We hope you all had a great Christmas and are doing well on this last day of the year! This was our second Christmas in Ukraine and we are still trying to figure out what exactly it means to celebrate Christmas “the Ukrainian way.”
We were ready to learn about new Christmas traditions, we were ready to try new meals for Christmas dinner, we were even prepared to accept the fact that Christmas might be celebrated on a different day (January 7 for many Christians in Ukraine). But what we were somehow not ready for is the fact that Christmas is just a CHURCH HOLIDAY. So the feel is completely different! Even though Lutherans in Ukraine do celebrate their Christmas in December as we do, the way they celebrate is very different. They celebrate by coming to church. That is it. So most of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day is spent in church, including that you are expected to take part in a simple Christmas dinner at church instead of having Christmas dinner at home with your family. So that is an adjustment for us. Especially this year, with our first baby on the way, we were eager to work on our own family Christmas traditions. But there was absolutely no time for that. So maybe in the future, we will have to move our family Christmas to some other day… We are not sure…
On the other hand, New Year’s is a big deal in Ukraine. That is when Ukrainians are with their families and close friends, they set up a “Christmas” tree (well, a New Year Tree) and many get gifts from Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost). This holiday is unfortunately also celebrated with lots of alcohol drinking :(. But New Year’s (of course leaving out the real reason for celebrating Christmas) is much more the Ukrainian equivalent to Christmas in the United States or Europe than anything that happens on December 25th or January 7th. Our Pastor was even thinking about canceling Sunday church (28th) to give people more time to prepare their homes for New Year’s!!!
You can probably imagine that all this is confusing for us. But there are also some encouraging things happening here in Lviv. For example this past Sunday, Miriam had a good opportunity to share the basic salvation message with three of the Sunday School youngest girls. We usually work with the whole group together but this last Sunday Miriam took the youngest girls to a different room to read the Christmas story with them and to decorate some Christmas cookies :) When they were reading the Christmas story, two of the girls started talking about their religion class at school and what they are learning there. The two girls do not take this religion class together but it sounded like they had the same teacher (a priest) or at least they were using the same materials. They told Miriam that you can open your heart for Jesus by doing good things. And that if you do bad things, a “little devil” lives in your heart and that devil scares Jesus away so then Jesus cannot be in your heart. They also said that there is a Book where all the names of people going to Heaven are recorded. And you can have your name in that Book if you do more good things than bad things. People who are really bad will not make it to Heaven... So of course this opened the door to talk about what the Bible says about that. How we ALL are sinners and how we ALL deserve nothing but punishment. And how God/Jesus loved us so much that He took the punishment Himself. And how we are saved (by God’s grace) when we believe. The little girls were really interested in all this and listened very attentively. Now we are praying that God would take these sown seeds and make them grow in their hearts.
We have updated our gallery at (http://www.chmiels.com/gallery).
Have a blessed last day of this year!
Tomasz, Miriam and Baby
