Another walk through the Botanical Gardens with Iilya, our good University professor friend.

They love to debate philosophical and spiritual topics.

May Day

Jerry and Vitya, our good friend in front of a monastery and lilacs.

We have been celebrating the many May holidays in Ukraine these past few weeks and hanging out with our friends as we begin our good-bye saying. The first of them was May Day, May 1st. We have met friends at the National Botanical Gardens just down the street from us. It is beautiful this time of the year, as the lilacs are blooming. The smell is at times overpowering and the views of the surrounding Orthodox monasteries are so beautiful!

We are trying to take all opportunities we have to spend with our friends here before we take off to the states.

We will miss them.

Sasha again

Finally, we're back home and back to ourselves.

(I reread our last entry and want to update you on Michael Merrill. He is in the US and is still undergoing treatments. At this point the doctors have not been able to come up with a solution that's going to work long-term. Please keep praying. Trevor Hope has recovered from the sickness he had on our travel to Germany.)

Back to Sasha: to make a long story a little shorter, I wrote back to all the contacts I'd received from the website manager. One of the people I wrote to again was Sasha. He was interested in meeting to talk about life. He suggested one of the many McDonald's restaurants we have here in Kiev, near a school where he is learning English. We talked about his walk with Christ, which had stagnated over many ears of D.I.Y Christianity- no church attendance, no Christian friends, only that whole 'I can worship God where ever I am' type of deception that so many people try to make work.

Anyway, we had a good talk about where he was and where he needed to be headed if he wanted to get to the Abundant Life that Christ promised. This was on a Saturday so I invited him to an English international church service the next day. It turned out the church was within walking distance of his apartment so he could have gotten there easily, though we did meet him in our car. [We're looking for a buyer for our car before we leave in 45 days, please pray]

Anyway, he loved the service and determined to go to a Russian-speaking small group, which he also loved. And since that first meeting 4-5 months ago Kim and I have been meeting with Sasha weekly for discipleship.

But what was interesting was his attendance at a gathering of some old friends of his who invited him to come to a 'religious' group meeting. He went because of his re-newed interest in spiritual things and a renewed desire to tell people about life change through Christ. He was surprised to find a group of disciples of a woman, who had recently died, gathering to pray to a pyramid...

That's it for this entry. We'll try to get back to this story soon, (which I can already tells you ends, as of this writing, with a group of new believers meeting in our apartment).

Thanks for reading along.

Quick update

Hi to our readers...you know who you are,

We just wanted to give you a quick word on what we've been doing and where we've been.

2 1/2 weeks ago Parker came home for Spring Break. We had a nice time in Kiev together but we are quite busy with ministry nowadays, which we didn't realize until we tried to find 'just hang out with Parker' time and we found it difficult. Anyway, all was good. Parker and Jerry did spend a full day working through college acceptance letters (George Fox University, in Oregon and Wheaton) and financial aid packages (a word to young fathers: start saving now). Parker had all but decided on GFU until the Wheaton financial aid info came and the amount they offer makes the choice difficult again. Oh well, on Life's Big Scale of Problems this one doesn't weigh anything.

So, as Spring Break was winding down our Russia (and Ukraine) Field Forum was gearing up in southern Russia. Kim, Parker and I went to Anapa, on the Black Sea, for this annual gathering. It was especially nice for us to be there as a family so that Parker could do his goodbyes for the last time with kids he's known, or know about, for his whole MK life. He had a good time there and we had a good time watching our nearly full-grown baby (18 years old this month) interacting with his friends.

Then, with school starting in Germany the kids had to get back. I had the job of escorting them (since Lisa Merrill (who was the original escort) is in America trying to help her son Michael deal with a chronic health problem. Plllllllllleeeeeeeease pray for Michael. He's one tough kid but he'd really like to get his medical issues resolved so that he can get back to school.)
The need for an escort was only too clear as a couple of the guys got really sick. Trevor Hope, another tough kid, was indescribably ill every hour or so all day l0ng, including airports, airplanes and trains. I haven't heard but I hope he's better today.


Well, anyway, I'm typing this in Parker's dorm while waiting for him to come back from school. This is our next-to-last visit to BFA, at least as parents of students. We'll be back in 7 weeks for graduation. For all the difficult stories that you may have heard about missionary kid boarding schools we can only say from our own experiences with Black Forest Academy that we have nothing but positive things to say. This is true about the quality of school and social life and especially about the spiritual input our kids have received.
Our thanks to all the professionals who have sacrificed time in their careers to give something to our kids.

Ok, that's it for this update. I plan to be back at my computer tomorrow in Kiev and will try to remember to continue the Sasha Saga for those of you who might have been waiting.

Bye for now.
Jerry

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...

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

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