Better than the Easter Bunny

What did you do last Thursday? Here in the Netherlands, we went to a Maundy Thursday communion service. In Moldova, they won't celebrate Easter until May 1. The country is traditionally Orthodox and follows that church calendar.
So no, this is not a photo of the Easter bunny.
It is a photo of two of the women who went to the usual Thursday night  Bible study/prayer meeting in their village. This turned out to be as unusual as a Maundy Thursday. The women did not simply listen and go home. They had many, many questions. They showed, once again, their serious commitment to follow Jesus. They wanted to be baptized. Believers' baptism is a mini-reenactment of the Easter story. As Paul wrote to the Christians in Colossi, When you were baptized, you were buried with Christ, and you were raised up with him because of your faith in God’s power. God’s power was shown when he raised Christ from death.

(Colossians 2:12 Easy-to-Read Version)

Bunnies and colored eggs are all right, but this sounds a whole lot better.

Translator at Work

High tech

A couple of weeks ago we spent time with some folks who actually do Scripture translation. (Since Keith works with media projects, a lot of people think he is doing Scripture translation. What he does is the next step--putting the translation into an accessible format.) I got to see a translator with the SIL (Wycliffe) Roma Service Group at work. Sari Gardner used high tech (Skype + Bibledit computer program) to confer with Florian, a Roma pastor who currently lives in Germany. They have been working together on Scripture translation for some time. She also used low tech (notebook). Though pen and paper looks like a simple way to go, I can assure you that whatever she was writing there would take as much explanation as the Bibledit computer program.

Low tech

A glimpse of Bibledit