Russell and Eileen's Church Missions: TENDER MERCIES IN SERBIA

We spent this last week in Serbia working with Elder John and Sister Cathie Swendsen. Other than it being extremely hot (the daytime temperatures were over 100 degrees with high humidity), we had a wonderful time getting to know our new couple from Calgary, Canada. During our visit we not only had the opportunity to train them on the typical subjects (computer programs, operational & project finances, and how to organize good humanitarian projects), we were also able to go see a water project that was in process of construction and to introduce them to an NGO (SOS) and visit two of their offices in Belgrade and Nis. Although most of our work is of a rather temporal nature, I (Russell) would like to relate three instances where we experienced God’s help in our work this week.

The Healys and the Swendsens

Meeting with SOS in Belgrade

Water filtration system

Site for the water tank, abandoned Russian built factory in background

Contractor explaining water project to Eileen

The first thing we work on with a new couple is making sure their Welfare Department provided computer, scanner/printer, phone, and debit card are working appropriately. We do this first because not only do the other subjects we teach rely upon them working properly, but also because this can often take the longest. Eileen has truly become something of an IT expert; a job she is looking forward to retiring from in two months! We allocate half a day for this part of our training. Eileen worked on this from Monday afternoon until Wednesday. She was on the phone with the Global Service Center (GSC) in SLC twice and in contact with our IT Department in Frankfurt several times. The GSC night-shift crew now recognize my wife’s voice when she calls. On Tuesday afternoon we were all pretty frustrated at our lack of progress on getting the computer to work right. The IT person from Frankfurt who had been working on the computer remotely for several hours, finally gave up and told us to just bring it back with us to Frankfurt. Elder Swendsen suggested that we call the GSC one more time. Within an hour they (Eileen and the GSC) had the computer working properly. We considered it a minor miracle.

Russell and Elder Swendsen on the computer

Nis is the second largest city in Serbia and about a three-and-a-half hour drive south of Belgrade. While visiting the office of SOS there we parked the car on the street next to a parking sign. Now the words on the sign were written in Serbian (both Latin and Cyrillic) but the big “P” on the blue sign clearly identified it as a parking sign. As we walked back from the meeting I saw something that looked like a dump-truck next to the car. Elder Swendsen must have been able to see better than I because he immediately began running to the car. It was no dump-truck but a tow-truck and it was just ready to raise our vehicle off the ground! Evidently we had parked on the wrong side of the parking sign. Even though they didn’t speak English, Elder Swendsen was able to get them to unhook the car and let us drive away. Had we been just a few minutes later we would have been without a car. Finding where the car would have been taken and getting a car out of the impound lot on a Friday afternoon would have been almost impossible. I feel it was not just coincidence that we arrived just in time.

When we lived in Belgium, Vijay and I home taught a father and his two teen-age sons. They were from Nis, Serbia. While in Belgium, the father (Alia Makic) was diagnosed with cancer and died during the summer of the year 2000. Eileen and I helped get his body back to Serbia so that he could be buried next to his wife who had died several years earlier. We very much wanted to see his final resting place in Serbia. Alia’s son Remzi, who is now married and living in Utah County, emailed me directions of how to find the grave. As we were walking up the path toward where the grave was, a man who worked in the graveyard asked us who we were looking for. He didn’t speak much English but he recognized the name Alia Makic. He said, “I am Makic.” He took us right to the grave and also tried to explain who he was. Our best guess is that he is the son of Alia’s wife (Emma)’s brother – so a cousin of Remzi. Meeting him and getting to see Alia’s final resting spot were in deed “a tender mercy of the Lord.”

In each of these three cases it seems God required us to do all we could to get the computer working, meet the NGO and visit/find Alia’s grave. But then he stepped in to help us get the computer working, not lose the car in a city none of us had ever been before, and to meet a relative of Alia. The older I get the more I am convinced that God is involved in the details of our lives. It is just a question of if we are willing to accept His help/counsel and be humble enough to see His handiwork.