Dani & Sarah

Ispas

From the start, we chose to follow God’s calling to put Him first, giving our all to serve Him.

An English woman and a Romanian man fell in love and married. We felt God calling us to serve in Romania where Dani was living. From the start, we chose to follow God’s calling to put Him first, giving our all to serve Him.

Serving in rural Romania can be tough, but our biggest challenge initially was that we were living with Dani’s parents. We were desperate to find our own place to grow and serve God. There was nothing we could afford but after a year or two of looking, we finally managed to buy a (literally) 2-room mud-brick shack that needed a lot of love. We invested everything, bought it and prayed that God would help us renovate and expand it in the future. We started to work but discovered that it was irreparable and would need demolishing! We were so disappointed.

A year later Toby, our eldest child was born. We were both disheartened and tired of living with other people. We couldn’t see any solution but kept trusting God who seemed silent. One morning when Dani took time out to pray and read his Bible, he felt God saying that He will show us that He is the provider, but we have to trust Him. We were unsure what this meant. We had lost hope.

Within a week an email arrived. Someone had made an anonymous donation for us to build a house! It was unbelievable, what could it mean? It was God’s provision. The first £800 arrived to prepare the ground for building, more would come as needed. We never knew who made the donations, but at every stage we would give a quote and money would arrive. The whole build cost about £45000, taking two years as we completed most of the work ourselves. At the time we had £200 a month, barely covering our bills, there was absolutely no way we could have afforded to build a house alone.

More than ten years later we look back on how God brought us from a suitcase to a two-room mudbrick shack, to a beautiful home.  He’s enabled us to have a family and a safe place to live, with an open door for all who need help to come. Many lives with their joys and pain have come through this place. We give our house back to God, just as He gave it to us.