June Never Stops
This has been hands-down the busiest, fullest month in the work here in Kharkov so far. It's been wonderful, but at the same time exhausting.
Our new AIM team arrived at the beginning of the month. We've spent a good amount of time with them, helping them get set up and familiar with things here. Two of them (the two guys out of a team of five) are living with my family in our apartment and we are enjoying that. The team is two weeks into their full-time Russian language studies at a local university and I think that has been really challenging for them.
Separate from that, we're currently right in the middle of a two-week Let's Start Talking campaign. A group of five Americans from a church in Washington state is here working with us on that, and it's going well. This has brought us into contact with a number of new people and has expanded horizons in relationships with some people we already knew. It's a work in progress, and I look forward to seeing how the next week will go.
Separate from all of that, we've been planning and preparing for a second combined assembly of congregations, following after the very positive precedent of the first one we did on May 1st. This second one will be tomorrow, and this time around we are featuring the theme of help for those struggling with addictions and dependencies. We invited workers from a rehab center in a neighboring part of Ukraine, whom we knew about through mutual friends at Ukrainian Bible Institute in Donetsk. That husband and wife team of workers arrived in town today and he will be delivering the message at our assembly tomorrow.
In the midst of this we've also bought tickets and made arrangements to return to the US next month for some period of time to both have our baby, do our annual visa renewal process, and seek a sponsoring church and the monthly support we currently lack. We'll be leaving Ukraine on July 12th, arriving in DFW on the 13th, where we will be based for at least the next couple of months after that.
Well, there is a pretty minimal overview of what's been going on. Things have truly been going on overdrive at times lately, for both us and our teammates. Being so consumed with the work is not good in some ways but in other ways it's been very fulfilling to have so many good things to be working on, and to see some of the work that God is doing here. I could easily write a whole blog post about any given paragraph above. It's good to have so much that could be written, but at the same time, I didn't come to Ukraine to sit and write blog posts. But don't worry, I'll still cover it all in our next monthly newsletter, and may find time to squeeze in another blog post about some of this.
June 27th, 2011 - 19:32
Good to hear! Sounds like God is doing a lot through you! Way to go Brother and Sister! Love you guys.