AFLC World Missions: Greetings from Chmiels

Greetings from Krakow! As you know, we are in Poland now, waiting for the birth of our daughter. Her due date is in exactly two weeks. Our Ukrainian doctor thinks she would be early, the Polish doctors here in Krakow do not think so... So we are curious to see when she decides to make her grand appearance :-)

We would like to thank you so much for your prayers! Not only did we make it safely to Poland but we are also very thankful for the last couple of weeks we had in Lviv before we had to leave for Krakow. We had couple more good youth meetings in which we were able to wrap up our school year with the youth. We also got an opportunity to share with the whole congregation on our last Sunday in Lviv. You see a picture from that. It seemed like the adults were encouraged by the youth and the children sharing what they had learned this school year.

We also wanted to ask you for special prayers for Mrs. Tanya. She has been our friend for the last two years and you too know her from our many updates and newsletters. Mrs. Tanya has always been interested in God and she always said she believed in God and prayed to Him daily. But when it came to Jesus, she refused His sacrifice and Him being the only way to God. Many times we talked to her and also Pastor Don Richman explained the way of Salvation to her when he was in Lviv. But nothing seemed to change for Mrs. Tanya. Just about two weeks before we left Lviv, she brought Tomasz a short passage to read. It dealt with some other religions and it was pretty anti-Christian but she really liked some of the ideas from that article. It was disappointing to us to see her seeking God in all these wrong places. But it also gave Tomasz a good opportunity to talk to her again. We were praying for Tanya a lot during those days. Then within the next couple of days Tomasz talked to her again and she said that she is starting to see things very differently. She also said that on Monday morning that week, about 8am, she wanted to call us because in that moment she felt VERY strongly that someone was praying for her! And she was right. About 8am was when we were reading our devotions and praying… and praying for her!

Tanya has not yet made a decision for Jesus but we believe that God is drawing her to Himself and we will not stop praying for her until she too is a child of God, saved through what Jesus had done for her. Please join us in praying for Mrs. Tanya if you can! She is now reading “The Case for Christ” (by Lee Strobel) and we are praying that the book and everything else that she comes across these days would minister to her!

We also need to share another big answer to our (and your!) prayers. Yes, in our last email update we asked you to pray for a car for us. We were looking for many months with no success… Every time we thought we found something, the car was either gone before we could ask someone to go see it for us (we were in Ukraine, looking for a car in Poland or Czech) or the car turned out to be in very bad shape even though the owner was advertising it as in “perfect or very good condition.” But only shortly after we asked you to pray with us, a friend of ours (a car mechanic) called us to tell us that he found a car for us in southern Poland. He went to see the car and found it to be in very good condition and he was recommending that we buy it as he thought the car was a reliable and safe vehicle for bad roads (such as we have in Lviv). It’s a Subaru Forester 2005. We have not seen the car yet but our friend already purchased it for us and brought it from Poland to the Czech Republic, where it is now waiting for some technical check-ups required by the Czech law and for registration. After that it will be available for us to use!!! The car is a little newer and nicer than what we were looking for but after many months of looking, we believe this is the car God had prepared for us. We praise God and we thank you so much for also praying for this specific need we had.