, incorporating much of the surrounding area as well.

There are various legends regarding this, one being that he was hunting an aurochs (extinct type of Bull). He pursued it as far as the Moldova river where he caught and killed it. At the spot where he dismounted from his horse, he realised this land was better that the Marumureș land where he was currently living so went back and brought back his people to take over this new territory.

A sad, but probably not too likely aspect of the story, is that his dog was called Molda. He was so exhausted from chasing the aurochs that he collapsed into the river and drowned. Hence the river being named ‘Moldova’ (‘of Molda’ as it were) and so the origin of the name Moldova.

This initial Moldova, or ‘Principality of Moldavia’, stretched from the Carpathian Mountains in the west to the Dniester river in the East and included much of what is now Eastern Romania and a little bit of today’s southern Ukraine.

As mentioned above, this was a much sought-after land as it was situated at a convenient location between East and West, not to mention contained very fertile soil. Thus, Moldavia was only able to retain its independence for less than 200 years. Indeed, Moldova’s most celebrated figure, Stephen Cel Mare (Stephen the great) is renowned for exactly that, defending the Moldovan territory against various attacks and so keeping it together as a whole.

After, Stephen the Great’s time (1457 to 1504) Moldova’s grip on independence waned and by 1538 it had become subject to the influence of the Ottoman empire. Since then it has had a long history of being ruled by various empires, subsequently being part of the Russian empire, Romania and the Soviet Union. Finally, in 1991 it declared independence again, creating what is today’s Moldova, a much smaller land than the Moldavia of Old, covering just the land between the Prut and Dniester rivers, having lost its western territory to what is now the Moldovan part of Romania and land in the south and North East to Ukraine.

Ben looked at his new acquaintance, who stood opposite him, obviously not really longing to become too immersed in the history of land that he had never even really heard of and certainly never thought about. Ben had no intention of foisting too much information upon him, although a brief history lesson couldn’t do any harm and indeed, knowledge of the past helps us understand the present and gives wisdom for the future.

So, Ben endeavoured to give a brief summary of the above-mentioned history, which was outwardly well received at the very least.

‘Ok, so I know a lot more about Moldova now than I did five minutes ago,’ was the reaction that Ben received to his brief history lesson. Indeed, one way or another this was the reaction he always received.

His discussion companion now turned to attend to other business and so Ben let him go without further ado, at least partially fulfilled that he had educated him in at least a little of what he knew about Moldova. He himself also turned the other way to look for another vict..…..er……willing student.