“I was raised in a Baptist family under communism, under Russian occupation before that,” Nelu, and his wife, Delia, sit across from us, warm spring sunlight falling across his shoulder, across the floors of their modest, welcoming Romanian home.
It’s early spring and Nelu and Delia have opened up their home to us, as they have for countless Ukrainian families fleeing war the last three years.
“So now with this Ukrainian crisis and families fleeing war, it’s natural that God’s called us, Delia and I, to open our home.” Nelu stops himself. “Well, maybe not natural, but supernatural, because doesn’t God supernaturally give His heart for all people, to all of His people?”
“Doesn’t God supernaturally give His heart for all people, to all of His people?”
I put my steaming cup down on one of the coasters on the coffee table between us and just frankly ask Nelu and Delia, who live a 15 plus hour drive from the Ukrainian border:
“But, can I just ask you? In this war with Russia and Ukraine, with families now finding themselves refugees, looking for safe shelter, how do you build margin in your life… margin in your heart… to care enough to open your life — open your heart? How do you do that?”
I’m not sure I really expected what Nelu would say next.
“Well, I think I just maybe to first understand,” Nelu leans back in his chair.
“As nations, politically, Romania and Ukraine have not always been friends. I’m aware of the politics. I am aware of the history. Wrongs have been done. But it’s not about getting all wrapped up in who is right or who is wrong, when it comes down to being about people being in need.” Then Nelu says it with slow and steady certainty:
“And before hearing my testimony about God, people need to feel my testimony of the love of God.”
I may be nodding with Nelu’s words — but it’s his lived words are stirring an inescapably deep conviction within:
Who can genuinely be a testimony for God, unless they daily live the generosity of God?
Who can genuinely be a testimony for God, unless they daily live the generosity of God?
“I’ve just really tried to imagine what it’s like to be Ukranian – I have tried to put myself in their shoes,” Nelu’s speaking quietly, the sunlight moving further across the floor, across his own shoes.
Only when we keep trying to put ourselves in other people’s shoes, are we actually walking in company with God.
“We had a Ukrainian family come here to the door,” Nelu turns toward Delia who is nodding, remembering, with him.
“He was a doctor. 65 years old. Retired with his wife. And they were trying, in this very small car, to get his elderly father and mother out of the war. I still don’t get how they got it all into this small car, packed full with goods, with a wheelchair inside, because his father was paralytic, and his mother somehow was squeezed in the front seat, and he was trying to get to France to leave his parents there,” Nelu pauses, gazes out his window.
“And if he was 65, how old were his parents? And this man…. this man had been a heart surgeon, and he was going back into Ukraine to war zones, to the injured, to help. But he said that he first wanted to get his parents out, and how could we help?” Nelu turns back twoard Delia and I, and he speaks with emotion:
“I mean, I could not grasp the pain and the suffering they were all going through. How can you understand this kind of suffering and despair?”
Sometimes your mind doesn’t have to fully understand, for your heart to begin to undergo a surgery of its own.
Only when we keep trying to put ourselves in other people’s shoes, are we actually walking in company with God.
“And frankly… the first thing is..,” Nelu adjusts his glasses, and then he says words that what feel like the beginning of a interior heart work : “I mean, the first thing that we have to do as a person is to actually realize:
You do not own anything.”
The room’s filling with all this morning light.
And Nelu’s words are filling me, doing this careful operation of their own. I write his words down, not wanting to forget any of them, what he’s saying, what he’s living.
What if the first thing a Christ-follower has to realize is that you do not actually ultimately own anything in the end? You don’t ultimately own your very life….. and everything you have in life?
“As long as we think we own anything, that thing owns us. As soon as we know that we own nothing, then God owns us,” is what the theologian A.W. Tozer said.
Only when we live out the reality that we don’t ultimately own anything, does God, in reality, finally own all of us.
Would this change everything — and the whole world?
“Everything under heaven belongs to Me,” the Lord says to Job then, and to us now (Job 41:11).
Only when we live out the reality that we don’t ultimately own anything, does God, in reality, finally own all of us.
“When I was just a young kid in the ‘80s, under communism, my Grandma, who virtually had nothing, she regularly made food for 20,” Nelu’s taps the fingers across his own hand.
“Food for people in need, for soldiers coming from the UK, for missionary teams coming to help as communism begins to fall in Romania. Somehow God provides and He just says to you, ‘I need you to do this, and you just do it.’ This is a legacy of my family: This real realisation that you really don’t own anything.”
Do we finally have the legacy we long for…. when we finally accept that we ultimately own nothing?
What’s being cut open and healed in my own heart?
“To the Lord your God belongs… the earth and everything in it,” is how the Infallible Word underlines who ultimately owns everything (Deuteronomy 10:14).
I feel like I am having a heart surgery of my own:
Is there a crisis of discipleship because, in part, we have conflated the cultural narrative of personal ownership…. with the Christian call to faithful stewardship?
Nelu’s quietly waves his hand to punctuate his point:
“Everything that we seem to have, it’s not something that we actually own; it’s only something that we have been entrusted to only steward, to only manage.”
When you finally manage to realize you’re never an owner, but always only a manager, God finally owns all of your attention.
When you finally manage to realize you’re never an owner, but always only a manager, God finally owns all of your attention.
“Then it’s easy to open up your life, or your house – because neither actually really are your own,” Nelu’s voice is steady, sure… cutting straight to the quick.
God Himself agrees, “You are not your own; you were bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).
And I think of one of my assigned reading this term for my doctorate in ministry, in regards to the early New Testament church, and how the very first Christians were instructed to be faithful disciples by their pastors: “Pastors enrolled new believers in a training program to prepare them for church membership….These manuals provided moral instruction for the Christian community too. One such manual, the Didache, states, “Do not be one who holds his hand out to take, but shuts it when it comes to giving… Do not hesitate to give and do not give with a bad grace. . . . Do not turn your back on the needy, but share everything with your brother and call nothing your own.” (Didache, in Early Christian Fathers, p. 173. as quoted in Water from a Deep Well: Gerald L. Sittser and Eugene H. Peterson)
What is more important–— the stuff we have, or the testimony we have for God?
Nelu sets his coffee cup back down and Delia begins to tell us how she keeps the fridge stocked and ready to serve a meal at short notice for anyone who comes to the door, anyone in need passing through.
It strikes me, as the light fills the room — how much they look they have the hearts of very first New Testament Christians.
When you own nothing, nor are your own — but God owns you, and everything — then you are free to live a kind of generosity with everything – which ultimately gives God a great testimony.
What is more important–— the stuff we have, or the testimony we have for God?
Does true Christian discipleship only begin when we accept there is no such thing as ultimate ownership, but only faithful stewardship?
Where do I want to have pretty stuff and lovely things, more than I want to live a powerful cruciform story of actually loving?
Does true Christian discipleship only begin when we accept there is no such thing as ultimate ownership, only faithful stewardship?
I’m not sure I’d known that before we sat down with Nelu and Delia, but it lingers long afterward, like there’s been a healing in these loud and strange times of self first, like there’s been a needed interior heart surgery, and the realization feels like amazing grace:
The heart is a muscle – the more it supernaturally opens, the stronger it becomes.
Related: Our series of posts from Romania, interviewing Romanian Christians who have welcomed Ukrainians fleeing war:
Part 1: What to think of when you think of the world, Ukraine, and the heart of Jesus
Part 2: And picked up at Christianity Today: Real Christianity Amidst War
You aren’t alone. And Jesus is with us, within us, to cause us love like Him.
God knows what it feels like to be where you are, where you have been — and He’s here to give us a new heart.
God Himself knows how hard this broken planet is―He’s walked where you’ve walked. But out of those hard, dusty roads emerges a way into the exhilarating life you’ve longed to fully experience — that exudes His kind of Love.
This is the truest story in the whole universe: God is the only One who has ever loved you to death and came to resurrect you into the fullest life you always hoped for.
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