AFLC World Missions: October Update from Chmiels

Warm greetings from cold Ukraine! We hope that you all are doing well. Already getting ready for Thanksgiving? Hard to believe that it is going to be Thanksgiving time again in less than a month! Our church had a small “Thanksgiving” celebration this month. Church ladies prepared a fall harvest display, children dressed up in costumes and sang couple of thanksgiving songs. There will be no Thanksgiving celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November here in Ukraine so that was our little Thanksgiving this year.

Thank you so much to all of you who wrote to us after we sent you our September update. We appreciate your prayers so very much and we want you to know that we do see God answering your and our prayers. One of the things we asked you to pray about in our last email was opportunities for us to witness to Serhiy, the guy who comes to our home to help Miriam with her back problems. And God answered those prayers! You remember that in September Serhiy told us that he was an atheist but a while ago Tomasz had a good opportunity to talk to him about God and Christianity and he admitted that he really was somewhat searching. Tomasz shared a little bit of Lee Strobel’s story with him and Serhiy seemed very much interested. As you probably know Lee Strobel is a former legal editor for the Chicago Tribune and former atheist. Things changed for Lee Strobel when his wife announced to him that she had become a Christian. After that he wanted to uncover the roots of what he considered to be pleasant changes in his wife’s personality. That motivated him to investigate Christianity. After a two-year personal research project, he concluded that the evidence of history, science, philosophy, and psychology "point toward the unthinkable," and this resulted in his own conversion. Well, to make a long story short, Serhiy would like to read Lee Strobel’s “Case for Christ.” We found out that there is a Russian translation of this book but we were not able to find it anywhere here in L’viv. We looked and looked, Serhiy looked but no bookstores (not even a Christian bookstore) had the book in stock. Then we found a Christian online bookstore in Odesa (southern Ukraine) and we were able to buy the book from them. We received the book today and we are going to give it to Serhiy tomorrow. So please pray that God would soften his heart and speak to him through this book. This is something only God can do so thank you so much for keeping us and Serhiy in your prayers!

You can also pray for a thirteen-year old boy from our church. Couple weeks ago he asked us if we would help him with his English so we are meeting with him on regular basis now. Please pray that God would give us wisdom when we interact with this boy. We try to do devotions with him (in Ukrainian) after each of our English lessons but we sense that he is very much afraid of opening his heart completely to the Word of God. His parents are divorced and he is living with his mom. But just this past month his mom decided to go to school in Russia for two years (leaving in February ’08). She is planning to leave her son here in L’viv with his father (with whom he has not been living for quite a few years now) . We cannot probably even imagine how hard this must be for this boy. We have no idea what is going on in his mind and his heart but please pray for him that God would help him not to harden his heart even though he has been hurt so many times.

On Saturday, October 13th, we had an official blessing into our ministry here in L’viv. The bishop from Odesa came to western Ukraine to do this blessing for us and also to install a young Polish pastor in a nearby city of Lutsk. You can see pictures from our time with the bishop here: