When we returned from our week at Living in Grace, we were encouraged both personally and in our ministry and support raising preparation. We were quickly brought down by the news that not one person had looked at our house during the week we were gone. We struggled to apply the lessons of the previous week and trust in God’s timing and not give way to anxiety about the house situation.
So, Monday morning was spent in the struggle not to give in to discouragement. By Monday evening, two people had looked at the house and by Tuesday we had an offer! Praise the Lord! Our closing is scheduled for July 15, so please pray that everything will continue to fall into place with that.
With the house selling, our next concern was finding an apartment. We spent about 4 days looking at various apartment options both in person and online. We finally found one that fit all of our criteria – it is close to Steve’s job (cuts his commute time more than half!), convenient to a bus that had a stop in front of his building, has a garage, and the rent is less than our current house payment. Again, praise the Lord!
We are moving to a 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom apartment so we are now sorting through our things and trying to get rid of things we don’t need. Our hope is that going through this process now will make the transition to an apartment in Ukraine a little easier.
We love our home and will be sad to leave it. We moved in when we returned from our honeymoon and it has been perfect for us. We have many wonderful memories and we hope the new owners will enjoy it just as much.
We just returned from a week in North Carolina at Ridgehaven camp. It was a lovely break from the Texas weather that is hovering around 100 degrees these days! We were there for one of the pre-field training requirements of Mission to the World (MTW). All missionaries are required to go through this training before they leave for the field. We were there with folks going to various countries in Asia, Latin America, and Western Europe. It is so exciting to hear their stories and learn about what God is doing all over the world!
Another treat was to have my (Dawn’s) parents there for the week to watch Stevie during our sessions. One of the more difficult aspects of moving overseas is taking Stevie far away from all of his grandparents. This week gave them a great chance to spend time with him and help him get to know them better. His other grandparents live in Austin, so he gets to see them fairly often. What a blessing to have grandparents!
In addition to the encouragement we get by talking to others who are doing the same thing we are and who are experiencing many of the same struggles, we heard some great teaching. We were reminded again that our salvation is by grace and so is our sanctification. Our growth in Christ is also dependent on Him. It is not dependent on how disciplined we are or how hard we work. The beauty of Christianity is that from start to finish, we can rest on the work of Christ to know that we have pleased God. When our identity is secure in that, we are freed to take risks and reach out to others.
One of the hardest things about moving to another culture is that you often lose much, if not all, of what you take pride in about yourself. You may not know how to pay your bills, you are incapable of having the normal, adult level conversations that you are used to, and you often need help to do even the simplest things in the new place. As you can imagine, this can lead quickly to discouragement! The message of Living in Grace is that God does not love you less even when you feel like you are not “performing” at the level you should be. In fact, being secure in God’s love ought to release us to have the humility we need to be learners in our new culture. It ought to release us from feeling we need to know everything or have it all together in order to minister to others. The beauty of this is that when we come to others with this kind of humility and weakness, we are much more able to show God’s love to them.
Of course, this is all much easier to say than it is to do! We will try to remind one another of these lessons when we get into those hard situations – I know we won’t have to wait until Ukraine before we’ll need the reminder!
We leave in a few hours for Living in Grace, a conference that our Mission requires us to attend as part of our training. (They also do an abbreviated version for churches that Steve and I attended in Austin about a year ago.) This time, it’s a week long and it’s in the North Carolina mountains! In Austin this weekend we are forecasted to hit 100 degrees so we’re getting away just in time 
.
Stevie will experience his first plane ride and we have high hopes it will go well!
Thanks for your prayers and for your giving. We are grateful that the funds were available to go now and not have to wait until September.
Thanks for praying for Steve’s sermon last weekend! If you want to hear it, you can hear the podcast here.
This weekend we will be at Bethel Presbyterian Church in Dallas. We will be presenting during their Sunday School hour and then having a few minutes in the worship service. Come say hi if you’re there so we know some people read this blog!
Steve will be preaching at our church in Austin, CrossPointe, on Sunday (May 23). His topic will be “Self – No Service”. He’ll be talking about some of the things God has been teaching him so far through the process of getting to Ukraine as well as giving our congregation more details about exactly what we’ll be doing. We’ll have a table set up with all of our information as well, so if you’re in the area come see us! The service begins at 10:45 am.
If they record it, you can hear the sermon by clicking the “Listen Online” button.
When I was working on my business major at Covenant College, I learned about “just in time” inventory. I think that most companies now use this approach because it means that (ideally) you don’t have to carry a bunch of inventory on hand. You get your supplies as you need to use them in production, hence the “just in time” title. Of course, the risk is that you get stuck without essential supplies when you need them. That’s why companies that do this must have good relationships with their suppliers.
I think that God often works with us on a “just in time” basis. He doesn’t give us all we need weeks before we will need it. He often doesn’t give us that safety cushion that we wish He would provide. On the other hand, He always gives us what we need by the time we need it. There’s an old saying that God is rarely early but always on time.
Anyway, we recently experienced some “just in time” encouragement. We had hoped that our house would sell before the tax credit expired at the end of April. (Yes, that was an ambitious hope, but we’re like that sometimes!) When it not only didn’t sell, but we didn’t even have one person look at it over the last weekend in April, we were discouraged. At the same time we were looking at our support account and wondering if we would be able to have the funds to cover the training we wanted to take in June. If we didn’t go in June, our next chance would be September. We just weren’t sure what the best decision was and we were discouraged that the finances were so close.
Well, God met us “just in time” in a couple of surprising ways! As you know if you receive our email updates, one of our donors called us and offered to match any donations given to our support account during the months of May and June. This was completely unexpected and reminded us that God will provide for us. We had made the decision a couple of days before to register for the June conference and trust that God would provide. He didn’t even make us wait very long to show us His provision in an amazing way!
Our house is still on the market and we haven’t had any new lookers in a couple of weeks. However, we went out of town that last weekend in April in order to leave the house open and to visit Southside Community Church in Corpus Christi. A couple of days after our donor contacted us about the matching gift, we got an email from a couple who was visiting Southside the week we were there and who said they sensed God telling them to start supporting us with monthly contributions. Just in time, God confirmed that our decision to travel that weekend was what He wanted us to do.
The entire support raising process is full of ups and downs. It is definitely a time where God builds our faith and makes us trust in His provision. The project is so much bigger than what we can do on our own and it forces us to depend on God. That is a habit we need to develop on so many levels! Praise the Lord that he always meets us just in time .
Last weekend we spent time visiting with the South Texas Presbytery at the Southside Community Church in Corpus Christi. If you are ever in Corpus we would highly encourage you to visit this church and if you live in Corpus or close and are looking for a church home, the ministry here is Gospel centered, they are mission focused and very friendly.
During the visit they had a fellowship meal and the BBQ/Smoked Pork was amazing. I can’t say that should be the reason to become a member, but maybe if you were on the edge..
We wanted to thank Ben Wheeler for having us on Sunday. You have been a great encouragement.
During the trip, we had the opportunity to visit the USS Lexington that is parked in Corpus Christi Bay. The Lexington is an inspirational part of US history. Here are a few photos from out visit.
Stevie is such a blessing! He continues to amaze us and has been bringing us many opportunities to visit with lots of people who we would have never met. You can see him looking back, busy charming all the others who are visiting the ship.
A few years ago, I started to get a women’s ministry going at Salomensky Presbyterian Reformed Church (SPRC). I distributed and collected questionnaires to see what they wanted and structured a few different types of meetings for the women in the church. I also started to meet weekly with the sister of one of our members. In meeting with her, I used a Bible study curriculum that had been very meaningful for my mom – The Person of Jesus. This is basically a study in the book of John, but it comes at things from a slightly different perspective that makes it very interesting.
Anyway, my meetings with that girl fizzled out after about 4 or 5. The women’s ministry activities had varying degrees of what I would consider “success”, but things didn’t really take off like I had hoped. The Person of Jesus study guide/notebook went onto my shelf.
At a Country Team meeting a year or so later, one of our missionaries in Odessa, Ukraine, mentioned that she was looking for something to use for a new Bible study that she was starting. I recommended the Person of Jesus study and told her I had even translated the first few lessons into Russian. Andrea took the first few chapters to try it out and ended up going through the study with a group of women over the next couple of years.
Fast forward to March 8 – Women’s Day – of this year. One of my fellow Kyiv team missionaries gave her testimony at a women’s event geared toward the women of our church as well as their mothers (many of the SPRC members are university students). They had a great turnout and Tracy is going to begin a new Bible study with them. Well, guess what curriculum she’s going to use? That’s right, Andrea has just about finished with it and the leader’s guide got passed back to Kyiv.
I am so encouraged to see how God has used and is using this Bible study with various groups in Kyiv! Just another example of how God is working in a very broad way as well as specifically with each of us as individuals. He is concerned with more than just my plans.
Keep Tracy in your prayers as she begins this study.
Our first travel series for 2010 has finished with great results! We are tired, but enjoyed renewing old acquaintances and making new ones.
We kicked things off in Tyler, Texas, at Fifth Street Presbyterian Church.
Many of the folks at 5th Street have been following my ministry in Ukraine since the beginning in 1998 and were delighted to hear about our plans to return and, of course, to meet baby Steven!
A couple of weeks later we had a chance to speak to Faith Presbyterian Church in San Antonio.
They had recently sent some boxes of clothing to a Ukrainian orphanage, so it was a nice connection for them to hear about our plans.
A fun benefit of this trip was getting to stay with a good friend of mine and meet her family. Dawn and I were camp counselors and lifeguards together at Pine Cove and it was great to catch up with her and enjoy her hospitality.
We were glad to have a couple of weekends without travel and look forward to talking about our ministry to a sister church plant in Georgetown, Texas, this Sunday.
Thanks for your prayers for health and safety. Other than colds, we’ve all stayed fairly healthy. The baby has done very well with all the travel so far and we are very thankful for that!
Now that our little guy is the ripe old age of 2 months, we are beginning to travel to share our ministry plans with churches, individuals, and basically anyone who will listen!
Our travel this year kicks off this weekend (January 17) in Tyler, TX, at Dawn’s home church – Fifth Street Presbyterian. We’ll be speaking during the Sunday School hour at 9:30 am and then for a few minutes in the service.
Our next trip will be during the weekend of January 29-31. We’ll be at the South Texas Presbytery meeting in San Antonio. On Sunday, we’ll be speaking at Faith Presbyterian Church. Again, we’ll have time in the Sunday School hour and a few minutes during the worship service.
The following weekend, February 5-7, we’ll be at the North Texas Presbytery meeting in Dallas. We’re still looking for a speaking opportunity in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, so let us know if you’re interested!
We would appreciate your prayers for safety and energy as we travel. Steve is still working his full-time job during the week. This will also be little Stevie’s first traveling, so we hope he’ll do well.
Please email us if you’d like to get together while we’re in your area. We love talking about our Ukraine plans or just visiting with friends!
