Thursday, March 25, 2010

Sasha

So, as promised here goes the story about Sasha.

It begins with our arrival here, now almost 1 1/2 years ago. Through a series of contacts- which are themselves an interesting story -we met Steve Webber, the director of the Christian Broadcasting Network for the whole Russian-speaking world.

In talking with Steve about what we were trying to do here, he offered to connect us with Andrey, the CBN guy in charge of their evangelistic outreach website. Andrey began to send us contact information from people who'd written into the website with questions or because they wanted to say that they'd just prayed a prayer of repentance or re-dedication to Christ.

We did a lot of work, writing to these people, but got little response. One thing we did try was to invite people to an Alpha evangelistic group, in English. In this way we hoped to do something we were good at- English -and combine it with the Gospel. (The attempt was technically successful, but actually the people who came were already believers, which sort of defeated the purpose...)

Anyway, it was at this time that I got a response from a man who was very excited to think that someone would take an interest in him and could show him to a church where they could help him find a job. I wrote back right away explaining that the church could help, but that didn't mean that they could get him a job.

He wrote back right away to say, "Well, what's the use then?"

So I wrote back right away again and said that there was more to life than just a job and not to be discouraged if I couldn't promise him that a local church could help him.

I was to find out later that this guy was Sasha. We'll tell you more of his story next time...

Thursday, March 18, 2010

93 days

Today, (March 19...the day Vitya and his family and friends come over) is the first day Deutschbahn- the German railroad company -will allow us to buy tickets from Frankfurt, Germany, down to Kandern, Germany, where Parker goes to school. We will be on our way to Parker's graduation, and then continue on our way to the US for a year.

Wow, our lives as parents of kids in missionary boarding school ends with Parker's graduation on June 11th. Where did all those years go?

Anyway, 93 days from now (June 18th) we are scheduled to land in Eugene, Oregon. We've been in Kiev nearly 1 1/2 years now...where did THAT time go?

Actually we're thankful that, though the time has been short, way too short in fact, we've made tons of friends and through those friends are connected to other friends and we keep praying and telling the story of Jesus and asking God to do something in the lives of these people.

Tonight Sasha will come over to be with us and Vitya, et.al. I'm going to take time in future blogs to tell you of our relationship with him and how God has used some simple discipleship to encourage Sasha and then he has used Sasha to bring 8 people to faith in Christ.

Anyway, thanks to those of you who have/are praying for our dinner tonight. We'll keep you posted on the results.

AND, more news: on Sunday members of the Sauna Team will be coming over for dinner. We recently spent some time skiing with these three couples and so my personal hero, my wife, wanted to invite them over for dinner. They'll come for dinner at 6pm...but before that Sasha will be here for more discipleship...and before that, a Ukrainian couple will be here for lunch to talk about the potential for working together with us in church-planting.

Yep, all on one Sunday.
And Kim will be working to be hostess to all of them.

You see why my wife is a personal missionary hero for me. Please pray for her this weekend.

Jerry

Monday, March 15, 2010

More work

Hi,
Our last post was about the people you could help us minister to by praying for them.

Here's a quick update:
We have a new friend, Sasha, who is a very gifted personal evangelist. We want to connect him with some more friends, Vitalic (a 5th year medical student) and his parents and two of their friends. They are coming for dinner on Friday, March 19th.

Please pray for our time together.
Thanks
Jerry and Kim