
On the train with
our six young
children across Europe.
God, Get Us To Romania
Though the film can be found at Christian Cinema, Amazon Prime Video,
and other platforms it is free here, see HOME page.
Though the film can be found at Christian Cinema, Amazon Prime Video,
and other platforms it is free here, see HOME page.

Getting to the Mission Field - a true story
I wanted to call this adventure “Murder on the Orient Express” after Agatha Christie’s book, but it's not a “Who done it?” It’s a “Why did I do it?” Sometimes spiritual truths are best learned on life’s path. We left Seattle, Washington, on April 29, 1991, and crossed the Romanian border on May 6 that year. Besides flying on two airplanes, we boarded five trains in seven days, and the main one was the Orient Express out of Paris to Budapest, Hungary.
We were on our way to the mission field! This was not a survey trip, where you check out the field to make sure it’s the Lord’s calling. I knew the Lord wanted us in Romania, so we just went. “We” included my wife, Nancy, and our six children: James was the oldest at eleven; Frank, nine; Ann, seven; Irene, five; , two and a half; and Michael, who was just six weeks old. The Bible says, “Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them [children]” (Ps. 127:5). My wife likes to respond, “Yes, dear, happy is the man!
Our family a few months after we arrived in Romania. From left to right, Ann, Jane, me, Irene, Nancy, Michael, James and Frank.
We had flown from the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, in Washington State, to the John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, and then on to Lisbon, Portugal. The reason we didn’t fly straight to Romania was because the travel agent said we would save a thousand dollars by taking the train. She also told us it would be a great opportunity to tour Europe on the way there. It may sound like fun being in cities like Madrid or Paris, but the only thing we saw was the inside of train stations. Trains are not all that fun or romantic with twenty-one pieces of luggage and six small children. I was afraid of losing our kids everywhere we went. Nancy was also still recovering from Michael’s birth, which required a cesarean section.
When our flight landed in Lisbon, we needed to get a room, as we had several hours to wait before our first train would leave. At the hotel, we were shown an overpriced apartment with only one room for all eight of us. When I complained about the price, the owner showed me a smaller room with five mattresses on the floor for only slightly less. I’m sure it was a room the hotel kept to make all us gullible tourists think we were getting a bargain by taking the more expensive room. So we paid for the more expensive room. At least it had a bathroom, and we needed to get some sleep. We were beat from the trip and the jet lag. Later that evening, we squeezed everyone into two taxis (no small trick with all that luggage), and off we went to the train station to confirm our tickets.
That’s when I started having language problems. I just assumed I would always find someone like the man at the hotel who could speak English, and if not, I thought I would just speak “loud and slow.” Well, of course, that doesn’t work, but I automatically started doing this every time someone started talking to me in a foreign language. From then on, we did a lot of Pictionary and pantomime, especially on the trains. Fortunately, the word for toilet in most countries is similar to the English word, which helps, because with six small children, you are always looking for one.
At any rate, we boarded the train. But you have to get to train stations early to get all the tickets in the same car, especially when you have busy trains and eight tickets. Well, I was not early enough. This meant that the first night, my children were all strewn up and down the train in different train cars. Seriously! I begged some people to let three of my children in one compartment. They kindly made room so they could be near Nancy and the babies in the next compartment. Each compartment had overhead shelves for baggage, with either six or eight seats. I could not get a seat close to my family, so that first night, to keep from getting our luggage stolen, I slept in the hall on top of our luggage which was on the floor. I was told I was very lucky that the train personnel allowed me to do that, as the halls in trains are quite narrow. Actually, I still had a good attitude, because at that point I was all gung-ho about going to the mission field.
The next morning we pulled into Madrid. I had first-class tickets, but everywhere I went, I needed to check in and get seat reservations, and as I already explained, this was a problem. In the main terminal in Madrid, I managed to waste most of our time in the wrong line! I finally got my seat tickets with barely enough time to catch the next train. The train was, as I remember, twenty-one tracks down from our previous train. And with little time we had to do this (about 10 min.) it was a big problem. Fortunately, James was big enough to help me with the luggage, and Frank was able to help with his sisters while Nancy handled the two little ones. We had to run back and forth several times to get the luggage.
Once in line to board, I started asking if it was the right train. I didn’t want to get on the wrong train like I had waited in the wrong line to get tickets. The first person I asked did not know any English but looked at my ticket and pointed me toward the train. The next person spoke a little English and also pointed me to the train. So, I felt confident that it was the correct train and got all my family boarded, with our twenty-one pieces of luggage. This train car was open inside, with no separate compartments and had around sixty seats in it. I settled my family in some seats and breathed a sigh of relief that we had made it in time. For some reason, I thought I ought to ask just one more time if we were on the right train. So I said out loud, “Does anyone here speak English?”
“I do,” said the man across the aisle.
“Oh good,” I said. I showed him our tickets and asked, “This train goes to Paris, right?”
“No, it doesn’t,” he said.
“Yes, it does!” I insisted.
“No, it doesn’t,” he told me again.
“Hey, other people told me it does.”
“I’m sorry, but it does not go to Paris,” he said confidently.
“Well, what train does?” I asked. He pointed to the front of the train car and said, “That train does.”
I was confused by the direction he was pointing and told him, “That train is this train!” By pointing to the front of the car it was still the same train. I couldn’t figure out what he meant.
“Come here,” he said, and I followed him outside. He pointed to the same train we had been on and said, “It’s true that this train goes to Paris, but this car you’re on does not.” He then said, “Look, they’re uncoupling your car right now from the rest of the train, and you only have one minute to get your family off and onto the next car.”
“Bother!” Somehow, we did this, luggage and all. The whole family got situated into one small compartment with eight seats and two other people in it. We had to place some of our luggage out in the hall, but we were finally settled. Nancy was a trooper, but we were clearly both exhausted from this European “tour.” We had gone a few miles outside of Madrid when Nancy leaned over to me and said, “Next time, let’s fly.”
I told her, “Yeah, I have been thinking the same thing but didn't want to say anything.”
The only thing I remember about that part of the trip was seeing small towns that reminded me of Mexico, and one train station even looked like something out of a cowboy-western film. That part of Spain just did not resemble what I thought Europe would look like. We also spent one long night in the train on our way to Paris. In no train on our trip did we have beds to sleep in (or none I could afford). We
just stayed in our seats the whole way. “Not fun!”
The next morning, we arrived in Paris and had a long wait in the train station for our next train, the Orient Express. We spent almost six hours sitting on the cement floor. I couldn’t find any hotel that would let me put my whole family into one apartment, and the prices were too high to get two rooms. Looking back, I was just too stingy with our money and should have paid for the rooms, even if they were overpriced. Later that afternoon I found one hotel that would let me put all my family into one apartment, and with less than three hours, we tried to get some sleep. At least we could use the shower.
The Orient Express was the longest leg of our trip and was to take us through parts of four countries. When the train left that evening, I managed to get my family into one compartment with no one else, plus all our luggage. Because we were at the train station early enough, I could get our seats reserved, but only until we entered Germany that night. But I was told at that time it was unlikely the train would be crowded.
We filled the center aisle between the facing seats with some of our bags and tried to make a place where we could sleep, smelly diapers and all. Nancy had run out of Pampers and was using cloth diapers, washing them out in the train’s restroom and then hanging them out to dry in our compartment. Well, it wasn’t the Marriott, but at least we were all together.
We did not sleep for long before we were awakened. The train was somewhere in Germany and it was about 1:30 a.m. The door opened, the light came on, and an elderly couple stood there staring at us. And then the lady said, in loud, broken English, four words that you never want to hear while traveling: “Those seats are ours!”
I wiped the sleep from my eyes and looked at her for a couple of seconds and then got up on one knee. “Well it’s going to be crowded with all of us here and all this luggage. Maybe you could find another place,” I suggested. Obviously, I didn’t want to get my family up and move the luggage.
That’s when she hollered, real loud, “Get the conductor! Get the conductor! Get the conductor!”
I said, “Ma’am, it’s all right. We’ll move.”
She surprised and irritated me with her loud voice and definitely woke me up. I stumbled over the luggage and out of the compartment into the hall. I thought maybe I could just find an empty compartment, and she would be satisfied with that. Surprisingly, the compartment right next to ours was completely empty.
“Oh, look, the compartment right here is empty,” I said.
She started hollering again, “Get the conductor!” And she kept repeating it like a mantra.
I shot back, “Okay, lady, we’re out of here!”
I’m sorry, but she made me upset. Our two youngest were crying, and I was trying to move my family and all that luggage in the middle of the night. While I was doing this, I prayed a little prayer and said, “Well, Lord, what do you think about this?” Guess what verse came to my mind? “Blessed are they who throw loud mouths off of trains.” No, actually the verse God gave me was, “Whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.” I said, “Okay.” I turned around, thinking, “How could I apply this verse on a train?” This elderly couple had two little carry-on bags and two big military-style duffel bags. They were each about 70 years old or older, and it would have been difficult to lift the duffel bags over their heads and put them on the shelf where they belonged. They couldn’t just place their luggage between the seats (as we had done) because there would be no room for their feet or the other people who might come into the compartment later.
At any rate, I stepped over and grabbed her duffel bag. Her eyes bugged out, and she slapped my hands! She said, “Get your hands off those bags. They belong to us.” And she reached out and pulled back the bag.
I said, “Hey, I’m not stealing them. I’m going to put them on the shelf for you.
She said, “What?” She couldn’t understand why I would do that, and I did not feel like trying to explain it to her. So I just reached down and grabbed the bag and stepped inside the compartment and somehow managed to lift it over my head onto the shelf. It was very heavy! They must have had books in those bags.
I was thinking how fortunate they were that I was there. I stepped out into the hall again to get the other bag. This time, she put both of her hands on it and said, “No, you can’t have it.”
I stood up and looked at her and said, “Hey,
I’m not stealing it!”
“I know,” she said.
“You know?”
“Yes,” she responded.
“Well, what’s the problem?”
“It’s not right that you should do this,” she said sheepishly.
“It’s not?” I said.
“No, it’s not.”
They both had guilty looks on their faces. And I couldn't help but laugh. Now I was feeling glad because they were feeling bad. I said, “No, I want to do this.” So I grabbed the other bag and put it on the shelf. I rubbed it in a little by taking the two small handbags and putting them on the seats next to the windows where they were going to sit. I then said, “If you need anything at all, we’re right next to you. Just knock on the wall here, and I will come right over and help you.” They were really feeling bad, and both of them waved their hands at me to just go away. I said, “Seriously, if I can help you at all, I really would like to.”
“Yes, yes, just go,” she said and pushed me away. During this whole time, her husband did not talk at all. As it turned out, he could not speak English.
I went to the compartment right next door and told Nancy what had happened and how I had all this joy. But she said, “I'm still upset with them!” She was trying to get the babies back to sleep.
You won't believe what happened next.
That same night, four hours later, about 5:30 a.m. in our new compartment, the door opened again, the light came on again, and again there were two people standing there, and they said those same four words: “Those are our seats!”
I got up on one knee and just stared at them, thinking, “You can’t reason with these people.” While I was looking at them, I noticed my wife had gotten up also. I turned toward her, and her face was very close to mine, uncomfortably close, and she had these snake eyes with a look that said, “I’m not moving!” I looked at her and I looked at the people who were standing at the door, and I wondered, “How do I get myself into these situations?”
God sends help from an unexpected source.
The couple who had kicked us out earlier that night apparently had never gone to sleep. They were still all dressed up, and they came over and started asking this new couple what they were doing. I don’t know what country we were in, being on a moving train, but both couples knew some English, which became their language of conversation. The lady who forced us to move earlier started raising her voice at the other couple. (She was really good at that!) “This is a very nice family we have here,” referring to us. “What, can’t you see they have six little children?” She did all the talking, while her husband and I just nodded in agreement. Then she said, “Surely you could have found some place else to sit?” And she added, “Why, what kind of people are you, anyway?” She was great! And the new couple left! She then turned to me and said the same thing I had said to her, “We’re right next door, and if you need anything at all, you just knock, and we will come right over and help you.”
All I could manage to say was, “Okay.” The next day we made some new friends, as they shared their lunch with us. Isn’t the Word of God powerful? If I had not obeyed that verse, I would still be upset with her, but instead, I had and still have a smile about it.
The train left without me!
Later that day our train pulled into Vienna, Austria. I left Nancy and the kids on the train and went to find something to make sandwiches for lunch. I knew I did not have much time before our train left, and I had planned it so that I should have returned in time. But when I came back, the train was gone!
I thought maybe I was confused, and the train was on another track. I looked, but to no avail. I was in a panic! “Where will my family go? All the way to Budapest, or will they get off at the next stop and wait for me?” I could imagine what must have been going through my wife’s mind as the train pulled out of the station without me.
I showed my tickets to a conductor, he motioned with his hands for me to follow him. Our train had been moved to another track, to hook up with a different engine. What a relief! Once inside, Nancy and I agreed it would be better not to step off the train at the rest of the stops until we arrived in Budapest, which would be that evening. If we needed more food, we would just buy some chips or soda on the train.
That day, for the first time, I started to enjoy the trip. We had enough food and wouldn’t have to get off the train until the evening. Everything looked clean and neat in the cities we were passing through. The houses were pretty, there were neat rows of flowers, and I remember seeing this well-to-do couple riding their horses.
I mean no offense to the people who live in Eastern Europe, but back in 1991, trying to compare it to the West would have been like trying to compare night to day. Crossing over into what used to be called the Iron Curtain countries was a real eye-opener. We crossed at Hungary and the differences were immediately visible. All the buildings were run-down, and the signs and towns looked like they had not been painted since World War II. Signs were so dirty you could barely read them, and the unattractive houses were painted a brownish-orange. Mind you, it is different today, but then the whole country looked drab.
When we pulled into Budapest that evening, the train station was dark and dingy. I had to get our baggage off and try to find some rooms for three nights. Though today it is different, back then we needed to get visas to enter Romania. We had to wait until the Romanian Embassy opened on Monday, otherwise the trip could have been at least two days shorter. It had been three and a half days since we boarded the first train in Portugal, not to mention the flights from Seattle and New York. We were all tired and wishing the trip was over, and it was then that I started asking the Lord, “Just get us to Romania.”
We ended up with all my family and luggage in two taxis, and we drove around Budapest looking for a place to spend the night. The taxi driver told us the first hotel we went to was a good place, but it did not look so good to me, just old. I asked for a room, and the man at the counter told me it would be $250 a night!
“There must be some mistake. We don’t need a fancy suite, just one room will do.”
“It is one room,” he replied.
“One room?” I asked in disbelief.
“Yes, one room, one bed, one night,” he responded. I turned around and walked out!
When I walked outside, I was struck by the fact that on both sides of the street, as far as I could see, cars were parked with no openings left, and both of our taxis were double-parked. The taxi driver explained that most of the cars were from Romania because the people were leaving Romania and trying to go to the West. Therefore all the cheap rooms had already been taken.
He then took us to an old, run-down apartment complex. There was no sidewalk, just mud. He said he had a friend there who sometimes rented out his apartment. The hallway leading to the apartment was poorly lit, and I was starting to wonder if I had made a mistake. I have a good imagination, and I was wondering if I was going to get hit over the head. His friend wasn’t home, and I was glad to get out of there.
When we got back to the taxis, Nancy said, “We need to do something.” My family was crammed into these two taxis, with bags on top of the taxis, bags in the trunks, and bags on the seats.
I prayed again, “Lord, just get us to Romania,” and I told my wife, “Yeah, we’ll do something.” I asked the taxi driver if he knew of anything better, and he said,
“Do you want to try a hotel service?” I didn’t know what he was talking about, but with the meters on both of these taxis still running, I said,
“Yeah, sure. Let’s try it.” We pulled up to a well-lit curb near the center of town. And out came these people with photo albums filled with pictures of rooms for rent. I said to the taxi driver, “These don’t look like hotel rooms.”
“They’re not,” he said. He explained that people who rented out rooms in their houses would bring pictures to this agency, and the agency would rent the rooms for them. We ended up renting one room for $100 a night in some guy's house. We spent the next three days there, while the owner slept in the kitchen. This was really different, but it seemed to work, and we were out of options.
On Monday morning, we picked up our visas from the Romanian Embassy. We had written to a Romanian man who was setting up an apartment for us to rent in a town called Oradea, which was just inside the border of Romania. After my fourth try from a telephone booth in Budapest, I was able to get through to him to let him know we were on our way. After I received my tickets from the train station, I thought, “This will be our last changing of trains.”
The last thing I remember about Hungary was the McDonald’s that was in this dark and dingy train station. McDonald’s, with all its lively colors, seemed so out of place there. My family was “safe” on the train, so I thought I would buy something familiar, Big Macs and Cokes. There were no McDonald’s in Romania at that time (and would not be for six more years), so we were in a sense saying good-bye to civilization.
I thought, “We’ve made it; I'll never have to do this again.” I had been waiting for twelve years after graduating from Bible college to set foot on the mission field. Just one more hurdle awaited us.
We were two hours out of Budapest on what I thought was our last leg of the train ride. And then our train stopped in the middle of nowhere. The station was small and no town was in sight; there were not even many houses around. The loudspeakers at the station started blaring something in Hungarian. Normally, I couldn’t have cared less. I had our tickets, we were on the right train, and it was to take us all the way to Romania. But it seemed like everyone was getting off the train. I told Nancy I had checked the train car in front and behind ours, and they were empty except for us. The train ride was supposed to be about five hours, so I knew we were not in Romania yet. I said what seemed obvious, “I think we are the only ones on the train.”
My wife pulled back the curtain and looked outside and said, “I don’t see how. There is no one around here. It’s just a farming community.” That’s when somebody in a train uniform, who seemed to be in charge, knocked on the window across the narrow hall from our compartment. I walked over to the window and let it down. He knew two English words: “Off, you!” I showed him our tickets and told him we were on our way to Romania and that I just knew this was the right train.
I’m sure he understood the tickets, but I doubt he understood me, and he just responded with, “You, off!” I tried to explain again but he was even louder. “Off, you!” I didn’t want to get off. What was I to do in the middle of nowhere with my family and all this luggage? He laughed to himself, and went and found some baggage people who came onto our train. They opened the windows and literally started throwing our luggage out the windows onto the adjacent train track! So, we got off the train.
Picture this: We were standing on the tracks of an old train station, with our twenty-one pieces of luggage, six children, and the station’s loudspeakers still blaring. I felt like I was getting ready to go to a concentration camp. My daughter Ann, who was carrying this huge stuffed white rabbit (It was as big as she was and looked ridiculous. We had bought it for her in the States.), walked up to me with a worried look on her face, pulled on my pant leg, and said, “Dad, what are we doing here?”
“I don’t know,” I responded. Not a good position for a daddy, who is supposed to have all the answers. But I didn’t have to wait long.
The man who threw our baggage out came with some carts, loaded up our luggage, and put our children on top, motioning to us to follow him. He led us around to the back of the train station, where there were six blue buses. The people on the buses were all upset because they had been waiting on us, but how were we to know, not being able to understand what the loudspeakers had said. The men loaded our luggage onto the last bus. Nancy stood in front with Michael, who was crying, and I stood next to the door in the back, with our luggage literally against my face. Our children were placed on different seats or on luggage that was in the aisle.
Sometimes on this trip, and especially then, I noticed our children looking at us with an expression that said, “Is this okay? Is everything going to be all right?” Of course, as a parent you never let on any concerns you might have, and you just keep your best face on.
Personally, I was in an awkward position on this bus, because if the back doors opened, our luggage would fall out and I would be pushed onto the street. All the buses went about ten miles down the road to another train station, where everyone got off. When the doors opened in the back, sure enough, I fell out with some of our baggage. To this day, I do not know why we had to take those buses. Perhaps some repairs were being made on the train track, but we never encountered anyone who could explain to us, in English, what the reason was.
The next train we boarded was even smaller and much older. It looked like a train from World War II. We knew we were going to be overcrowded. I told my wife to just get on the last car and find a place for our children, while James and I moved the luggage to the train. Nancy found a compartment where she and our other five children could sit with two other families. It was cramped, to say the least, and there was no room for our luggage. James and I stayed at the far end of the train car with our luggage on the floor in the hallway. The halls in the trains are narrow, and this hall was filled with people because there was no place left to sit, which meant that people were now standing on our luggage! I gritted my teeth and asked the Lord one more time: “Just get us to Romania.”
We stood for the rest of the trip and watched people smash our bags. When we finally came to the border, the train made a long, slow stop, and you could actually feel each train car hitting the car in front of it, bang, bang, bang, bang, about ten times. I asked some men who were standing on our bags, “Is this the border? Are we at Romania?”
A man next to us nodded yes and pointed to the front of the train and said, “Romania, Romania.”
I looked out the window in the direction he was pointing. I had never been in Eastern Europe before, much less Romania, but less than a mile away was the country I had been dreaming to get to. My first thought was, “It doesn’t look any different than Hungary.”
I noticed there were a lot of military people at the train station, who looked like they worked there. We crossed the frontier of Romania on May 6, 1991, about a year and four months after their revolution. During the revolution, many people had died, and they were working hard to make their transition to a Western economy. It is amazing to me how much the country has been transformed in the last 28 years. There are large stores now, and one can buy anything he wants, but back then one had to wait five hours inline just to buy bread! Now conditions are much better and Romania has joined both NATO and the European Community. But in May of 1991, America was like Disneyland compared to Eastern Europe.
We waited on the train for a while, then three young soldiers boarded with machine guns. These were not draped over their shoulders, but in their hands. One of them hollered, “Pasaporte, pasaporte.” I could at least figure out what that meant, and I handed him all of our passports. He stared at me and said, “Opt Pasaporte?” He then put his machine gun under his arm and lifted up eight fingers. I nodded yes and eventually he understood that the rest of my family was up front in a compartment. He then turned around and walked off the train with our passports. I had been told to never let anyone walk off with your passports, as they’re the only acceptable proof of who you are. So I followed him off the train and tried to get my passports back. Two more soldiers came up with machine guns and pushed me back up against the train! (This literally happed.) Well, you can’t argue with people holding machine guns. I must have had a startled look on my face, as one solider said, “OK, OK, no worry. Go on train.”
I got back on the train and thought, “They have my passports, and if this train leaves, I’m sunk.”
After about ten minutes, a uniformed customs agent came on and said something to me in Romanian. I shrugged my shoulders and said, “I don’t understand.” To my surprise he started speaking to me in broken English.
“Are these your bags?” he pointed to our bags that were on the ground in the hallway.
“Well, yes, they are,” I said, and added, “I’m sorry, but there is no place to put them.”
“Where is your paperwork?”
“For what?” I asked.
“For your bags. Show me the papers for your bags.”
I told him we had been in several countries and no one had asked for papers before. Apparently, these papers were to contain a list of what was in each bag. He was, after all, a customs agent, and his job was to inspect what was brought into the country. “You have no papers, you open bags,” he said. He moved people off and away from our bags and started opening them. Some of our “bags” were only cardboard boxes with masking tape on them, so he used his knife to cut the tape.
Then something happened that I will never forget. One of our cardboard boxes was filled with Romanian New Testaments, and it also contained my English Bible and a Russian Bible that someone had given me while I was in Hungary, who had told me to give it to the Russians who come into Romania to sell things at the open-air market. This customs agent only wanted to know one thing: “Why you have Bibles?” I knew it had been illegal to bring in Bibles under Communist rule, but since Romania’s revolution, I was told it was no longer a concern. I couldn’t understand what the problem was, but he was not going to let this pass. He started firing off questions. “Why you have Bibles? Are you going to sell them? Why you in our country? How long you going to stay? What you going to do?” He had lots of questions.
“I’m not going to sell them,” I said.
“Why you have them?”
“I’m just going to give them away.”
I was afraid to tell him I was a Baptist preacher coming to start churches. If he didn’t like the Bibles, then for sure he wouldn’t like my being a missionary. This man seemed to have the authority not only to make the train wait, but also to approve what and who went into Romania (or stayed behind). And then, surprisingly, he asked, “You Romanian?”
“Romanian? No, I’m American.”
“You no Romanian?” he said again.
I shook my head and said, “No, I’m American.”
“You American?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You American citizen?” He asked.
“Yes, I’m an American citizen.”
“No!” he said, and he started going through the box of Bibles.
I stared at him for a moment and then said to him, “What do you mean, ‘No?'”
“No! You no American citizen!”
I said, “What, is this a joke?”
Then he found the Russian Bible I had. “This is Russian Bible,” he said, and he seemed quite proud of himself for finding it. “Why you have Russian Bible?”
“I’m just going to give it away,” I said.
He looked at its pages for a few seconds and asked, “You Russian?”
I said “No!” and reached in my pocket for my passport to prove who I was. But, of course, it wasn’t there; the soldiers had taken them earlier. I thought, “What are they trying to pull here?” I put my hand in the air as though I was taking an oath and said, “I’m an American citizen!” It now seems funny to me, but at the time it certainly was not.
“You American?”
“Yes, American!” I responded.
“You an American citizen?”
“Yes, you got it. An American citizen!”
“No,” he said.
“No what?” I shot back.
“No, you not an American citizen!”
I was totally bewildered by it. And then I said, “Okay, I’m not an American, I’m not Russian, and I’m not Romanian. Who am I?”
He reached for my English Bible, which was also in the cardboard box, and said, “Read this.” I thought he wanted to see if I could read English, to prove if I was an American. I started to read the first verse I saw, but he stopped me and said,
“No, read this.” He pointed to Ephesians 2:19, the verse that talks about Christians being citizens of Heaven. He stopped me at that point and said, “You Christian, and Christians are citizens of Heaven.”
I stared at him and said “Yeah,” questioning where this was going to lead. It seemed to have helped me to have read even that one verse in God’s Word, something I needed, because I had this crazy thought I might actually be going to jail.
He then looked both ways and said, “I am Christian also, and I also citizen of Heaven.” He then reached for my hand and shook it and said, “I am so glad you come to our country!”
I had mixed feelings at this point. He was a Christian and I was not in trouble, but he had really pulled one on me and all I could do was grin. He told me that before the revolution, he would let Bibles enter Romania. He said one man had written a book about him, which said, “God had blinded the eyes of the customs agent.” He told me when he opened bags during Communism and saw any Bibles, he just closed the bags back up and said nothing. He added, “God didn’t blind my eyes. He just put me here to let Bibles through.”
I was glad that was over. Our bags had been inspected, and everything was a “go” for getting into Romania. After a few more minutes the soldiers came back with our passports. As I understand it, they just registered them there at the border. The train started moving again, and we passed over into Romania. I was relieved to have all that behind me, and glad to know we were getting off at the first city. When the train stopped for the last leg of our seven-day ordeal, I realized the Lord had answered my prayer, “Just get us to Romania.” As planned, a man named Radu met us. I knew him only through correspondence and the one phone call I had made from Budapest, but he was very helpful. He had hired two taxis to take our belongings and family to an apartment, where the refrigerator was full of food—something that was hard to do then. It was then that I got my first taste of Romanian bread, which is better than American bread.
Radu did not stay long. “You must be tired,” he said, and he handed me the key to the apartment and left.
There was about an hour left of daylight, so I went outside to look around. It was a new world to me. It was common to see a flock of sheep or a couple of cows on side streets. More people walked because fewer people had cars then; some even still used horse-drawn wagons (though not now). To me it was new sights, new sounds, and a little scary. I did not know what to expect—how we would be received, being foreigners. Thankfully, Romanians are a most hospitable people, and there was no need for worry.
By this time, we were all exhausted, so after we ate, we went to bed early. Our two boys slept in the living room, our three girls in one bedroom, our baby in a makeshift crib with Nancy and I in the other bedroom. Everyone went to sleep except for me; I just couldn’t sleep. I lay there in bed staring into a dark room for a while, then finally got up and went into the living room, where there was a small light shining from the kitchen. I thought, “I will pray one more time and thank the Lord for getting us here.” I knelt down on the living room floor, but what I prayed surprised me. I had never even thought to pray this before, but I prayed, “Lord, please let all of our children be missionaries.” I thought, “Why did I pray that?” Especially after all we had been through, would I want my children to go through such a time when they are older? The only thing I can tell you is that, even after everything we had suffered on our journey, I had this joy and thankfulness in my heart, and I guess I wanted them to have the same.
Joy like that comes only from the Lord, not from a life (or a train trip) without problems, not from geography (being in your own country with friends and relatives), not from ink on paper (money), but from doing the will of God from the heart.
Hope you see the movie God, Get Us To Romania.
Below is the trailer for On Christian Cinema and Amazon Prime Video.
Christian Cenima, https://www.christiancinema.com/digital/movie/god-get-us-to
Amazon Prime Video, https://www.amazon.com/God-get-Romania-Eric-Bowden/dp/B0B69QBBH7
See for FREE at, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X52FSiCCcz4&t=44s
I wanted to call this adventure “Murder on the Orient Express” after Agatha Christie’s book, but it's not a “Who done it?” It’s a “Why did I do it?” Sometimes spiritual truths are best learned on life’s path. We left Seattle, Washington, on April 29, 1991, and crossed the Romanian border on May 6 that year. Besides flying on two airplanes, we boarded five trains in seven days, and the main one was the Orient Express out of Paris to Budapest, Hungary.
We were on our way to the mission field! This was not a survey trip, where you check out the field to make sure it’s the Lord’s calling. I knew the Lord wanted us in Romania, so we just went. “We” included my wife, Nancy, and our six children: James was the oldest at eleven; Frank, nine; Ann, seven; Irene, five; , two and a half; and Michael, who was just six weeks old. The Bible says, “Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them [children]” (Ps. 127:5). My wife likes to respond, “Yes, dear, happy is the man!
Our family a few months after we arrived in Romania. From left to right, Ann, Jane, me, Irene, Nancy, Michael, James and Frank.
We had flown from the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, in Washington State, to the John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, and then on to Lisbon, Portugal. The reason we didn’t fly straight to Romania was because the travel agent said we would save a thousand dollars by taking the train. She also told us it would be a great opportunity to tour Europe on the way there. It may sound like fun being in cities like Madrid or Paris, but the only thing we saw was the inside of train stations. Trains are not all that fun or romantic with twenty-one pieces of luggage and six small children. I was afraid of losing our kids everywhere we went. Nancy was also still recovering from Michael’s birth, which required a cesarean section.
When our flight landed in Lisbon, we needed to get a room, as we had several hours to wait before our first train would leave. At the hotel, we were shown an overpriced apartment with only one room for all eight of us. When I complained about the price, the owner showed me a smaller room with five mattresses on the floor for only slightly less. I’m sure it was a room the hotel kept to make all us gullible tourists think we were getting a bargain by taking the more expensive room. So we paid for the more expensive room. At least it had a bathroom, and we needed to get some sleep. We were beat from the trip and the jet lag. Later that evening, we squeezed everyone into two taxis (no small trick with all that luggage), and off we went to the train station to confirm our tickets.
That’s when I started having language problems. I just assumed I would always find someone like the man at the hotel who could speak English, and if not, I thought I would just speak “loud and slow.” Well, of course, that doesn’t work, but I automatically started doing this every time someone started talking to me in a foreign language. From then on, we did a lot of Pictionary and pantomime, especially on the trains. Fortunately, the word for toilet in most countries is similar to the English word, which helps, because with six small children, you are always looking for one.
At any rate, we boarded the train. But you have to get to train stations early to get all the tickets in the same car, especially when you have busy trains and eight tickets. Well, I was not early enough. This meant that the first night, my children were all strewn up and down the train in different train cars. Seriously! I begged some people to let three of my children in one compartment. They kindly made room so they could be near Nancy and the babies in the next compartment. Each compartment had overhead shelves for baggage, with either six or eight seats. I could not get a seat close to my family, so that first night, to keep from getting our luggage stolen, I slept in the hall on top of our luggage which was on the floor. I was told I was very lucky that the train personnel allowed me to do that, as the halls in trains are quite narrow. Actually, I still had a good attitude, because at that point I was all gung-ho about going to the mission field.
The next morning we pulled into Madrid. I had first-class tickets, but everywhere I went, I needed to check in and get seat reservations, and as I already explained, this was a problem. In the main terminal in Madrid, I managed to waste most of our time in the wrong line! I finally got my seat tickets with barely enough time to catch the next train. The train was, as I remember, twenty-one tracks down from our previous train. And with little time we had to do this (about 10 min.) it was a big problem. Fortunately, James was big enough to help me with the luggage, and Frank was able to help with his sisters while Nancy handled the two little ones. We had to run back and forth several times to get the luggage.
Once in line to board, I started asking if it was the right train. I didn’t want to get on the wrong train like I had waited in the wrong line to get tickets. The first person I asked did not know any English but looked at my ticket and pointed me toward the train. The next person spoke a little English and also pointed me to the train. So, I felt confident that it was the correct train and got all my family boarded, with our twenty-one pieces of luggage. This train car was open inside, with no separate compartments and had around sixty seats in it. I settled my family in some seats and breathed a sigh of relief that we had made it in time. For some reason, I thought I ought to ask just one more time if we were on the right train. So I said out loud, “Does anyone here speak English?”
“I do,” said the man across the aisle.
“Oh good,” I said. I showed him our tickets and asked, “This train goes to Paris, right?”
“No, it doesn’t,” he said.
“Yes, it does!” I insisted.
“No, it doesn’t,” he told me again.
“Hey, other people told me it does.”
“I’m sorry, but it does not go to Paris,” he said confidently.
“Well, what train does?” I asked. He pointed to the front of the train car and said, “That train does.”
I was confused by the direction he was pointing and told him, “That train is this train!” By pointing to the front of the car it was still the same train. I couldn’t figure out what he meant.
“Come here,” he said, and I followed him outside. He pointed to the same train we had been on and said, “It’s true that this train goes to Paris, but this car you’re on does not.” He then said, “Look, they’re uncoupling your car right now from the rest of the train, and you only have one minute to get your family off and onto the next car.”
“Bother!” Somehow, we did this, luggage and all. The whole family got situated into one small compartment with eight seats and two other people in it. We had to place some of our luggage out in the hall, but we were finally settled. Nancy was a trooper, but we were clearly both exhausted from this European “tour.” We had gone a few miles outside of Madrid when Nancy leaned over to me and said, “Next time, let’s fly.”
I told her, “Yeah, I have been thinking the same thing but didn't want to say anything.”
The only thing I remember about that part of the trip was seeing small towns that reminded me of Mexico, and one train station even looked like something out of a cowboy-western film. That part of Spain just did not resemble what I thought Europe would look like. We also spent one long night in the train on our way to Paris. In no train on our trip did we have beds to sleep in (or none I could afford). We
just stayed in our seats the whole way. “Not fun!”
The next morning, we arrived in Paris and had a long wait in the train station for our next train, the Orient Express. We spent almost six hours sitting on the cement floor. I couldn’t find any hotel that would let me put my whole family into one apartment, and the prices were too high to get two rooms. Looking back, I was just too stingy with our money and should have paid for the rooms, even if they were overpriced. Later that afternoon I found one hotel that would let me put all my family into one apartment, and with less than three hours, we tried to get some sleep. At least we could use the shower.
The Orient Express was the longest leg of our trip and was to take us through parts of four countries. When the train left that evening, I managed to get my family into one compartment with no one else, plus all our luggage. Because we were at the train station early enough, I could get our seats reserved, but only until we entered Germany that night. But I was told at that time it was unlikely the train would be crowded.
We filled the center aisle between the facing seats with some of our bags and tried to make a place where we could sleep, smelly diapers and all. Nancy had run out of Pampers and was using cloth diapers, washing them out in the train’s restroom and then hanging them out to dry in our compartment. Well, it wasn’t the Marriott, but at least we were all together.
We did not sleep for long before we were awakened. The train was somewhere in Germany and it was about 1:30 a.m. The door opened, the light came on, and an elderly couple stood there staring at us. And then the lady said, in loud, broken English, four words that you never want to hear while traveling: “Those seats are ours!”
I wiped the sleep from my eyes and looked at her for a couple of seconds and then got up on one knee. “Well it’s going to be crowded with all of us here and all this luggage. Maybe you could find another place,” I suggested. Obviously, I didn’t want to get my family up and move the luggage.
That’s when she hollered, real loud, “Get the conductor! Get the conductor! Get the conductor!”
I said, “Ma’am, it’s all right. We’ll move.”
She surprised and irritated me with her loud voice and definitely woke me up. I stumbled over the luggage and out of the compartment into the hall. I thought maybe I could just find an empty compartment, and she would be satisfied with that. Surprisingly, the compartment right next to ours was completely empty.
“Oh, look, the compartment right here is empty,” I said.
She started hollering again, “Get the conductor!” And she kept repeating it like a mantra.
I shot back, “Okay, lady, we’re out of here!”
I’m sorry, but she made me upset. Our two youngest were crying, and I was trying to move my family and all that luggage in the middle of the night. While I was doing this, I prayed a little prayer and said, “Well, Lord, what do you think about this?” Guess what verse came to my mind? “Blessed are they who throw loud mouths off of trains.” No, actually the verse God gave me was, “Whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.” I said, “Okay.” I turned around, thinking, “How could I apply this verse on a train?” This elderly couple had two little carry-on bags and two big military-style duffel bags. They were each about 70 years old or older, and it would have been difficult to lift the duffel bags over their heads and put them on the shelf where they belonged. They couldn’t just place their luggage between the seats (as we had done) because there would be no room for their feet or the other people who might come into the compartment later.
At any rate, I stepped over and grabbed her duffel bag. Her eyes bugged out, and she slapped my hands! She said, “Get your hands off those bags. They belong to us.” And she reached out and pulled back the bag.
I said, “Hey, I’m not stealing them. I’m going to put them on the shelf for you.
She said, “What?” She couldn’t understand why I would do that, and I did not feel like trying to explain it to her. So I just reached down and grabbed the bag and stepped inside the compartment and somehow managed to lift it over my head onto the shelf. It was very heavy! They must have had books in those bags.
I was thinking how fortunate they were that I was there. I stepped out into the hall again to get the other bag. This time, she put both of her hands on it and said, “No, you can’t have it.”
I stood up and looked at her and said, “Hey,
I’m not stealing it!”
“I know,” she said.
“You know?”
“Yes,” she responded.
“Well, what’s the problem?”
“It’s not right that you should do this,” she said sheepishly.
“It’s not?” I said.
“No, it’s not.”
They both had guilty looks on their faces. And I couldn't help but laugh. Now I was feeling glad because they were feeling bad. I said, “No, I want to do this.” So I grabbed the other bag and put it on the shelf. I rubbed it in a little by taking the two small handbags and putting them on the seats next to the windows where they were going to sit. I then said, “If you need anything at all, we’re right next to you. Just knock on the wall here, and I will come right over and help you.” They were really feeling bad, and both of them waved their hands at me to just go away. I said, “Seriously, if I can help you at all, I really would like to.”
“Yes, yes, just go,” she said and pushed me away. During this whole time, her husband did not talk at all. As it turned out, he could not speak English.
I went to the compartment right next door and told Nancy what had happened and how I had all this joy. But she said, “I'm still upset with them!” She was trying to get the babies back to sleep.
You won't believe what happened next.
That same night, four hours later, about 5:30 a.m. in our new compartment, the door opened again, the light came on again, and again there were two people standing there, and they said those same four words: “Those are our seats!”
I got up on one knee and just stared at them, thinking, “You can’t reason with these people.” While I was looking at them, I noticed my wife had gotten up also. I turned toward her, and her face was very close to mine, uncomfortably close, and she had these snake eyes with a look that said, “I’m not moving!” I looked at her and I looked at the people who were standing at the door, and I wondered, “How do I get myself into these situations?”
God sends help from an unexpected source.
The couple who had kicked us out earlier that night apparently had never gone to sleep. They were still all dressed up, and they came over and started asking this new couple what they were doing. I don’t know what country we were in, being on a moving train, but both couples knew some English, which became their language of conversation. The lady who forced us to move earlier started raising her voice at the other couple. (She was really good at that!) “This is a very nice family we have here,” referring to us. “What, can’t you see they have six little children?” She did all the talking, while her husband and I just nodded in agreement. Then she said, “Surely you could have found some place else to sit?” And she added, “Why, what kind of people are you, anyway?” She was great! And the new couple left! She then turned to me and said the same thing I had said to her, “We’re right next door, and if you need anything at all, you just knock, and we will come right over and help you.”
All I could manage to say was, “Okay.” The next day we made some new friends, as they shared their lunch with us. Isn’t the Word of God powerful? If I had not obeyed that verse, I would still be upset with her, but instead, I had and still have a smile about it.
The train left without me!
Later that day our train pulled into Vienna, Austria. I left Nancy and the kids on the train and went to find something to make sandwiches for lunch. I knew I did not have much time before our train left, and I had planned it so that I should have returned in time. But when I came back, the train was gone!
I thought maybe I was confused, and the train was on another track. I looked, but to no avail. I was in a panic! “Where will my family go? All the way to Budapest, or will they get off at the next stop and wait for me?” I could imagine what must have been going through my wife’s mind as the train pulled out of the station without me.
I showed my tickets to a conductor, he motioned with his hands for me to follow him. Our train had been moved to another track, to hook up with a different engine. What a relief! Once inside, Nancy and I agreed it would be better not to step off the train at the rest of the stops until we arrived in Budapest, which would be that evening. If we needed more food, we would just buy some chips or soda on the train.
That day, for the first time, I started to enjoy the trip. We had enough food and wouldn’t have to get off the train until the evening. Everything looked clean and neat in the cities we were passing through. The houses were pretty, there were neat rows of flowers, and I remember seeing this well-to-do couple riding their horses.
I mean no offense to the people who live in Eastern Europe, but back in 1991, trying to compare it to the West would have been like trying to compare night to day. Crossing over into what used to be called the Iron Curtain countries was a real eye-opener. We crossed at Hungary and the differences were immediately visible. All the buildings were run-down, and the signs and towns looked like they had not been painted since World War II. Signs were so dirty you could barely read them, and the unattractive houses were painted a brownish-orange. Mind you, it is different today, but then the whole country looked drab.
When we pulled into Budapest that evening, the train station was dark and dingy. I had to get our baggage off and try to find some rooms for three nights. Though today it is different, back then we needed to get visas to enter Romania. We had to wait until the Romanian Embassy opened on Monday, otherwise the trip could have been at least two days shorter. It had been three and a half days since we boarded the first train in Portugal, not to mention the flights from Seattle and New York. We were all tired and wishing the trip was over, and it was then that I started asking the Lord, “Just get us to Romania.”
We ended up with all my family and luggage in two taxis, and we drove around Budapest looking for a place to spend the night. The taxi driver told us the first hotel we went to was a good place, but it did not look so good to me, just old. I asked for a room, and the man at the counter told me it would be $250 a night!
“There must be some mistake. We don’t need a fancy suite, just one room will do.”
“It is one room,” he replied.
“One room?” I asked in disbelief.
“Yes, one room, one bed, one night,” he responded. I turned around and walked out!
When I walked outside, I was struck by the fact that on both sides of the street, as far as I could see, cars were parked with no openings left, and both of our taxis were double-parked. The taxi driver explained that most of the cars were from Romania because the people were leaving Romania and trying to go to the West. Therefore all the cheap rooms had already been taken.
He then took us to an old, run-down apartment complex. There was no sidewalk, just mud. He said he had a friend there who sometimes rented out his apartment. The hallway leading to the apartment was poorly lit, and I was starting to wonder if I had made a mistake. I have a good imagination, and I was wondering if I was going to get hit over the head. His friend wasn’t home, and I was glad to get out of there.
When we got back to the taxis, Nancy said, “We need to do something.” My family was crammed into these two taxis, with bags on top of the taxis, bags in the trunks, and bags on the seats.
I prayed again, “Lord, just get us to Romania,” and I told my wife, “Yeah, we’ll do something.” I asked the taxi driver if he knew of anything better, and he said,
“Do you want to try a hotel service?” I didn’t know what he was talking about, but with the meters on both of these taxis still running, I said,
“Yeah, sure. Let’s try it.” We pulled up to a well-lit curb near the center of town. And out came these people with photo albums filled with pictures of rooms for rent. I said to the taxi driver, “These don’t look like hotel rooms.”
“They’re not,” he said. He explained that people who rented out rooms in their houses would bring pictures to this agency, and the agency would rent the rooms for them. We ended up renting one room for $100 a night in some guy's house. We spent the next three days there, while the owner slept in the kitchen. This was really different, but it seemed to work, and we were out of options.
On Monday morning, we picked up our visas from the Romanian Embassy. We had written to a Romanian man who was setting up an apartment for us to rent in a town called Oradea, which was just inside the border of Romania. After my fourth try from a telephone booth in Budapest, I was able to get through to him to let him know we were on our way. After I received my tickets from the train station, I thought, “This will be our last changing of trains.”
The last thing I remember about Hungary was the McDonald’s that was in this dark and dingy train station. McDonald’s, with all its lively colors, seemed so out of place there. My family was “safe” on the train, so I thought I would buy something familiar, Big Macs and Cokes. There were no McDonald’s in Romania at that time (and would not be for six more years), so we were in a sense saying good-bye to civilization.
I thought, “We’ve made it; I'll never have to do this again.” I had been waiting for twelve years after graduating from Bible college to set foot on the mission field. Just one more hurdle awaited us.
We were two hours out of Budapest on what I thought was our last leg of the train ride. And then our train stopped in the middle of nowhere. The station was small and no town was in sight; there were not even many houses around. The loudspeakers at the station started blaring something in Hungarian. Normally, I couldn’t have cared less. I had our tickets, we were on the right train, and it was to take us all the way to Romania. But it seemed like everyone was getting off the train. I told Nancy I had checked the train car in front and behind ours, and they were empty except for us. The train ride was supposed to be about five hours, so I knew we were not in Romania yet. I said what seemed obvious, “I think we are the only ones on the train.”
My wife pulled back the curtain and looked outside and said, “I don’t see how. There is no one around here. It’s just a farming community.” That’s when somebody in a train uniform, who seemed to be in charge, knocked on the window across the narrow hall from our compartment. I walked over to the window and let it down. He knew two English words: “Off, you!” I showed him our tickets and told him we were on our way to Romania and that I just knew this was the right train.
I’m sure he understood the tickets, but I doubt he understood me, and he just responded with, “You, off!” I tried to explain again but he was even louder. “Off, you!” I didn’t want to get off. What was I to do in the middle of nowhere with my family and all this luggage? He laughed to himself, and went and found some baggage people who came onto our train. They opened the windows and literally started throwing our luggage out the windows onto the adjacent train track! So, we got off the train.
Picture this: We were standing on the tracks of an old train station, with our twenty-one pieces of luggage, six children, and the station’s loudspeakers still blaring. I felt like I was getting ready to go to a concentration camp. My daughter Ann, who was carrying this huge stuffed white rabbit (It was as big as she was and looked ridiculous. We had bought it for her in the States.), walked up to me with a worried look on her face, pulled on my pant leg, and said, “Dad, what are we doing here?”
“I don’t know,” I responded. Not a good position for a daddy, who is supposed to have all the answers. But I didn’t have to wait long.
The man who threw our baggage out came with some carts, loaded up our luggage, and put our children on top, motioning to us to follow him. He led us around to the back of the train station, where there were six blue buses. The people on the buses were all upset because they had been waiting on us, but how were we to know, not being able to understand what the loudspeakers had said. The men loaded our luggage onto the last bus. Nancy stood in front with Michael, who was crying, and I stood next to the door in the back, with our luggage literally against my face. Our children were placed on different seats or on luggage that was in the aisle.
Sometimes on this trip, and especially then, I noticed our children looking at us with an expression that said, “Is this okay? Is everything going to be all right?” Of course, as a parent you never let on any concerns you might have, and you just keep your best face on.
Personally, I was in an awkward position on this bus, because if the back doors opened, our luggage would fall out and I would be pushed onto the street. All the buses went about ten miles down the road to another train station, where everyone got off. When the doors opened in the back, sure enough, I fell out with some of our baggage. To this day, I do not know why we had to take those buses. Perhaps some repairs were being made on the train track, but we never encountered anyone who could explain to us, in English, what the reason was.
The next train we boarded was even smaller and much older. It looked like a train from World War II. We knew we were going to be overcrowded. I told my wife to just get on the last car and find a place for our children, while James and I moved the luggage to the train. Nancy found a compartment where she and our other five children could sit with two other families. It was cramped, to say the least, and there was no room for our luggage. James and I stayed at the far end of the train car with our luggage on the floor in the hallway. The halls in the trains are narrow, and this hall was filled with people because there was no place left to sit, which meant that people were now standing on our luggage! I gritted my teeth and asked the Lord one more time: “Just get us to Romania.”
We stood for the rest of the trip and watched people smash our bags. When we finally came to the border, the train made a long, slow stop, and you could actually feel each train car hitting the car in front of it, bang, bang, bang, bang, about ten times. I asked some men who were standing on our bags, “Is this the border? Are we at Romania?”
A man next to us nodded yes and pointed to the front of the train and said, “Romania, Romania.”
I looked out the window in the direction he was pointing. I had never been in Eastern Europe before, much less Romania, but less than a mile away was the country I had been dreaming to get to. My first thought was, “It doesn’t look any different than Hungary.”
I noticed there were a lot of military people at the train station, who looked like they worked there. We crossed the frontier of Romania on May 6, 1991, about a year and four months after their revolution. During the revolution, many people had died, and they were working hard to make their transition to a Western economy. It is amazing to me how much the country has been transformed in the last 28 years. There are large stores now, and one can buy anything he wants, but back then one had to wait five hours inline just to buy bread! Now conditions are much better and Romania has joined both NATO and the European Community. But in May of 1991, America was like Disneyland compared to Eastern Europe.
We waited on the train for a while, then three young soldiers boarded with machine guns. These were not draped over their shoulders, but in their hands. One of them hollered, “Pasaporte, pasaporte.” I could at least figure out what that meant, and I handed him all of our passports. He stared at me and said, “Opt Pasaporte?” He then put his machine gun under his arm and lifted up eight fingers. I nodded yes and eventually he understood that the rest of my family was up front in a compartment. He then turned around and walked off the train with our passports. I had been told to never let anyone walk off with your passports, as they’re the only acceptable proof of who you are. So I followed him off the train and tried to get my passports back. Two more soldiers came up with machine guns and pushed me back up against the train! (This literally happed.) Well, you can’t argue with people holding machine guns. I must have had a startled look on my face, as one solider said, “OK, OK, no worry. Go on train.”
I got back on the train and thought, “They have my passports, and if this train leaves, I’m sunk.”
After about ten minutes, a uniformed customs agent came on and said something to me in Romanian. I shrugged my shoulders and said, “I don’t understand.” To my surprise he started speaking to me in broken English.
“Are these your bags?” he pointed to our bags that were on the ground in the hallway.
“Well, yes, they are,” I said, and added, “I’m sorry, but there is no place to put them.”
“Where is your paperwork?”
“For what?” I asked.
“For your bags. Show me the papers for your bags.”
I told him we had been in several countries and no one had asked for papers before. Apparently, these papers were to contain a list of what was in each bag. He was, after all, a customs agent, and his job was to inspect what was brought into the country. “You have no papers, you open bags,” he said. He moved people off and away from our bags and started opening them. Some of our “bags” were only cardboard boxes with masking tape on them, so he used his knife to cut the tape.
Then something happened that I will never forget. One of our cardboard boxes was filled with Romanian New Testaments, and it also contained my English Bible and a Russian Bible that someone had given me while I was in Hungary, who had told me to give it to the Russians who come into Romania to sell things at the open-air market. This customs agent only wanted to know one thing: “Why you have Bibles?” I knew it had been illegal to bring in Bibles under Communist rule, but since Romania’s revolution, I was told it was no longer a concern. I couldn’t understand what the problem was, but he was not going to let this pass. He started firing off questions. “Why you have Bibles? Are you going to sell them? Why you in our country? How long you going to stay? What you going to do?” He had lots of questions.
“I’m not going to sell them,” I said.
“Why you have them?”
“I’m just going to give them away.”
I was afraid to tell him I was a Baptist preacher coming to start churches. If he didn’t like the Bibles, then for sure he wouldn’t like my being a missionary. This man seemed to have the authority not only to make the train wait, but also to approve what and who went into Romania (or stayed behind). And then, surprisingly, he asked, “You Romanian?”
“Romanian? No, I’m American.”
“You no Romanian?” he said again.
I shook my head and said, “No, I’m American.”
“You American?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You American citizen?” He asked.
“Yes, I’m an American citizen.”
“No!” he said, and he started going through the box of Bibles.
I stared at him for a moment and then said to him, “What do you mean, ‘No?'”
“No! You no American citizen!”
I said, “What, is this a joke?”
Then he found the Russian Bible I had. “This is Russian Bible,” he said, and he seemed quite proud of himself for finding it. “Why you have Russian Bible?”
“I’m just going to give it away,” I said.
He looked at its pages for a few seconds and asked, “You Russian?”
I said “No!” and reached in my pocket for my passport to prove who I was. But, of course, it wasn’t there; the soldiers had taken them earlier. I thought, “What are they trying to pull here?” I put my hand in the air as though I was taking an oath and said, “I’m an American citizen!” It now seems funny to me, but at the time it certainly was not.
“You American?”
“Yes, American!” I responded.
“You an American citizen?”
“Yes, you got it. An American citizen!”
“No,” he said.
“No what?” I shot back.
“No, you not an American citizen!”
I was totally bewildered by it. And then I said, “Okay, I’m not an American, I’m not Russian, and I’m not Romanian. Who am I?”
He reached for my English Bible, which was also in the cardboard box, and said, “Read this.” I thought he wanted to see if I could read English, to prove if I was an American. I started to read the first verse I saw, but he stopped me and said,
“No, read this.” He pointed to Ephesians 2:19, the verse that talks about Christians being citizens of Heaven. He stopped me at that point and said, “You Christian, and Christians are citizens of Heaven.”
I stared at him and said “Yeah,” questioning where this was going to lead. It seemed to have helped me to have read even that one verse in God’s Word, something I needed, because I had this crazy thought I might actually be going to jail.
He then looked both ways and said, “I am Christian also, and I also citizen of Heaven.” He then reached for my hand and shook it and said, “I am so glad you come to our country!”
I had mixed feelings at this point. He was a Christian and I was not in trouble, but he had really pulled one on me and all I could do was grin. He told me that before the revolution, he would let Bibles enter Romania. He said one man had written a book about him, which said, “God had blinded the eyes of the customs agent.” He told me when he opened bags during Communism and saw any Bibles, he just closed the bags back up and said nothing. He added, “God didn’t blind my eyes. He just put me here to let Bibles through.”
I was glad that was over. Our bags had been inspected, and everything was a “go” for getting into Romania. After a few more minutes the soldiers came back with our passports. As I understand it, they just registered them there at the border. The train started moving again, and we passed over into Romania. I was relieved to have all that behind me, and glad to know we were getting off at the first city. When the train stopped for the last leg of our seven-day ordeal, I realized the Lord had answered my prayer, “Just get us to Romania.” As planned, a man named Radu met us. I knew him only through correspondence and the one phone call I had made from Budapest, but he was very helpful. He had hired two taxis to take our belongings and family to an apartment, where the refrigerator was full of food—something that was hard to do then. It was then that I got my first taste of Romanian bread, which is better than American bread.
Radu did not stay long. “You must be tired,” he said, and he handed me the key to the apartment and left.
There was about an hour left of daylight, so I went outside to look around. It was a new world to me. It was common to see a flock of sheep or a couple of cows on side streets. More people walked because fewer people had cars then; some even still used horse-drawn wagons (though not now). To me it was new sights, new sounds, and a little scary. I did not know what to expect—how we would be received, being foreigners. Thankfully, Romanians are a most hospitable people, and there was no need for worry.
By this time, we were all exhausted, so after we ate, we went to bed early. Our two boys slept in the living room, our three girls in one bedroom, our baby in a makeshift crib with Nancy and I in the other bedroom. Everyone went to sleep except for me; I just couldn’t sleep. I lay there in bed staring into a dark room for a while, then finally got up and went into the living room, where there was a small light shining from the kitchen. I thought, “I will pray one more time and thank the Lord for getting us here.” I knelt down on the living room floor, but what I prayed surprised me. I had never even thought to pray this before, but I prayed, “Lord, please let all of our children be missionaries.” I thought, “Why did I pray that?” Especially after all we had been through, would I want my children to go through such a time when they are older? The only thing I can tell you is that, even after everything we had suffered on our journey, I had this joy and thankfulness in my heart, and I guess I wanted them to have the same.
Joy like that comes only from the Lord, not from a life (or a train trip) without problems, not from geography (being in your own country with friends and relatives), not from ink on paper (money), but from doing the will of God from the heart.
Hope you see the movie God, Get Us To Romania.
Below is the trailer for On Christian Cinema and Amazon Prime Video.
Christian Cenima, https://www.christiancinema.com/digital/movie/god-get-us-to
Amazon Prime Video, https://www.amazon.com/God-get-Romania-Eric-Bowden/dp/B0B69QBBH7
See for FREE at, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X52FSiCCcz4&t=44s

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See video GOD'S WORKING IN THE DEEP under "HELPFUL VIDEOS".
GOD & SPIES
DECLASSIFIED TOP SECRET OPERATION
GM Matheny was a US Navy saturation diver on the nuclear submarine USS Halibut. Involved in "Operation Ivy Bells". America’s most important and most dangerous of the Cold War clandestine operations. If you like good old fashioned American bravado, espionage and American history, you will enjoy this book.
Based on True Events -The Mount Everest of Spy Missions
Firsthand account of history's greatest intelligence coup. Operation Ivy Bells was not a onetime intercept of foreign intelligence, but an ongoing operation of multiple Soviet military channels, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, which lasted for years! Another reason for the high interest in our operation was the audacious nature in which it was done—with not one person risking his neck but a whole crew of a nuclear submarine.
See video GOD'S WORKING IN THE DEEP under "HELPFUL VIDEOS".
GOD & SPIES
DECLASSIFIED TOP SECRET OPERATION
GM Matheny was a US Navy saturation diver on the nuclear submarine USS Halibut. Involved in "Operation Ivy Bells". America’s most important and most dangerous of the Cold War clandestine operations. If you like good old fashioned American bravado, espionage and American history, you will enjoy this book.
Based on True Events -The Mount Everest of Spy Missions
Firsthand account of history's greatest intelligence coup. Operation Ivy Bells was not a onetime intercept of foreign intelligence, but an ongoing operation of multiple Soviet military channels, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, which lasted for years! Another reason for the high interest in our operation was the audacious nature in which it was done—with not one person risking his neck but a whole crew of a nuclear submarine.