A Boxed Cake

The box that store bought cakes come in! It says "Cappuccino". It is VERY tasty cake made by the famous Roshen bakery here in Kiev.

Happy Birthday to ME!

The theme this week at English Cafe was health and sickness and it came at just the right time...many of our Cafe friends were sick this week with a virus that seems to be making people sick all over Ukraine.

(Actually, I don't want to write about sickness right now. After all, nobody really wants to talk much about being 'sicker than a dog', or how they are 'sick and tired' or how we are 'feeling under the weather' or how something is just plain 'sick'.)

I want to talk about birthdays.

It wasn't my birthday this week, it was actually the young man's birthday who is holding the cake in the picture. He bought and brought the cake himself. By the unwritten rules of Ukrainian culture, if it is your birthday, you bring the cake. If you want a party, you do the inviting, make the food, decorate the house...Yep, you throw yourself a big birthday bash. Quite the opposite of what American culture tells us to do: if it is your friend's birthday, you make the cake for your friend.

So, knowing that Roma was coming (we didn't know he was bringing a cake) and feeling compelled by my own culture to make a cake, I made one of our special cakes- a box mix straight from America, a treat. My cake was quite plain compared to this beautiful 'tort' that Roma brought. But, with twice the normal amount of cake for a single birthday, every sweet tooth was satisfied as each of us had at least 2 pieces of cake.

It was a sweet Happy Birthday for us all!

Soy Sauce and Wasabi ~ Make your own sushi party

DIY sushi!

the guys 'cooking' for the first time!

Make your own sushi party....

So, we had a make your own sushi party at English cafe on Wednesday. I actually have had the idea for a LONG time...finally my dream came true.

It was a day to be remembered for a long time...this whole week has been unusual, filled with unplanned things, unexpected guests and spur-of-the-moment happenings, but all in all, very pleasant how it has all worked out.

So, on Wednesday, when the car battery had to be replaced (twice- as the first one that we bought was the wrong one), and the English movie time needed to be transferred to our home due to double scheduling of events at the University and a few other things, I had to remind myself several times that God is in control of it all and it will all work out...but when the water went out 30 minutes before everyone came to our place, and stayed off till 10pm...it took all I could muster up to laugh about it, remembering that it was under control and all would work out....how do you clean the sticky sushi rice off of your fingers?????

But, you know what? Everyone else seemed to be doing just fine with the whole situation and I have heard from several of our friends, how much fun they had and how they would love to do something like this again...

I kept thinking that something really great was going to happen because it was such a CRAZY day...this is yet to be realized...but...I have hope that things are happening...

Remember us, please...it is really cool to see what is happening and are hoping to see even more!

Stars on Ice

Here we are....the not so famous Stars on Ice of Kiev! We usually hang out at our place and have fun speaking in English, but last week one of us had the grand idea of getting together on a totally different day to go ice skating while we spoke English. It was a beautiful evening, the snow was gently falling. We warmed up afterwards with tea at a cafe and laughed about the fun we had going round and round in the rink, managing not to fall. Such fun people to have the privilege to know.

As we drank our tea and laughed...someone had another brilliant idea - to go snowboarding!

Yikes!

Remember us as we have fun, sharing our lives, dreams, hopes and the most important stuff of life.

Old Christmas Pie

Our friends and the pie they prepared!
cutting the pie

It was 'Old' Christmas Eve and our good friends invited us over to their place for pie. In Ukraine, Christmas is a religious holiday. On that night, "Holy Dinner" is eaten after the first star appears and no gifts are exchanged. We were excited that they would invite us over on this special day.

We thought we were invited over for dessert, as we sat down we realized the pie they had prepared for us was a fish pie! It was beautiful. On the bottom was a layer of potatoes, a layer of sliced onions and then a layer of fish, all wrapped in a savory crust. It was delicious!

As you remember the special memories you have of this Holy season, will you also remember our good friends as they wrestle with their beliefs and thoughts about Jesus and how His birth changed everything. Thanks for coming along with us on this adventure!

New Year's dinner 2012

We enjoyed a quiet dinner together with 3 of our friends here at our place. Our neighbor brought a stuffed fish that she made for us to eat along with our tacos. It was a very nice dinner. I am sorry that I totally forgot to take a picture of us all together. At 11pm, we started walking to the center. We enjoyed a few mintues of the free concert and then the fireworks began at the stroke of midnight.

Happy New Year 2012

the beginning of the firework salute!

the ocean of people celebrating the new year 2012

Ringing in the New Year 2012

We celebrated in the city center, Kiev with thousands of others...Happy New Year!!!!

Merry Christmas 2011

We have had this nativity scene for a long time. Our kids have played with it their whole lives. The figurines are made of plastic, the angels were Happy Meal toys, the kids decorated the trees when they were little. These figures were well loved, chewed on and played with for hours. They came with us when we moved over here 16 years ago.

Many other little ones have been in our home over the years, and they have played with, chewed on and loved these figures too.
Our kids are grown now and still this is our nativity scene.

It is sitting on the buffet in our livingroom in our beloved city, Kiev. It is a visual reminder of why we are here. At just the right time God sent His son Jesus to be born and raised by a humble family. He would grow up and one day become the saviour for all.
Such a simple reminder of the greatest event in all of history.

Happy Birthday Jesus!

the New Year's decorations on our street

Each night we look down at our street and see the pretty butterflies that have been hung for Christmas/New Year's.
Hope you have enjoyed celebrating Jesus's coming to earth. His birth changed everything!
Oh come let us adore Him!

At last!

Last night we had our first English club at our home. I was a bit on the edge all day, nervous about how it would all go down? who would come? would anyone come? would it be any fun? what would it be like?

It has been a long, kind of discouraging month last month. A month that has had postponed meetings, canceled get togethers with friends, and other times put off till later. I was afraid to be very hopeful about the turnout for this 'let's get aquainted' time.

But, I am so happy to say, our livingroom was full! 11 people came. It was SUCH fun!!!!!!! A friend called today to tell us what was not good about our gathering last night, he told us that we made it too much fun, we will have so many people come to our English time, that we won't have room for everyone!!! yeah! that is a problem that we can live with!

So, please remember us...in 2 weeks we will have another English gathering, and we are thinking that we may have to divide up into a few groups! How cool is that? Remember us as we meet new people, that we can be effective in our witness and lives...giving back the love and grace we have been given, to be attractive as ambassadors!

Apocalypse Now? Really...?

We are working on plans to host an Alpha class in our apartment. It won't be big, at first, but we hope to see it grow to reach more and more friends and neighbors. If you don't know, Alpha is a program for people who want to investigate the message of the Bible.

Anyway, how do you go about demonstrating to people that maybe, just maybe, there is a need to consider that the Bible contains truth. (Forget about insisting that the Bible IS truth. You'll get nowhere with that argument in this post-modern world).

One way to do it is to read the headlines and you realize that not only that "there will be terrible times in the last days" but that these are pretty terrible times right now.

You may practice a healthy skepticism and say, "Yeah, well, you know that every generation at some point has said, 'This is it...the END!' "

It's healthy to think that because this truism- that every generation thought it was seeing The End -seems to be a fact of history.

But what is relevant is the degree to which The End will differ from normal apocalypses: "...There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. Men will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken...." Luke 21:25-26

This and other apocalyptic passages in the Bible describe a world gone insane, not only geographically, but also geo-politcally, socially, personally and economically.

Speaking of economic realities of the future I find this article found at this link (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/12/04/subdermal_rfid_chip_provokes_furore/) extremely interesting. The article has a bit of a 'scoffer' tone to it, but the facts are all accurate.

Those of you who read the Bible know the significance of this. (It's nothing to be alarmed about, because to paraphrase, Jesus said, "Don't let your hearts get weighed down by fear of all these things".)

Moving back to Alpha. It seems that VeriSign and VeriPay have entered the Russian market. If you read Russian you can read all about the first importer into the Russian market here: www.membrana.ru/particle/1629

In fact, what this does for us is that it gives us a chance to show people here, in a language they can read, that MAYBE, JUST MAYBE the Bible contains some Truth that would be of great interest, not to mention benefit, to them.

What is more, while the Bible makes it clear that there will be doubters and scoffers until the very end- in fact doubting and scoffing will increase by orders of magnitude -no one will be able to deny that, as the Bible says, those times will be terrible times.

So the stock market is going Chernobyl; "London Calling" to "London Burning"; flash drives empower flash mobs.

Is this the Big One? Really? Well, I'm one of the skeptics, but I'm not so skeptical that I won't continue to watch the signs "of the fig tree as it ripens" (Luke 21:29). And I won't miss the chance to say, "You know, my friend, it's interesting that 2000 years ago this kind of stuff was predicted..."

Thanks for reading along and for praying for our efforts to start up Alpha.

Mike and me

Hoop dreamin' with Mike Fratello

Hey,

Well, here we are. Summer is scheduled to leave Kiev tomorrow, when rain and 73F are predicted. After that, the 5-day forecast never calls for anything warmer than 75F. We're hoping this means an end to the summer sweat. But all the while I have to remind myself that in January these will seem like the best of days.

So, Mike Fratello? Well the story begins this way: My friend Ilya- the English professor turned BBC cub translator/reporter -became my 'guy' for sporting events when we lived here before. We went to soccer and basketball games together. I enjoyed getting to know the sports teams of the city with him.

Those of you who have tracked with us know Ilya as the guy who can argue for any conspiracy theory and can argue AGAINST any theory as well. I have fun crossing rhetorical swords with him.

But it all came to a head a few weeks ago. He invited us over for dinner with his family, the first time we were getting a chance to meet his wife and daughter. We went and had a good time. They then wanted to see us off at the subway and so we took the long way through a park so they could stroll with their daughter. While walking Ilya asked me where in the Bible does it say things like homosexuality are a sin. I quickly dialed through my smart phone to Leviticus and showed him. "Oh," was his only response.

When I got home I also copied to him some verses out of Romans which are very blunt on that whole topic. He wrote back quite upset, "How could a 'God of LOVE...?'" was the response he fired at me. I felt bad. I was only trying to answer his question and I'm not going to apologize: I didn't write it. (What's more, I think you better be pretty sure who did or didn't write it before you start trying to bend the meaning...but I digress).

Anyway, we had plans to go on BBQ outing with him and his wife and daughter and I sort of wondered if that would now fall through. In fact, his wife had to go out of town on business on the day we'd planned the outing and I thought, "Well, that's that..."

Jump to today, 2 weeks after the fateful email. Ilya called. He invited me to a basketball game. It seems that Ukraine, in a bid to make a showing in 2012 in London, has hired Mike Fratello to coach their national basketball team. "Would you like to go see Mike Fratello's futile attempts today?" Ilya asked in his very good English.

Uh, well, "YEAH!" I said, not caring if I sounded a little too eager. So, my hope is to put a picture of me and/or Ilya with Mike Fratello. I'll add it to my Jerry and Carl Lewis collection. The point of the picture, besides saying "Wow, he's SO cool!" (me, I mean, not Mike Fratello) will be to remember to pray for Ilya. He believes in God, heaven, hell, eternal punishment and eternal reward. What about Jesus? Nope, that was a conspiracy...

Thanks for reading along. We'll keep you posted.

ps. sorry. Ilya insisted on taking the picture instead of being in it. He seemed to feel funny about getting in the picture with someone famous...even if they were only famous in America. Anyway, that's me and Mike to my right in the blurry picture. An interesting bonus was seeing Eddie Pinckney, (you remember Villanova v. Georgetown from 1985, right?) who also coaches the Ukrainian team with Fratello. He is barely visible in picture seemingly coming out of my left shoulder.

Luda and Marina at the Datcha

Unpacking

Hi readers,

It's time to update again. We've been here for...could it be almost three weeks already...? I guess that's right. We've been working our way through all the things that go with moving: moving boxes, unpacking boxes, arranging furniture. Today there is some furniture that needs to be assembled (yuck) and then we'll be done. I'm happy for Kim, who does the bulk of the unpacking and arranging that it is almost done.

I would help but I don't know where anything goes...after 28 years of marriage.

Our days have been busy seeing friends also, though not as busy as things will be when the school year starts up. Our good friend Alexander is the director of foreign languages at the University near us and he was sooooo happy to have us back. He asked us to come for a meeting as soon as we could. When we did he told us that they had special ideas how to use us this school year so that we can maximize the benefit to the students. (He really does have the success of all of his students at the forefront of what the language department does and we are happy to help since we also want to see them, and their country, succeed.)

We continue to pray about other avenues of ministry. We are in the happy position of having too many potential areas to work in and not too few. The question for us now is: "God, what's YOUR plan?" We could really use some help following up these many contacts but for now we are here on our own. We don't know why that is, in the Great Scheme of things, so we trust that this is a part of God's plan that we just aren't all-seeing enough to understand. Go figure.

Everyone else seems good: the sauna guys; Vitya, the former medical student but now a doctor; our neighbors; professors from the U...The list goes on and on. So, God, what's your plan?

Thanks for following along with this and for praying.

Jerry and Kim