Yes, a beautiful week with family. Restoration for the soul. The work doesn’t go away. The troubles don’t go away. War conditions in Ukraine worsen.
The threat there is constant. But God gives us moments, or even days, of refreshment. We just praise the Lord for the time with 3 of our children, 2 daughters-in-love and 9 grandchildren. God provided a beautiful facility where we could all relax and the kids could run and play. We enjoyed going to the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter, both well worth your time and effort to reinforce our Biblical beliefs in a time where Christianity is increasingly under attack, truth is scoffed at, and society is ruled by popular opinion. We just praise the Lord for this special opportunity!
Now we return to the task at hand. And we pray that it will be all joy to do so.
Prayer requests
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The long time being on the road and going from place to place seems unrelenting sometimes as we long to go home. And yet “home” holds uncertainties with the war continuing, and with our rental agreement ending Dec 31. But I do appreciate the fact that in this task we are sharing in the pain and struggles of the millions of refugees and displaced persons of Ukraine. We have been on the road for 3 months and have another 2 to go. Pray that the Lord will give strength and energy, but also freshness as we visit churches and groups and individuals.
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Praise the Lord I (Diane) did receive a new passport, but now we need to follow up and see what has happened to our Ukrainian documents, can they be resurrected, will we have to start a whole new process in order to return and live there. We have to go through a yearly process of renewing our temporary registration and we had just finished that process when the war began. But because everything shut down we were not able to go and pick them up. Pray that the Lord will give us direction and wisdom in how to pursue this. It would be a mercy if we could get those documents and get them activated as it is a costly and time-consuming process to start all over again.
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Priscilla will be here for another couple days before she journeys back to Ukraine (a journey complicated by the need to fly into Poland and then find a bus back to Kyiv and then another local bus home). Pray for her as she meets friends and does shopping and prepares to return. Pray for Dan too as he has been laboring on there alone. He continues to have a lot of back pain. And pray for her travels to go smoothly as she will be alone, Ellie having gone out to Oregon for two months.
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And another prayer request that has just come in. A missionary family we have known for many years are going through a major struggle. The husband is American and the wife Ukrainian. There is a lot of fear and anger and turning against each other at the moment. I find this an example of what is happening all across Ukraine as people deal with all the uncertainty and troubles brought on by the war. And add to the mix two teenage children… Somehow all the emotions need to be dealt with and everyone has to reexamine their own walk with the Lord, and then they need to find a way forward. And since they have reached out to me, evidently we need to be part of the process. Pray for wisdom for Abe and me. Pray for Tom and his wife to find a way to embrace each other in the pain, and to lead their daughters into a stronger walk with the Lord.
If you are like me, you may get bogged down in how to pray. Right now I’m doing some meditations on the Lord’s Prayer. From time to time I’ve turned to it when I didn’t know what to pray for other people, or even for myself. I will quote from this devotional:
“…the Lord’s prayer is a window into the very heart of God. In a world of injustice, poverty, bitterness and evil, Jesus teaches us to pray about justice, bread, forgiveness, and deliverance.” (the universe in 57 words by Carolyn Arends)
So I’m encouraging my heart in this “simple” prayer the Lord Jesus Christ gave to us to put us on the right path of prayer. Sometimes the familiar becomes so familiar we don’t appreciate it.
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