robhindman.com

Mid-January Happenings

Well, first of all, it has been about two weeks since my last blog post, and that was right at the height of the uncertainty and activity in regard to our miscarriage that was taking place.  We had a successful trip to Kiev and were blessed with some answers and some good contacts and experiences that may be useful in the future.  You can read a lot more about how things went during those critical couple of days on Denyce's blog post about it.  We got the results of the blood test last week and it was conclusive that Denyce's hCG levels were back to normal, indicating that the miscarriage had already run its course.  It goes without saying that a miscarriage is a difficult thing to go through, and this was not easy on us by any means.  While it was not our first miscarriage (we had one before, between Malachi and Silas), it was the first one we've experienced overseas.  But we were blessed through the process and our faith is firmly in God, who is in control.

Since then things have been getting more or less back to normal.  We have a couple of people with whom we are studying the Bible weekly now, and one or two more possibly in the works.  We and our teammates here in Kharkov are also gearing up to start some English-through-the-Bible group studies in our apartments.  We also spend some time when we can on Russian language study, which is continuing to progress.  There is a lot more I could write about the work we're involved in right now but I told myself I'd keep this blog post pretty short.

It's plenty cold here right now.  Temps have been hovering around -10 C (14 F), give or take, depending on whether it's day or night.  But we're entering a cold spell that will drive things colder than that.  Forecasted lows in the coming days get down to -22 C (-8 F).  Outside there is snow on the ground, and lots of ice built up on sidewalks and driveways and stuff resulting from several weeks of itinerant snow and constant cold.  I'm not complaining about any of this.  While sometimes the cold is, well, unpleasantly cold, I also enjoy the snow and the variety that this time of year offers.  And really -- this is Ukraine.  This is what we signed up for.  In fact, winters are even a bit milder here than they are in Moscow, where we originally wanted to work. 

Today is Wednesday, which is normally our day off.  We all slept in and we've mostly been relaxing and playing at home.  We also took down the Christmas tree and decorations.  In the States this would be very late to do that, but we're not really late here because Christmas is January 7th here (the day we came back from Kiev) and the whole Christmas/New Year's season doesn't really conclude until after the "Old New Year" (or Orthodox New Year; that is, New Year according to the Julian calendar), which is January 13-14.

That's all for now; I'm off to play with Malachi and his trains. 

Users' Comments (1)