Prayer Update from Chmiels

Dear friends,

Thank you to all of you who have written to us lately. We were glad to hear that so many of you were encouraged by our August update. Yes, God is good! The trip to Poland was such a tangible way of God saying, “I am with you! -- I care!” We really needed that encouragement and God used our “furniture trip” very much to let us feel His love and power.

We are a month into the new school year and besides being back to our Ukrainian lessons, we also take part in a Friday night Bible Study at our church, we sit in on the confirmation class every Saturday and we also try to be available for people to visit us or for us to visit them. We are enjoying getting to know new people and being more and more comfortable with the language every day. But sometimes it is hard to know what to do first as most of the time other things also come up and it is impossible to fit everything into 24-hour days.

Also one lady from our church (pani Maria – for those of you who read our newsletter) had a heart attack and was in the hospital. Because she does not have any family in L’viv and because we live right next-door to the hospital, we were the ones to kind of “take care” of her while she was there. They all kept telling us that this hospital is the best hospital in L’viv, but when we came there to visit pani Maria we immediately knew that no matter how “great” this hospital was, we would not like to ever be there as patients! There were seven ladies with heart attacks scrunched in one not-very-big room. Only two of them had typical hospital beds, the other ladies had different simple wooden beds. One of the beds actually fell apart one time when we were there. The sick lady was lying in bed when one side of her bed simply fell off!!! Also, the hospital only fed the patients some kind of porridge three times a day (which we were told was more than most other Ukrainian hospitals do). If the patients wanted a “real meal”, family members or friends had to provide that. Because we live so close, it was easy for us to bring food, sweets or drinks. One day we organized a little “decaf party” for all the ladies. We brought our own nice teacups with saucers and we served them decaf coffee and tea. They all seemed to thoroughly enjoy it and kept telling each other, “He is a priest,” pointing to Tomasz. :) Last Monday, on Miriam’s birthday, all the seven ladies sang a Ukrainian version of “Happy Birthday” to Miriam. It was very special.

Many of you have been praying for Miriam’s back and the good news is that we found a guy here in L’viv (recommended to us by another missionary couple) who seems to know what he is doing when it comes to bad backs. He has already spent over fifteen hours working on Miriam’s back and says that her scoliosis has improved dramatically. The only downside is that the spine’s straightening is a shock to the rest of Miriam’s body and the changes happening in her spine cause a lot of pain. Please pray for Miriam. On the one hand, it is encouraging to finally have found someone who seems to be helping. On the other hand, it can be discouraging to see positive changes only coming very slowly. Please pray that God would give Serhiy (the guy) wisdom to know how to best help Miriam’s back. It would be exciting for Miriam to finally get rid of her back problems after so many years! We actually feel like there is a reason for why God chose not to provide healing through different doctors and chiropractors in the States and another doctor and physical therapist in Czech, but He chose to use a Ukrainian person to help Miriam. If Miriam’s back gets better here in L’viv, that will definitely make us appreciate Ukraine more!

Miriam’s sessions with Serhiy are also a good language practice for us. He is very talkative and he says that he will teach us Ukrainian faster than our language teacher. He is also a very unusual guy in the sense that he does not like to do things the way “everybody else” does them. For example he charges us less than what he charges some of his Ukrainian patients. He says that in Ukraine, when you are a foreigner it is a good enough reason for Ukrainians to rip you off. Most of the time when they see you are not Ukrainian, you automatically get the “foreigner’s price.” And because Serhiy does not agree with that, he gives his non-Ukrainian patients a discount. You won’t get that very often!

As we are able to communicate better and we get to know more Ukrainian people, we would like to ask you to pray for us to be good witnesses for the Lord to people like Serhiy or our language teacher, Veronica. Those are people we see often and we know they do not have a personal relationship with the Lord. Serhiy says he is an atheist. Veronica knows a lot about Christianity and acknowledges the existence of God but does not walk with Jesus in her everyday life. Please pray for them.

And one last thing to pray for. Today, once again Ukrainians will go to the polls in order to elect a new parliament. Unlike in America, Ukrainians are asked to vote for certain political parties and not individuals. The result of that is that every party receiving at least 3% of the popular vote is allocated seats in the 450-member parliament, based on their showing in the election. If you recall the Orange Revolution that took place in 2004, you may remember that Ukraine's presidential election results were challenged by mass demonstrations and eventually overturned due to fraud. The ultimate winner, Victor Yuschenko, was also poisoned during the campaign and controversy still surrounds that incident. Unfortunately, he has been unable to make much of any changes to move Ukraine forward towards a free and democratic society. Please pray that these elections would be peaceful, free, and fair, that the elected parliament would press towards a corrupt-free society and that the new leaders would have the courage to stand for truth and justice. Even though we do not expect the results of the elections to bring any major changes to us, we are aware of the fact that we live here as guests of the Ukrainian government. So please pray for that.

Speaking of the Ukrainian government, we just learned couple of days ago that the Ukrainian Parliament changed some of the immigration rules again. Because of that, we will try to go to the Ukrainian Embassy in Krakow (Poland) as soon as possible to get all our paperwork done the way it is supposed to be according to the new laws. But the discouraging thing is that just yesterday, one of our fellow missionaries said that they too were told of this new visa law but when he and his wife arrived at the Ukrainian Embassy in Krakow, the workers there were totally unaware of this law and could not help them! We thought it was really strange but we were told, “Why are you surprised? It’s Ukraine!” Please keep us in your prayers.

We added some new pictures to our online gallery for you to see. Click here http://www.chmiels.com/gallery/fall2007 for some new fall pictures.

Thank you for all your support!

Tomasz and Miriam