The Latest from Here (part 1)
In the midst of the constantly-evolving saga that has been the past two and a half months, I thought I should take a few paragraphs to fill you all in on how things are. It's been tempting not to do blog posts like this simply because our situation, plans, feelings, and mindset in the midst of all of this has rarely stayed the same for more than a few days, and so even now as I write this blog post it's probably got an expiration date that's sooner than that carton of milk in your fridge that you bought last week.
In an effort for this post not to become a mile-long string of text, I'm splitting it into two parts. This is part 1, and the rest will come tomorrow.
So here is the latest from us, in regard to:
Our family: We recently celebrated Denyce's birthday. The boys are doing well and we're encouraged by Malachi's growth in interacting with people in his limited Russian. We found a good school right down the street for the boys, but they are already out for the summer. Hoping to get him started in a school here in the fall (or whenever we get back...) Silas has recently been showing a strong penchant for singing, which he does often throughout any given day.
The pregnancy: Denyce is now in the third trimester. All is well, which we are so thankful for. We've tried to keep some of the stress of our situation off of her for the sake of her and the baby. That is easier said than done. Thankfully she is a woman of faith and has taken things well so far. We don't know the sex of the baby and don't plan to find out. Due date is August 21st or so. More about where we will be giving birth in part 2 of this post tomorrow.
The work in Kharkov: After a number of months of praying and planning, we've recently started the ball rolling toward a second new church plant in Kharkov. See this post and this post from teammates' blogs for details. This is exciting. Our English-through-the-Bible group is going well. We have a Christian young married couple in town right now who are deaf and are looking into opportunities for deaf ministry work in Eastern Europe. We are preparing for our first team of AIM students, who will arrive this Friday and serve with us for 1-2 years. We have an LST campaign coming up starting in mid-June, which will involve the most widescale publicity that we've attempted since our creation-evolution seminar. On the other hand, it's been frustrating, because of our support situation, to not be able to be as fully invested in the work right now as we otherwise would be able to be. Our teammates have picked up some of the slack but I also don't like to see the extra burden it places on them.
In tomorrow's part 2 we'll share more updates about our support search and upcoming plans.
Combined Assembly
(Note: in order to not reinvent the wheel, I am just adapting a blog post about this event from one of our teammates' blogs, rather than write basically the same thing myself. Original post on the Prices' blog here.)
To our knowledge there are a total of five congregations of the churches of Christ in Kharkov. The largest is around fifty or so, ours is somewhere around twenty, and the other three are under ten people (one has about three, I think). Kharkov is a city of about 1.5 million people, so having several congregations is definitely a good thing.
However, like many churches of Christ it seems, there isn’t a lot of communication between the different groups. One of the reasons why is because these five churches have been started by three different efforts over several years. Over time these groups have learned about each other, but there still hasn’t been a lot done as far as fellowship activities go.
Our dream for the churches we plant here in Kharkov is to keep them simple and, ideally, to continue to meet in apartments all around the city. Because one congregation can’t grow very large in number in a living room, we have had the long-term dream to have all the congregations that are started meet together once a month or so to encourage one another in a larger group. It’d be a time to remind ourselves that we are not alone, and that we are part of a much larger family in this city.
Though our own group is just getting large enough to merit dividing into two groups, we have not made the move quite yet. However, we thought it’d be a great idea to try out one of these larger meetings by inviting all the churches of Christ in Kharkov to an area-wide worship service and to use that meeting to do some good. Our own congregation collected money to rent a place big enough for us all to meet in. Then an invitation was sent out to join us on May 1st to worship together and to take up a collection for a Christian organization working to provide relief in Japan for the earth quake and tsunami victims.
Sunday, May 1st was the big day and we were blessed to see 39 people come together that evening from all five congregations to worship and encourage one another. We arranged the schedule to allow men from all five groups to participate in the service, which turned out really well. It was so encouraging to see everyone fellowshipping with one another afterward, getting acquainted with their fellow brothers and sisters they hadn’t met before. We were told by several that if we hadn’t had this meeting on Ukraine’s Memorial Day weekend that we would have had many more which was good to hear. And, through our efforts of working together, we collected and sent $310 (USD) to the relief efforts in Japan.
Yesterday was the beginning of something very good in Kharkov, and we look forward to seeing how God grows this effort to bless Christians and non-Christians alike here in this great city.
Kharkov Remembers Chernobyl
One question we've been asked a number of times in the past few years is how close we are to Chernobyl and whether we are affected by it living here in Ukraine. Kharkov is about 280 miles from Chernobyl. Fortunately for Kharkov (but not fortunate for others), the wind was not blowing in this direction when the incident occurred, and Kharkov received no significant amount of direct radiation from Chernobyl. Instead, most of the radiation traveled up into Belarus, Russia, and other parts of Europe. To this day there are still measurable effects of Chernobyl in Austria and Germany, for example. The very worst of it, though is in the immediate area of Northern Ukraine and Southern Belarus, where to this day there are large swaths of contaminated land that are largely abandoned. These days the worst threat that Chernobyl can still pose to us is the possibility of buying and eating produce grown in contaminated soil. We try to buy local.
Kharkov does play a role in the Chernobyl story. As background, Kharkov has long been one of the capitals of physics research in the former Soviet Union. We have a physics university here that is well-known, at least in this part of the world. It was in Kharkov that the nucleus of an atom was split for the first time in the Soviet Union. But more specifically, there were Kharkovites on the ground at Chernobyl both at the time of the disaster and in the immediate aftermath. If I'm correctly understanding what I've read, the steam turbine in Chernobyl's reactor #4 (where the disaster occurred) was built in a factory in Kharkov. The night of the disaster, two men from the turbine plant in Kharkov where there at reactor #4, and they were two of the most immediate casulties. One of those is buried in a lead coffin in Kharkov (I'd really like to find out where -- which cemetery -- but I've yet to dig up any further details about the burial location). In the months that followed, some 20,000 people from Kharkov and the Kharkov area contributed to the massive containment effort, at the risk of their own health.
In one of the main parks here in the city there is a Chernobyl monument. I pass by it often and until recently it seemed kind of forgotten, sort of out of the way off of a main path and not ever attracting much interest that I could tell. But then sometime around mid-March I walked by and there were two men there with tools starting to take off old tiles. It looked like they were doing some sort of refurbishment. Over the weeks that followed the work around the monument gradually gained momentum. They were installing lighting, repainting parts of the monument, laying brick tiles to expand the area in front of the monument, installing new benches, laying sod, and more. Starting the weekend before last, they were even out there at night working under flood lights.
This past Tuesday marked 25 years since the Chernobyl accident. Fire trucks and ambulances came and parked near the monument, there were lots of balloons representing each of the 25 years since the accident, lots of flowers laid on the monument, lots of people milling around. We got over there right, apparently, after some kind of formal ceremony had been completed. Below are some pictures I took that day.
New landscaping and freshly planted flowers leading toward the monument.
You can see that the monument itself, when viewed from straight on, is shaped like the international symbol for radiation hazard.
At the center is a sculpture of a man who looks like he's being blown back by a blast, and has his arm and hand up shielding his eyes.
The whole front of the monument was covered that day with countless flowers and bouquets brought by those who had come. Normally visible, but almost completely covered by all the flowers, is large metallic lettering that says (when translated) "To the Chernobylites."
While I'm on the subject, here is one more interesting visual to share. Our teammate Dougle picked up a newspaper last week that featured an article about radiation in Ukraine with this large graphic. The blue arrow points to Kharkov. As you can see, according to whatever data this map is based on, we're in a good situation, but we don't have to travel too far to be in the yellow at least. I forgot to mark Chernobyl on the map, but it's in that U-shaped red area on the northern central border.
Easter Egg Hunt on a Tuesday in Ukraine
In the past couple of weeks I've gotten about 4 new blog posts written ... in my head. Getting them written where someone else can read them has been a different story. I've been going like crazy, especially here this weekend. Anyway, I'd like to get some or all of those posts out of my head and onto the screen for you, but for now this short post will suffice.
Our teammate Brandon yesterday put up a well-done blog post about our Easter egg hunt for our kids, which we did this last Tuesday morning. You'll probably most enjoy the video he included, which I am embedding below. But I encourage you to check out the full post at his site, where he sheds light on this occasion as an illustration of both 1) the dynamic of missionary kids as "third-culture kids," and 2) the differences in how Easter is regarded and celebrated between Ukrainian and American cultures.
Enjoy the video. Thanks Brandon!
What the Church Did (Does) Together
Below is document I produced recently for use in a Bible study. In the study, we are learning about the life of the church, particularly in the context of gatherings. This was the introductory study of the series and I wanted to give us a direct look into what the New Testament actually does (and, by extension, doesn't) say about the gatherings of the church and the time Christians spend together. I found this to be a really insightful study that helped me cut through the mire of my own experiences and traditions to focus on the actual content of Scripture. And I think this will be a useful document to have on hand for reference down the road.
After my initial compilation of the study, I shared it in the study group here in Kharkov and received some good feedback, resulting in a few tweaks. I'm sure there is more room for adjustment. Comments, questions, and feedback are welcome.
Needing a New Home
It's been a little over a week, now, since we received a phone call that will definitely leave a defining mark on year 3 of our time on the field, and overall on our experience as missionaries. Our sponsoring church, Sun Valley Church of Christ in Arizona, is ending their oversight of our family and work, and will be ending their monthly financial support by October. This came out of nowhere for us since we left for Ukraine in Oct. 2008 with a mutual 6-year commitment, and this is only 2.5 years into that (and only 1.5 years into the 5 year ministry phase of the work).
You remember, probably, that we just had a furlough at the end of the year and this included a little over two weeks with Sun Valley. That visit seemed to go quite well, and we even left with some new resolutions and forward-looking plans between me and the elders. The church was trying to cope with the economic downturn just like all churches are, but there was no indication that this was an immediate threat to the entirety of their support and partnership with us. We left feeling that it had been a good visit and that all was more or less well. So this came as a surprise.
Let me just say, before I write any further, that Denyce and I are absolutely sure that this is for the best. It really knocked me for a loop the first couple of days after it happened, and for sure it will take a long time to get back to normalcy. But we are confident in God's working through this and of His care for us, and we feel that the future is bright. We have been buoyed by the promises and outlook offered by Scripture, such as Phil. 3:8, Phil. 4:19, and James 1:2-4.
Having said that, there is still no denying that losing a sponsoring church is one of the more difficult things a missionary might ever have to go through. It might be hard to see it from a stateside perspective, but it's a lot different than just losing a job while living in the US. One of our teammates, in a recent blog post about this, captured the idea well:
"Losing a sponsoring congregation is more than just losing money. As I’ve written before, a sponsoring congregation is a missionary’s home base. It is not only where financial support is channeled and accounted for, it’s a source of emotional support as well. Regardless of good reasons or bad, losing a sponsoring congregation while on the mission field isn’t as much like getting laid off as it is like your parents calling you at summer camp letting you know you’ll need to find a new family."
...except that "summer camp" makes what we're doing over here sound way too easy, safe, and fun. 
So right now we're feeling kind of uprooted from our stateside roots, kind of floating in limbo a bit. From an emotional perspective, we've been flooded with expressions of support, understanding, and encouragement from all sorts of different places. And, some of our other partners, friends, and mentors have stepped in and are taking an active role in helping us get the gears turning for this transition. Our teammates' sponsoring churches have been especially attentive and caring and it is looking like one of those churches will temporarily manage our funds until we can find a new sponsoring church for ourselves.
From a financial perspective, over half of our monthly support is on the chopping block. If I were in a similar situation in the US, I could just go out today and apply for a dozen part time jobs somewhere. Even if they are low-paying jobs, at least I'd be working and bringing in something. But here in Ukraine I am on a religious mission visa, not a business visa, and it would be illegal for me to get a job. So what do we do? Do we further uproot our family and disrupt the work by moving back to the US until we can get things figured out? Or do we stay put here in hope and faith that all will work out, even though it took over a year to find a sponsoring church the first time, and that was with us living in the US and able to travel easily to visit?
For now that is an easy decision to make. We love what we came here to do, we believe in what God has been and currently is doing, and we have no intention of leaving unless it becomes clear that we really must. We are blessed to have a cushion of excess funds in the States that can help us through whatever time of shortfall lies ahead, and which can help cover the expense of a trip back to the States if one becomes necessary (particularly in order to start off well with a new sponsoring church).
We love the Sun Valley church and have many good memories and great friendships there. It's been almost 4 years since we first visited them and they decided to partner with us, and 3 years since we moved there and spent around 8 months with them. They believed in us and encouraged us during the very difficult time when we had to change our destination from Moscow to Kharkov late in our preparation process. Many people there have blessed us, and continue to offer blessings, with their hospitality and words of affirmation. It's really too bad that they never did send anyone over here to visit; I had really looked forward to acquainting them with our life, the work, and the people here.
There is so much more I could write but I shouldn't make this post any longer. In particular, the past 1-2 weeks have been very busy in the work and some good things have been happening, though I am struggling with the need to cut back on some of my activity and responsibilities here locally in order to deal with this transition. I need to be able to give attention to the need to seek new partners and work on some of the logistics of the transition, right down to things like figuring out what my family's new stateside mailing address will be (I'm sure it will change a couple of times before things settle down) and keeping that updated everywhere it needs to be.
More to come.
The Rest of the Paris Photos
We got back from Paris on Sunday and got right back in the swing of things here (we had only been gone for four days total, after all). I want to catch up on some things with the work here in a separate blog post, but first we're overdue to finish sharing about our time in Paris. Although we both wrote about and uploaded photos of our first full day (Thursday), we only wrote about the second full day (Friday) without photos, and haven't done anything about the last day (Saturday).
So here are photos from both days in order. By way of review, Friday was our actual anniversary, and we celebrated with a special lunch out at a well-recommended restaurant. Aside from that, Friday's main deal was going to the Louvre in the evening, and there are a number of photos from that. Before that we also saw a couple of the best-known parks, rode a boat several times on the river, visited the Notre Dame cathedral, and returned to the Eiffel Tower to see it at daytime. Here is Friday:
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| Paris - Friday |
We have not blogged about Saturday, but it was really our least eventful day, and we wanted it that way. By Saturday we were ready to just enjoy a coffee in a cafe, try some crepes, and drink some hot chocolate at various times during the day. We also spent much of the day just wandering the streets in a certain part of the city (the islands and the Latin Quarter) just soaking it in and seeing what we would discover, while also trying to do some shopping for some gifts to bring back to Kharkov. On the way we had a little picnic lunch in a big park, walked by the Pantheon, and saw the Sacre Couer church. Here is Saturday:
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| Paris - Saturday |
Second Full Day
Yesterday was our second of three days in Paris. Denyce did the blogging about the day yesterday, so this is just a quick post to link you over to her blog if you'd like to read about it (sorry, no pictures uploaded yet):
First Full Day
Today was our first full day in Paris after arriving last night. We are staying in a quaint, very well-appointed little studio apartment. It's not too much bigger than a cheap hotel room would have been but it's so much better overall. We've already saved quite a bit just by eating in for three meals (last night after arrival, breakfast this morning, and then stopping in again for a quick lunch).
As I type this I'm in the process of uploading photos from the day today, which I will link you to below (here is the link if you want to get straight to them). I'll write captions for the photos, but in this post I'll give an overview of the day. The weather, by the way, has been pretty nice for March -- cool, but not not biting cold. It was off-and-on sunny and cloudy this morning, and just cloudy the rest of the day, but no rain and overall pleasant. In the afternoon and evening the wind started to kick up a bit and that made it feel a bit colder. So, we left the apartment and headed in the direction of a large outdoor food market that is a few blocks away. The food market is supposed to be the best in Paris and it only happens on Thursday and Sunday mornings. We leave really early Sunday so this was our only shot.
On the way we walked through a famous, beautiful square called Place des Vosgues. (I'm not going into detail in this post because the photos and their captions will do that better) Once at the food market we started looking around but our total ignorance of even basic French made things a little tricky. Right as I was about to get out a phrase book, a lady walked up and asked something in French, then repeated it in English, "Are you in line?" She and Denyce got to talking and within a few minutes we had made our first friend in Paris. She is actually an 83-year old American lady named Mary who has lived here since the 80s. She helped us buy the handful of items we wanted to get from the food market, then walked with us to her favorite bakery since we wanted some bread.
Then she invited us to her home, so off we went together.
On the way we walked through the Place de la Bastille, the site where once stood the forboding Bastille prison that was the site of the beginning of the French Revolution. The prison is long gone; now it's a bustling intersection with a monumental pillar in the middle. So Mary actually has a unique living situation here -- she lives on a boat parked in a canal right nearby, just steps off of the Place de la Bastille. We went down with her on to her boat and spent at least an hour seeing the boat, eating cookies and drinking tea, learning about her very interesting story and life, and talking about France and Ukraine.
Although we didn't particularly want to leave our friend's place, we eventually excahnged phone numbers, said goodbye, and headed out. By now it was lunchtime and we hurried back to our flat (just a few blocks from there) with our groceries and Denyce whipped up a quick lunch. We headed back out and took the metro across the center to the Arc de Triomphe, and went up into it and up onto the top. The view from the top of that thing was fantastic, better than I expected. I really liked it up there.
From there we walked down the Champs Elysees, the most famous street in Paris. It runs straight from the Arc to the Louvre. We walked down it a little ways and then veered off away from the main touristy area onto some side streets to browse the cafes and bistros until we found one we wanted to have dinner at. We found a bakery that also serves sandwiches, paninis, soups, salads, etc. The prices were reasonable for Paris and the girl at the counter was really welcoming. Perhaps best of all, the whole time we were in there sitting at bar stools taking our time eating, not a single other person who came in was a tourist, as far as we could tell. I think we managed to find a truly local place in Paris, that the people who actually live here go to.
After dinner it was starting to get dark and we walked a couple of kilometers to get to the Eiffel Tower. Our plan has been to go there once during the day and once at night (but only actually go up into it one of the two times). Originally I had envisioned doing them in that order but as our tentative schedule for our three days here has evolved, it worked out better to go first tonight, at night. So we walked over there and soaked it in, first from a distance, then approaching, then right underneath it. The "underneath it" part lasted a while because we had to stand in line for half an hour or so. We took the elevators to the top, which was a neat ride, and then wow, the view from the top of the Eiffel Tower at night. It was really awesome.
We then took the metro home back to our apartment and got here around 10:00. A long and full day, and totally wonderful. Pictures here:
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| Paris - Thursday |
From Paris with Links
Denyce and I are in Paris for a few days to celebrate our tenth anniversary. We have our first day in the city awaiting us, so I'm not going to write anything here yet. Instead I'm just going to share a couple of links to other blogs to fill in details on our trip:
- Denyce's blog post she just wrote about the beginning of our trip
- Our teammate Brandon's blog post about he and Katie keeping our kids while we are here