Walker family
Dear Praying Friends!
Since we last communicated with you through this newsletter, we have seen a lot of asphalt!
I flew to Romania in March for a Bible training conference for church planters with my good friend Thomas Jettel. It was very well attended and the participation was very intense! LORD willing, we will be offering this service in March of every year!
Then Maria, Jana and I flew to the US for what some call a “home assignment”. We greatly enjoyed visiting and sharing with many of you that live in Fayetteville, Indiana, Michigan and Maryland! We returned to Germany in the middle of May.
In June GAIN (Global Aid Network) allowed me to drive their truck to Romania again. As always, we delivered 2 full containers and returned with 2 empty ones. This trip had one major glitch.
At the Austria-Hungary border, it is required to drive your rig over the scales. These are old fashion axle scales. The computer then adds up your total weight. As I had half a container filled with special type mattresses for hospital beds and my computer had calculated a net weight of 9.8 tons (+3 tons for each container), I was well in range of my 20 ton allowance.
The green light went on at the scales, and the scale master motioned me – thumbs up – to move on. So we bristled through Hungary and re-entered the axle scales exiting Hungary. Here the scale master gave me a red light and I had to maneuver into “sinner’s bay”- They insisted that the back axle of my truck was 1.4 tons overweight! The container on the truck was loaded with mattresses! I had to pay a fine of 520 Euros which is over 600$!! Interesting detail: I had to pay this fine not with the police but at a trucking company on the lot. This guy grinned when I asked why he was ripping my credit card through his machine – and not the police? – “They obviously do not trust their own men”. Anyway, I finally got all the paper work from the police when I realized that they had only weighed 4 of my 5 axles! While politely pointing this out to the officer, he had me arrested for “contempt of a government official”. I spent close to 2 hours being interrogated. The tone became very professional and polite when my interrogating officer realized who I was and what I was doing. The charges were dropped! But my fine was not returned. The highway police had fined me, the money was in escrow through a transportation company and the border police had interrogated me! I would have to return to Hungary and make an official appeal through the court to have my money returned to me! That takes a week and you need a lawyer!!
All the same, I was really exasperated and bewildered at how I could have avoided that Kafkaesque maze! My paper work was then handed over to the Romanian border police. I was somewhat unsettled what would happen next, as they had extra paper work from the police added to the usual file. Finally a senior officer appeared with my paper work. He looked me straight into the eye, shook my hand and said:” God bless you, dear brother, and thank you for your good work”.
What a surprise that was! I had never met this fellow before, and had no idea how he would know who I am and what I do!!! It was a real encouragement, and a real lesson not to doubt that God is always in control – even when we cannot match up the paradigms of our circumstances! Folks used to say: “Father knows best!”
By the way, when sharing this episode in a sermon in Switzerland, a business man handed me an envelope with the comment: “We would not want the Lord’s money wasted on fines now, do we?” The content easily made up for the damage!
In July and August, I worked for my furniture transportation and moving company. Again these two months proved very fruitful! As always, I learned a lot how to handle furniture, load a truck or container more efficiently and improve my driving skills with a trailer (these rigs are 50 feet long).
But the main blessings were the many opportunities to share my faith with co-workers and customers. Especially my Muslim coworkers were very open and interested! It all started when one of them asked me: “Are we praying to the same God”??
The two months were over very quickly! I understood once again how important it is to prepare for the daily working place. Do you pray for each of the people you will be spending the day with or that organize the company in their various offices? Are you concerned that you might be a blessing wherever and with whomever God brings you in contact with during your working day? Are you concerned that the quality of your work and the attitudes you display in various challenging situations will glorify God? Or do you listen to the radio instead while driving to your job?
Not much happened till I began to prepare with prayer on my way getting there.
In September, I was invited to speak twice at a mission’s conference in northern Germany . From there, Ernest Lassner (who helps me regularly In the warehouse) and I drove directly to Munich where we picked up Fred Stonehouse who had flown in from Scotland. We then drove to Romania where we met up with Ioan Chivoiu (Onesti). After working towards this goal for the past 5 years, we finally were able to nail down dates for a training/mentoring/counseling ministry for 30 churches in the Bacau area.
Most of these men are “lay people” responsible for their local churches. Fred is a little younger than my father and was involved in church planting work about 50 miles down the road from where we worked in Bavaria from the sixties through the nineties. So we have known each other for a long time!
Fred will be the elder statesman developing this training ministry. My main contribution was introducing him to these fine folks and working on the logistical details to provide continuity. Lord willing – there will be training sessions in April, July and September each year starting next year. My other contribution is to be a back-up person in case higher circumstances prevent Fred or his side-kick, Richard, from upholding this April-Juyl-September schedule! I drive through Onesti every time I visit “my” gypsies in Falciu (on the border to the Republic of Moldova).
No sooner had we returned home, we got the next transport ready to roll. GAIN let me use two their trucks so I could deliver 4 containers to Romania. The vice-president of GAIN, Thomas Steffen, drove the other truck. This time the trip went glitch free.
Maria, Jana and I then flew to the US. We had unsuccessfully applied for US citizenship for Jana twice. Now we had received an invitation to appear in Indianapolis at the Immigration and Citizenship office in Indianapolis on Oct. 17th at 9:00 AM. We spent a week with my parents nearCrawfordsville and therefore were able to take care of a passport and Social Security for Jana as well. Maria will describe this week in more detail in our family prayer bulletin. Again – we welcome you to request it if you do not already receive it. Just write to our mission or send Maria an email: smokesignal4ria@gmail.com
Besides regularly preaching in various churches, getting both warehouses ready for winter, and conducting collection points in local churches; we are currently gearing up to the annual November trip to Romania. We will be visiting a church and two mission works in Hungary. Then spend a week with the gypsies training the lay people responsible for 7 churches. Then we will have the German Bible Conference in Sibiu (Hermannstadt) before returning home!
Do pray for Mitika’s health. Mitika is the gypsy missionary in Falciu. Some of you support him – and allow me to use this opportunity to thank you on his behalf! I will get the details when I see him middle of November, but we are informed that he will need to have a hernia operation. It also seems that he has kidney problems. He is in a lot of pain. It is sad that the health system in Romania is still very under par. Mitika’s health insurance will cover the official bills, but money “under the table” is still needed to ensure proper and prompt treatment by the doctor and nurses. I understand that a patient still needs some outside help to ensure proper and adequate nutrition (enough to eat), and they still need to obtain certain drugs from the pharmacy not provided by the hospital.
Do keep Mitika in your prayers! His health has a tendency to stymie his ministry efforts!
