AFLC World Missions: Chmiel’s Update

Advent greetings from Ukraine! Last time we wrote from a youth camp that we (together with a congregation in Czech) organized for our Lviv youth. Thank you so much to all of you who were praying for us during that time. We are really excited to see what that week did for our students. They took some huge steps toward spiritual maturity at the camp. It’s such joy for us to see them reading their Bibles a lot more and to watch their lives changing. We are so proud of the Oldrichovice youth group for how they embraced our students, how naturally and lovingly they shared their faith and how many of them are faithful (even now after the camp) to stay in touch and encourage our students in their faith. One of the Czech guys is, for example, really trying to send daily cell phone text messages with Bible verses. He still has yet to figure out a good way how to do it with the Cyrillic alphabet but we really appreciate him wanting to do this for our students.

Here we are with the Oldrichovice leadership team, already after the camp, planning our future working together. God willing, we will again organize something together next year, probably in August 2010. This time we are planning to have some of the Oldrichovice youth come to Lviv. Please pray for God’s guidance in all this.

As we told you in our last email, there was a quarantine order issued in Lviv at the end of October. It was finally cancelled last week so we are back in Lviv now! This is what Lviv looked like couple weeks ago.

Because of the quarantine we had couple unplanned weeks in the Czech Republic. One of the blessings was that Tomasz was able to take part in a youth ministry conference in Ostrava (Czech). The theme of the conference was “Holy Spirit.” The teaching was done by Dave Patty, a missionary who has been ministering to young people and youth leaders in the Czech Republic for the last 16 years. When we are in Ukraine we do not have very much opportunity to be part of things that would be spiritually encouraging to us so we were thankful for this opportunity. It was also inspiring for us to see a missionary who has been doing a lot of what we are trying to do in Ukraine. Sometimes we feel ineffective as missionaries, we spend a lot of time on things that people from that country would not have to do, it takes us a lot of time to prepare our teaching in a language that is not our own and even with diligent preparation we still make many grammar mistakes when teaching our youth. So, besides other things, it was really encouraging to see how powerfully God is using Dave in the ministry He called him to do. Even when you do not get all the word endings and cases and tenses right, God can still use you to do big things in the lives of those that you work with. :)

We also used the time in Czech to visit some youth ministries to learn from what other churches do. The picture below was taken at an outreach Sunday night club that the Oldrichovice church organizes for the neighborhood unchurched youth. As you see, Hannah does not have trouble making new friends :)

We also got to spend some time with Pastor Stanislav Pietak, who now serves as Bishop for the Silesian Evangelical Church of Augsburg Confession in the Czech Republic. We are always encouraged by His love for the Lord and his commitment to serve Him no matter what the costs.
One special occasion was being in Czech to help Tomasz’s parents celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary. Because Tomasz has not lived in Czech since 1999, it was very special for his parents to have all their sons and their families with them to celebrate their big day. Tomasz’s grandma (holding Hannah) too was able to be there which was also a reason for celebration because she just recently miraculously survived a severe illness and surgery when the doctors gave close to zero chance for recovery. Praise God for being the ultimate doctor!

On November 18, Hannah celebrated her “half-birthday”. This picture was taken at exactly 5:45pm (time when she was born 6 months earlier) :)
One of the hardest things about being missionaries is to feel like we are robbing the grandparents of being able to watch their grandchildren grow. For Miriam’s parents, Hannah is the only grandchild and they definitely wish we could live a little closer. So they enjoyed being with Hannah on her “half-birthday”. In the picture, Grandpa Tomas is giving Hannah a little “half-birthday” present.

But our greatest achievement while being gone from Ukraine was obtaining new Ukrainian visa at the Ukrainian consulate in Krakow! What a hassle!!!!!! Weeks of gathering information and documents preceded the moment when we were finally holding our passports with the one-year religious work visa. Thanks be to God for again helping us through this process. Now we have to take the next step and try to register again. We would again appreciate your prayers.

Thank you so much for standing behind us!