Dear friends, 
We are still writing to you from outside of Ukraine but that is soon to change! We are so excited to tell you that Hannah finally got her birth certificate so that means that we should be back home in Lviv soon! Tomasz will already be back in Lviv this Monday and there will again be a youth group meeting at our house on Tuesday! How exciting! After all these long weeks of being in Poland and Czech Republic, waiting for Hannah’s documents, it feels almost unreal to think that in just couple of days we should be back home and back to our ministry.
As we said, Tomasz will go to Lviv on Monday. There will be a youth group meeting on Tuesday and he will take our friend Lydia Johnson to the Lviv airport on Wednesday. He will also try to prepare our home for our return. After that he will come back to get me (Miriam) and Hannah and we will all return to Lviv next weekend. Unfortunately it is not possible for all of us to leave this Monday because there are still couple of last things that have to be taken care of for Hannah before we go back to Lviv for good. But the day for all of us to be back in Ukraine is coming up and we are praising God for that! :)
Hannah is growing so fast! She’s been lifting her head and smiling for a while now and each day we watch her learn something new. We love being her parents! What a gift from God she is!
We also have Lydia Johnson with us these days. Lydia is Hannah’s baptismal sponsor and we are so thankful that there will be such a godly young woman like Lydia in Hannah’s life as she is growing up. Lydia has spent the last three weeks with us helping us and also getting to know the various ministry opportunities here in Central and Eastern Europe. Who knows, maybe one day God will call Lydia to come back as a missionary. :)
Tonight we are going to meet with a youth group in Oldrichovice, Czech Republic. The Lutheran congregation in Oldrichovice invited our Lviv youth group to come for a weeklong retreat in the fall so we are planning and organizing that. We believe that this could be a wonderful opportunity for our Lviv youth to meet young Christians of their own age who are on fire for the Lord, to see Christian families (because none of our students in Lviv have two parents who would both be believers) and spend more focused time in God’s Word.
Thank you so much for praying for us during these months. Please pray for traveling mercies for this week and for short waiting times at the Polish-Ukrainian border. We would also appreciate your prayers for the Youth Group meeting on Tuesday. Pray that even though we were gone for some time, that we would be able to pick up where we left off.
Blessings,
Tomasz, Miriam and Hannah
For those of you who would like to see more baby pictures… :) http://picasaweb.google.com/HannahJoyChmiel “First month” is updated and two more albums were added.
