Go Over the Wall

This morning we spent time with a man named Lee Sevell who runs a ministry for street children and the poor in the villages outside Arad. Lee grew up in a non-Christian home, was a successful lawyer in Sheffield, England and thought Christians were "weak, pathetic individuals who needed a crutch." Through an interesting series of events, he found himself at an Alpha Course (a 10-week course explaining the basics of Christianity) in 1994 and came to Christ at the age of 34.

Soon after Lee became a Christian he began having open visions- movie-like pictures that would pop into his head that he eventually determined were from God. In one recurring vision he was standing behind a wall looking out over a field half-covered in fog. A boy around 12, without shoes and a shirt came bursting from the fog, screaming and obviously running from something. As time went on, more children appeared in the vision: a 16-year-old mother with a child and another boy. At the end of the vision he would hear a voice saying, "Go over the wall, Lee."

Lee finally determined that these were street children in his vision, and he began researching street ministries around the world. In the midst of looking at ministries in Brazil and other places, an older couple in his church invited him to go to Romania. When he stepped out of the car in Arad (where we're spending the week), he came face to face with the children in his vision.

After that first trip to Romania, Lee returned to England, resigned from his job, sold his home and moved to Romania to work with street children full-time. He started out taking soup in margarine containers to 20 children on the street, and since then the ministry has grown to include 50 full-time staff members who work in several Gypsy communities, providing stability in often rocky family lives.

Lee has story after story of how God provided specifically as the ministry was growing and changing. When he was looking to buy the first building that would serve as a boys home, a man from Sweden whom he had never met called him saying God had told him to give $12,000- the exact amount needed to purchase the property. There are many more stories of God's provision for land, money, and miraculous healings. Lee says that he can look at the growth of this ministry knowing that it has been the Lord working the whole time, and he has learned that "His plans are so much better than mine."

In the afternoon our team did a VBS-type program in one of the Gypsy villages that Lee's ministry is involved with. We sang songs, performed a skit about David and Goliath, and ended our time making paper plate tambourines. Within minutes of arriving in the village we rounded up about 25 children (many thanks to Alex, our team's Pied Piper of Children), who were instantly hugging us, giving high fives and fighting to sit in our laps. A gypsy woman tried to swipe Collin's running magazine, but other than that, we loved our afternoon in the village and are trying to find some time to return before we head to camp.