Another Tuesday...

another sauna day.

Here's what I find during sauna times: the guys are joking around the way old friends do and I understand about half of their jokes, if they speak clearly.
(Ok, here's a joke I did get that's fresh from today:
A man at a sauna answers a cell phone:
"Oh, honey, " says a woman on the other end, "I just bought a new pair of red shoes to go with my red cell phone...I hope that's alright"
"Well, what do I care? No big deal".
A while later she calls back: "Oh, honey, I hope it's ok that I bought a red purse to go with the shoes and phone. Is that ok?"
"Well of course, how could you pass that up?" he says.
And later..."Honey, I just HAD to buy a red Ferrari to go with the shoes and purse and phone"
"Well, of course you did. Hope you like it...goodbye." He closes the phone and looks around and asks, "Hey, whose phone is this?")

The general discussion is easier to follow. Today the discussion included religion vs. true faith; how much vodka you could REALLY drink and still legally drive; what the ideal blood pressure was for men of our age (from 55ish down to 48ish). Since I can't always jump into and out of the conversation I have extra time to pray for them.

Volodya Companietz, one of the guys who's at the 55ish end of the age scale, is also a grandfather has a sick grand daughter. The guys were trying to make connections to a pediatrician on their cell phones during breaks from the sauna and, having done that, Volodya will get to take his daughter and grand daughter in to see him tomorrow.

But, anyway, prayer.
Volodya is a Russian, a former-ish communist and a loud but diplomatic atheist. He and Yura laugh at things like Creationsim and miracles and ask provocative questions for which they expect no good answers...though I hope they expect more good answers now.
Anyway, as Alexey the Dentist was delivering us all to our drop-off points after the sauna I told Volodya I'd pray for his grand daughter. He actually stopped in mid-sentence, looked at me, and said "Thanks a lot for that".

There are no atheists in fox holes, it's said. I doubt if there are any in pediatric wards.

So, if you are reading this and have time to pray for this baby I know he'd appreciate it. Of course, pray that God answers in such a way that he doesn't just say, "Yeah, we had a good doctor."

Kim and I will be in Russia for the next 10 days at our annual retreat for CMA missionaries. We'll catch you up when we get back.

Evangelistic Mushrooms

HI All,

So much has happened. We should write more often...
When Galina left she took with her the Russian tranlation of "Resurrection Factor". She said that she couldn't put it down and read the whole thing in a few hours. I'd asked her to read it and give me a review so that I could give it to Yura and Luda.

The whole Yura/Luda thing took an interesting turn when I went for an overnighter at their dacha. Other sauna pal, Sasha and his son Sergey and I went up on Tuesday morning. The plan was to hunt mushrooms (we never found any), do the sauna (which Yura built as an addition to the dacha) and sleep over.

We did all those things but the most interesting thing of all was that in the middle of it Luda told her own story of how, when she was 21 she died during an appendix operation. If you've ever heard life-after-life stories her's was eerily similar to the ones you've heard. She said that she was unconcious when they started to operate on her- she had her out of body event -and then woke up to the operation in progress. Only THEN did they give her anesthesia...so she knows it wasn't something drug-induced. This assured, dialectical-materialist kept her story to herself until some air of freedom began to blow around the USSR. Then she dared to let people know.
It happened 30 years ago and she remembers it like it was yesterday.

Well, as you can imagine this provided plenty of fuel for the 'meaning of life' discussion that occupied our time there.

Skipping ahead, Galina REALLY, REALLY recommended that I pass Resurrection Factor along to people with questions.

Oh, the Evangelistic Mushrooms? Well, this morning Kim and I arrived at the English-speakers church, (this was after we went to the Russian church with Sasha, who I thought had hated his first experience there). When we pulled up, there was a tall white mushroom growing next to the parking lot. I went to inspect it and found an additional bunch of small brown mushrooms growing.

Subsequently, during the worship service, a plan formed itself- take pictures and email them to Yura and then call and ask if they were edible or not. Turns out the white ones shouldn't even be touched if you can help it; the brown ones- edible but not desirable.

The real reason for calling Yura was just to make contact, say 'yo'- in Russian -and continue to keep lines of communication open.

Oh, and set up a time to go play tennis Monday morning so I can give him that book.

Thanks for keeping up with all this stuff. Have a good week

Galina and 'Movie Night', day

Hi again,
Thanks for your prayers. You can see by the fairly frequent updates that we're encouraged.
I said below that a whirlwind week began for us last Thursday morning. The events have included: moving possessions from one garage to another (an easy thing when you have access to a pick-up; not so easy in a country where once a month or so you see one and you say, "Hey, look! A pick-up"); an out of town meeting; preparations for the arrival of new colleagues; an evangelistic run to the farmers' market; Movie Night prep.

The busyness will wind down starting on Wednesday night after we welcome our C&MA colleagues Jason, Carolina, Camilla and Joshua Kochsiek to Kiev. They will come here so that we can pursue ministry in tandem with them. Please keep them in your prayers.

So, about Galina. She didn't come Thursday, as she said she would. Instead, on Friday when we took our staunch communist friend, Maria, to the farmers' market Galina came with us. Later that night she knocked and said, "Hey, I forgot all about Thursday. So, tell me now."
We sat and discussed life after death and the biblical promises concerning a new future for those who believe.
She talked about how she's prayed and believed her whole life. In this orthodox country she even said, "I don't really feel close to Mary...but Jesus has always seemed to be really approachable." I don't know where this leaves her. She said as she was leaving that we should do this again. We're trying to figure out how to get people like her and Comrade Maria in for some events so that we can begin to make it a common occurence among the neighbrs to come to our apartment for spiritual discussions.

And, now, on to the "Pursuit of Happyness" at the U today. Since most of the students are economics majors this movie will touch on a lot of things relevant to them.

Thanks for reading this and for participating with us as you pray.

Alpha Dinner

Well, it's Thursday morning, a day which for us begins a whirlwind week ahead...But more of that later.

Last night Yura and Luda found our apartment. It was really nice having them as guests. We showed pictures of our kids and places we've lived. They are both from the Ural Mountains of Russia so we did a lot of comparisons.
We had lasagna (is that how you spell that?) and salad that was deadly delicious, and for which Kim is famous all around the Rundstrom house. It was a good way to get to know them better.

The theme of the evening was Christianity. They didn't know what to expect and seemed a little nervous. I told them we wanted to show them a video with some information about the Bible, etc. The video was the first lesson from the Alpha program, "Who is Jesus?"
They listened attentively to most of it and got some of the main important points concerning the history of the writing of the New Testament, the teachings of Jesus and other things.

Luda seemed to be saying, "Yeah, we know all this already from the book you gave us." But Yura was more interested. While we didn't make plans to do this again next week this will give me some very good opportunities during tennis and sauna to ask questions, and I hope will give him some things to chew on.

Tonight our neighbor Galina (who along with her huband Enver, were the first of our neighbors to befriend us) wants to come for a visit. She wants to talk specifically about life after death. This has come about because Enver- a life-long communist -has a lot of physical issues and is, not surprisingly, afraid of dying.
Because I know he's afraid I've been saying to him, "Let's talk about life after death".
"There's no such thing! You can't prove that!", he says to me.

Doesn't seem to bother him that he can't prove that there is NO life after death, though.

Anyway, though he's been growly with me he has talked to Galina about it and now she wants to hear more.

We'll keep you posted.

What do you know?

Hi all,
This will be short because sauna pal, Yura and his wife Luda are on their way here for dinner. You've maybe read the story below...?

Anyway, follow-up on sauna day: I thought that Sasha was acting kind of weird at tennis so, when we got to the sauna and Alexey the Dentist (another sauna regular) asked, "Well, what's everyone been up to?" In order to disarm the weirdness I said, "Well, Sasha came with me to church but he didn't like it."

Sasha lit right up: "What are you talking about?! I really liked it. I'm bringing my wife on Sunday...You're going to be there, right?"

I sort of choked because I didn't want to be uncool and blurt all over so I managed to get out: "Well, yeah. Of course."

Well, what DO you know, anyway? I could sermonize here about how God works but I'll save that for another day.

Thanks for your prayers for these friends of ours.

Sauna Day

Well, it's Sauna Day, like every Tuesday and I'm back here to continue some of the story: As you read below, Yura had said, last week, "I want to believe. How come you're not telling me?"
I told him, "Well, Yura, I did give you that book about how you can know God even exists and I do try to invite you over but you're always at your cabin." [The Russian word for 'cabin' is 'dacha']
"Oh, ok, well then we'll come over..."

And you already read my last entry about how they were all ready to come. Then Yura called me the next morning to say Luda was very sick, (she's better now) so they didn't come. That was supposed to be Wednesday. Yura and I played tennis on Friday and then they were headed to the dacha again.
So, bummer, they didn't come and though we made tentative plans for tomorrow night I don't know if they'll come.

Part of the reason I don't know if they'll come is Sasha.

Sasha is a sauna pal also, and probably Yura's best friend. He is an orthodox believer, which he interprets to mean he can live any way he wants to. Yet he does have quite an interest in spiritual things. I invited him to church Sunday and Kim and I met him at the metro stop then we walked to the church. We really like this church- good music and great preaching. I even told Sasha on the way there that the preacher is one of the best we've ever heard in any language, and that's saying something since we usually listen to him when he preaches the Ukrainian service; the fact that we still get a lot out of it shows what a good preacher he is.

Anyway, what we hoped for was an enthusiastic embracing of the message by Sasha but the opposite result seems to be what we got. So while I'm saying, "This guy is going to be great, Sasha!" He thought, "I don't like this guy".
Now, every person has their time and their path and God works in mysterious ways but in this case God will have to use Sasha's negative advertising at the sauna- which is what I expect to hear today -to get guys like Yura interested.

How can that work? I don't know. We're trying to trust and not be afraid, here.

Well, at least the good news is that Sasha JUST NOW called to confirm our sauna time and to confirm our pre-sauna tennis time [on the court I call "New York, New York", because if you can play there you can play anywhere] so I was glad to hear his voice and it didn't seem he'd blown me off as a hopeless fanatic because the preacher got a little fiery at the church I'd recommended.

We'll let you know what happens.

Back in the classroom

well, today I just printed out the lesson plans for the English class I am going to on Tuesday...differences between American English and British English. I should be an expert, because I speak American English, but...honestly I googled it so I could see some of the main differences. We volunteer our help at the nearby University. Native English speakers are a hot commodity and our price is right!
I am pretty excited about getting back into the classes, I find that I really love 17-2? year olds...it is so interesting to hear what they think about politics, world events and life. We have been welcomed into the classrooms and hope to do a great job helping with English skills. Many of these students also will be attending the movie/discussion club. ~kim