I am amazed that summer is almost over! This year wasn’t quite as hot as last year in Austin, but I’m afraid my friends in Ukraine have been melting in the heat wave over there.
We are thankful to have a full schedule for August. We are always open for any opportunity to talk about our ministry to Ukraine, so please contact us if you have any interest in that.
August 8 – Christ the King Presbyterian in Austin
August 13-14 – South Texas Presbytery meeting in Austin (this is a gathering of pastors and elders from the South Texas presbyterian churches)
August 22 – Steve preaches at Christ Presbyterian Church in Georgetown, Texas. He’ll be speaking about some of the ways God has been challenging him and growing his faith over the last couple of months.
August 27-28 – North Texas presbytery meeting in Gordonville, Texas. (same as above, but for the North Texas and Oklahoma churches)
August 29 – We’ll be giving a presentation during the Sunday School hour at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Gainesville, Texas, and speaking for a few minutes in the service.
If you are at any of these meetings, please let us know that you read the blog. We’d love to meet you!
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!
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 .
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.
This past Sunday, our home church in Austin celebrated its 25th anniversary. It was interesting to see the pictures from when the church was first planted and to hear the stories of God’s faithfulness throughout the past 25 years. (It was also pretty amusing to see some of the people we know now in pictures that were 15-20 years old!)
One of the exciting things for both us and for our church is that we are the first “home grown” overseas missionaries to be sent out from CrossPointe. So it was appropriate for us to be formally introduced to the church on the anniversary Sunday. I think that sending out missionaries from the church body is definitely a wonderful sign of growth and health in any church! We had the opportunity to talk a little bit about our new ministry assignment and look forward to more opportunities with various groups at CrossPointe.
Now we are “launched” into our new phase of ministry and the adventure begins (again!).
Dawn and I sure are excited to be working together as a team.
We both very much appreciate the continued support for the past many months. We look forward to sharing the upcoming updates about our progress as we build a team to help support our ministry in Ukraine. I tend to call it “our” ministry, but I want to make sure everyone knows “Our” means you are included in that ministry. It’s a team, it is the body of Christ, that means you and us.
We are working on more updates and will be sending out more information. Thanks for the support, thanks for being part of our team!
This past week has been very encouraging and very tiring. Dawn and I are so happy that we have been received approval and the initial training for our Ministry in Ukraine. We thank everyone who has been praying for us and ask for continued prayers and we continue to work on this ministry.
Please continue to pray for us as we move to the next phase of raising support and in the midst of everything begin our new family. Dawn is due in just a few weeks. We are very excited about the new baby and ask for continued prayers for him and for Dawn.
We thank everyone in Atlanta and everyone in the I&O training during this past week. It is exciting to see how God is involved with so many people and how he is directing them to their specific ministries.
We look forward to working with our many current and new partners in the upcoming months to help grow Gods kingdom.
We are busy visiting with all the people at MTW HQ. It has been a lot of fun getting to put faces with names and jobs. I have to admit that even though I am here for training and evaluation, I did spend time in the computer room looking at the ‘setup’.
Please continue to pray for us as we have more interviews and training until the middle of the day on Friday. We are feeling very encouraged with the process.
Please keep the people of Atlanta in your prayers concerning all the rain and flooding…
